Concerning the concsious and unconscious mind

Your unconscious mind is your subjective mind, your emotional mind. It accepts any thoughts or images that are accepted or produced by the conscious mind. It cannot reject them. It is the seat of your emotions, and all of your life’s memories and experiences. It is the seat of your imagination, intuition and creativity. It does everything in its power to manifest the thoughts and images passed on by the conscious mind –whether they are correct or incorrect, positive or negative.

However, it is your conscious mind that is your objective mind, your thinking mind, your intellectual mind. It has the ability to choose. It can accept or reject thoughts or images.

If this is true what does it mean? If the unconscious mind works endlessly to make the conscious mind correct, then are we doomed to the anxiety and fear as to what we have learned throughout our lives? That is all that dominates our everyday thoughts. Therefore finally made real by our unconscious? I ask these questions because much of what we fear and don’t fear is learned. However, we are also predisposed to some anxiety and fears through our genetic make-up passed down from our parents. The important question is can we program our unconscious mind to somehow delete all selected thoughts and images that may be uncomfortable for us. Moreover, in principle completely reprogram our entire unconscious mind to diminish all or most anxieties and fears.

The answer depends on many factors external and internal learned and predisposed through family heritage.
At many levels we consciously fight negative emotion through rationalization and will every day. And as difficult as it can be, I believe it can be done with much greater success regarding discarding negative thought levels. What remains to be investigated is just how much we can retrain our unconscious mind so as mental illness such as depression poor self-esteem and even suicidal contemplations do not become dominate thoughts. Moreover, regarding practicing thought patterns that can help retrain the conscious and unconscious mind can be of great assistance to one with dominating negative thought patterns. I believe that self-confidence plays a major role in concerning the reprograming of the unconscious mind. However, how does one develop self-confidence?

In my experiences throughout life I have found through athletics that confidence is fragile. I followed tennis players over a span of ten years and found that confidence is one skill that can be shaken easily, so easily in fact a player can be hitting the ball so well and beating everyone he comes up against. However, with the onset of just a few badly hit balls can change his game drastically even permanently. I found this to be true countless times over the years concerning many different tennis professionals. I choose tennis to point this out because this game is more about one’s own-self-confidence than it is about the opponent. Believe in oneself is key for individual sports as it is in ones mind’s eye. Establishing that confidence plays a major role in how we think then the challenge of life’s constant bombardment of negative stimuli daily must be a real drain on our physic wellbeing.
In addition, I believe that we must control what enters our minds and what images we allow to be created through-out our everyday thought process. For example: just because we hear it and see it does not necessarily mean we have to mentally digest it. At least not allowing the negative thoughts to build on them-selves and become melded on and fixed in the unconscious mind.

For example, a distance relative dies that you have not seen for some time. You attend the funeral. At the wake you see the body in the casket, it really bothers you to see such and old acquaintance in this position and it seems that the image of this is burned into memory and you can’t shake the thought of this in your mind. However, others that are there that have the same experience seem oblivious and do not share the negative feelings you have regarding the body lying there. Does this mean they have no feelings? That they don’t love this person as much as you?
I think to some degree this plays a role however, I believe that it is much more than that. I believe people with self-confidence and little self-doubt are better able to control the negative and positive thoughts that have entered their mind. Therefore, better able to control negative thoughts and emotion.
Consequently this may explain why everyone at the funeral reacted differently to the image of the body lying in the casket. In addition, to effectively control in-coming thoughts and images there is no place for any doubt at all concerning the correctness or incorrectness regarding the higher order in which you place these incoming thoughts or images. In other words just how much this thought or idea is allowed to play out in your mind?
Whether or not these thoughts deserve continues melding over or should be discarded. This seems to be all part of a very complex process that makes up the incredibly complex personalities that we all develop from birth to death.
Therefore, if your conscious mind makes the decision to discards negative thought or stimuli efficiently enough the unconscious mind is not as likely to be as emotional particularly concerning the negative thought process. I believe to be effective in life one must control exactly what is allowed to transfer to their unconscious and must recognize and identify negative thought patterns quickly. In addition, must be self-confident and self-aware enough to discard these thought pattens before they become fixed in the unconscious mind.
Nevertheless, why does the unconscious mind work endlessly to prove the conscious mind correct? This happens for many complex reasons such as higher level decision making processes that must be performed constantly every day.
For instance: an act such as placing your hand on a hot stove and burning it is not only painful but emotional as well. So this stimuli or thought is placed in the highest order so that you won’t allow this to happen again. Therefore, the unconscious must maintain the memory of the emotional pain throughout so that the higher level conscious mind will make the change to never let this happen again. Therefore, proving the conscious mind correct in its decision making process. Therefore, even more powerful is the thought itself. For example: even if the oven poses no threat to burn you, but if you believe that is does the signals are the same, in other words if you believe it, than its true. The responses in your mind are the same. Imbedded deep in your unconscious, remains that deep emotional pain real or not real. And in some cases real or not these thoughts can become neurotic fear mounting anxieties and in many cases can become obsessive.
In particular the elderly population has great difficulty getting over negative events such as falls. For these people that may have fallen once to several times sometimes are not able to mentally discard the negative event. In many cases are unable to pick themselves up and transfer or begin to walk even once completely healed. Of course sometimes in elderly cognition plays a role but not all-ways is this phenomen secondary to decreased mental skills. This behavior can go on for an extended period of time or in some cases they may never walk again. These trends are well documented. This illustrates the unconscious mind at work holding that deep painful fear and anxiety. As well as to the conscious mind taking the position that this fall will not happen again secondary to the decision not to walk anymore. Hence, proving the conscious mind correct once again and keeping this person safe from another fall. Even more so, this depicts the line between severe anxiety and serene calmness as fragile as confidence itself.

Well-documented is the story of young girl that was being repeatedly raped by her uncle when she was very young around age 14. Her mother and father came home while her daughter was being raped and caught the uncle in the process. The mother and father removed the uncle from the house permanently. The mother father and daughter sat down to discuss this atrocity. The mother and father ensured the daughter that she would never see the uncle again. In addition, she was never to discuss this with anyone and was to forget it ever happened. No more future dialogue regarding this matter from anyone in the household was permitted. Moreover the mother instructed the daughter never to give this any thought to this again. The daughter agreed and got on with her life. She finished high school with honors. Went on to college and graduated with a doctorate in psychology. Many years went by before this woman even mentioned the rape to anyone. However, when she was around 35 years old she decided to tell a women that she had befriended a few years earlier through her career. While discussing this with her friend she told her friend she was harboring no ill feelings regarding the rape. However, her friend told her she was in denial regarding the rape. And went on to tell her that she had to go for help and therapy. Reluctantly she took her good friends advice and started seeing a psychiatrist weekly. The doctors put her on medication and talk therapy. She became so distraught and depressed while on therapy she lost her job and ended up in the mental hospital for a long period of time. She decided that she was going to stop therapy and all the medications. Her condition improved over a short period of time. She regained her position at work and went on to completely recover. Currently she openly discusses how talk therapy combined with medications and continually discussing the rape every week was exactly like being raped over and over again. Which is the point regarding conscious and unconscious thoughts. Throughout the time since she was raped from 14 to 35 years of age she had not placed this event into a higher emotional thought level. Therefore it did not affect her daily living or her everyday thought process. Moreover, this was a conscious decision not to meld over this since she was 14 years old. Hence, the conscious mind did not manifest the thoughts or images of the rape repeatedly. At that young age she believed truly that her mother was given her good advice and was confident enough to make the decision to discard this negative event and move on with her life. Looking back into her life she believed that this was the right decision. I believe that it was as well. The ability to put negative events or thoughts behind us hinges on one’s self-confidence and believes in one’s own self-worth. This happens at the highest level of thought process in the conscious mind. However, much of this emotional and negative memory is probably harbored for much of the time in the unconscious mind. These emotional memories seem to filter through during difficult times in our lives. These thoughts if allowed to be conjured up through the consistent daily talk therapy could have been the stimulus that created so much despair for the women that was raped when she was a young girl.

A study concerning this hypothesis was performed some years ago. This study was performed using muscle measuring machines. They performed muscle measuring test during talk therapy sessions. In some cases they would talk about memories that were uncomfortable or painful for the person to talk about although the painful event had happened several years before. In each of these cases the machines would record the same type of stress levels each time. So it was as if the painful experience or stimulus was happening over and over to the patient each time that they were in talk therapy. In other cases patients that have had recent painful experiences where also involved in talk therapy. The machines measured the same stress levels as the others that in the study had painful events happen many years ago. Some of the patient’s painful experiences were more than twenty years apart from each other. I believe that this is an example of conjuring up thoughts buried deep within the unconscious mind and reinforcing them. Over and above allowing them to meld around in the conscious mind long enough to cause the very same symptoms that happened to this woman many years after the actual rape occurred. I believe that this can be translated into a decreased view of one’s own self-worth. Overriding, the self-confidence and self-worth that one has been building up over a life time. However, I believe that childhood learned experiences probably play a much greater role as compared to those learned later in life concerning the development of one’s own individual’s self-worth and self-confidence.

In addition, I think everyone can relate to this experience? That is this lack of confidence relative to any task we feel is important enough that we have to perform it perfectly. This is called performance anxiety. For example: one has to speak in front of a large crowd. He practices daily; he reads his speech in front of his children and wife consistently without error and well. However, when he gets up on the podium in front of the audience he begins to sweet and cannot seem to get the well-rehearsed speech out of his mouth correctly. Now since this speech was well-rehearsed and read with confidence and correctly several times what is it that happened? Could this be the unconscious mind at work again filtering up all the remembered fears insecurities and anxieties of our past directing these thoughts to our conscious mind? In fact which has manifested them-selves into reality? Could it be that the conscious insecurity he felt of potentially not doing well while reading in front such a large audience was made correct by the unconscious mind? For example: the unconscious mind is correctly deducing all the fears of his conscious mind before the task was performed. Hence, validating them and making them correct. The consequence suffering the embarrassment of this exposed failure in front of a large audience? While some people may be just more comfortable with this skill secondary to academic training and personality, I’m sure we’ve all experienced similar occurrences throughout our life time in one situation or another. I believe this is a lack of self-confidence deep in one’s personality harbored throughout a life-time of one’s experiences in the unconscious mind. Moreover, it is in this is area where we must work diligently to improve the quality of our own lives.

In conclusion, if the conscious mind has charge over all of the analyzing and decision making process concerning all thought. Then is has to ultimately be the part of the mind that conditions the unconscious mind to think the way that it does. Moreover, if this is true, this is probably the best example of how we could affect our everyday thought patterns. By simply retraining the conscious mind and through this process finally retraining the unconscious mind. Nevertheless, this continues to be a daunting task as noted with all the examples above. Overall this means that one must strive to see the positive in all situations. Must indeed practice self-confidence and learn to think positively of one’s own self-worth consistently. Furthermore, develop these skills and practice them daily in all aspects of life encompassing, relationships, competitive sports, careers, businesses, and education. To be successful in one’s own mind is to translate into reality and a happier existence and coexistence over one’s life time.