Big news, I think!
New research published by BBC News confirms what Time Line Therapy® and Tad James are saying for about 30 years now, and that is the relationship between conscious mind and unconscious mind.
Personally I feel extremely positive about the fact that Freud’s AND THE WHOLE Freudian approach of the Unconscious Mind is slowly but surely going out the window.
The old attitude was intent upon demoting the Unconscious Mind (which is an intrinsic part of every human being) to the status of garbage. This was supposedly the seat of everything dirty, nasty, wicked, immoral, disgusting, obnoxious and evil inside individuals and as such had to be controlled to the point of complete alienation through the power of the “will”. People were not supposed to show emotions at all if they were to earn any respect in the “upper class” of society. Only “weak” and “inferior” people had emotions.
Talk about chronic dissociation elevated to the rank of sainthood.
This report from BBC News goes even further. They’re telling us to trust our “instinct”. Where does instinct reside? Where does it come from? Your logic? Your rational thinking about it? No! Not from there!
Your “instinct” is a fundamental part of your Unconscious Mind.
Recently I noticed a very interesting phenomenon. It seems that through dissociation from the Unconscious Mind, many people have lost even their basic instinct for life. They seem to be indifferent to death – others or even their own. That is absolutely amazing to me. I see people watching horror newscast stories on television from different war theaters around the world with complete indifference – and almost with the enjoyment of an entertaining moment.
The report talks about our success rate at identifying liars which is increased when we “harness” the unconscious mind (according to a report in Psychological Science).
Well I am happy they finally woke up since for a very long time they scoffed and laughed at the idea of working with the Unconscious Mind.
In the past we tried to detect lies by detecting eye movements, eye contact or lack thereof, congruency in physiological cues, a person “appearing nervous” and the like. I could go through each and every one of these and discuss how the cultural constraints on which all these are based on are not necessarily true or false. Eye contact has nothing to do with telling the truth. And yet. how many people have been rejected in an interview for a new job or a promotion for the “crime” of not maintaining eye contact with the interviewer?
One of the important things we teach in the NLP Practitioner Training as well as in the Time Line Therapy® part of this training is a collection of functions the Unconscious Mind performs in the body. These are called the Prime Directives of the Unconscious Mind.
If the Unconscious Mind has an important role in our behaviors, emotional wellbeing, reactions to events and situations, then we might as well get to recognize what the Unconscious Mind functions are.
Here are some of these functions:
- Your Unconscious Mind Stores your memories. All the memories you have are not held in your mind consciously. They are relegated to the Unconscious Mind and when you need them you just pull them out. Of course, the better the relationship with your Unconscious Mind, the better your ability to recall information stored in there.
- Your Unconscious Mind represses memories with unresolved negative emotions. That is a good function. Imagine something bad happens and you are in the midst of negative emotions. If your Unconscious Mind did not repress these negative emotions, you could not properly function.
- But your Unconscious Mind also presents repressed memories for resolution – unconsciously you know that Negative Emotions stored in the memories of each cell in your body are not healthy. In fact there is a lot of research and literature starting in the 60’s and 70’s to support the evidence that Negative Emotions damage your health. So your little Unconscious Mind presents these Negative Emotions for the purpose of making them rational and to release the emotions.
- Now here is an interesting function of the Unconscious Mind. Your Unconscious Mind runs your body. You don’t run your body consciously. You don’t beat your heart, circulate your blood and lymph, you don’t digest the food and eliminate the waste, you don’t do any of that consciously. These functions are performed unconsciously.
- Your Unconscious Mind is also the domain of your emotions. You are aware of your emotions consciously, however they stem from within your Unconscious Mind. As such, it requires conscious understanding of concrete processes and techniques (like in Time Line Therapy®) to assist and direct the Unconscious Mind to release these stored Negative Emotions.
- Your Unconscious Mind maintains instincts and here is where this new research focuses on. “Instinct” is defined as an innate (read unconscious) biological reaction. The actions we call instinctive all conform to the general reflex type therefore they are automatic, thus unconscious.
The researchers also found that people are not good at spotting “deception”. What a surprise! When you consider how detached people are from their own Unconscious Minds (by training or societal conditioning) this is not a revelation at all. Our “intuitive” sense has been ridiculed for not being backed up by hard scientific facts to the point to which learned to ignore it completely. Even currently, try to substantiate your point of view based on your instinct and see how well this works!
At least our scientists and researchers begin to wake up and – albeit leisurely – correct some of the inaccuracies present for many years relating to different functions of the human body and psyche.
Until next time, be well.