SUBCONSCIOUS SHADOWS: You can run, but you can't hide...

You've never been in the world, not even for a brief visit. You've only ever been inside the mental workings ("mind") of your brain and, in 'there,' your entire life has been condensed, literally compacted in your cranium and every experience that you have ever encountered is linking up with associated neural circuits (we are inextricably bound to neurally hardwired associations/habits/repetitions based on excitatory and inhibitory impulses) to insure you respond adequately in the future, because your brain is genetically programmed for the survival of the whole organism (the I-me-ego-self-body-mind) and is expert at identifying threats to the function of survival.

But some of what's in there is dark and can rise to the top when least expected, tailoring lifelong impulsive behaviors that elicit feelings of guilt and remorse which, ironically, emotionally certifies that same response for a repeat performance. Amongst 87 billion neurons, linked up over a trillion miles of neuro-circuitry, repetitive behavior (or subconsciously habituated responses) is afforded high precedence because it has allowed mankind to exist and predominate over 2.4 million years.

Most of "you" is a subconscious neural accumulation of good and bad, joy and trauma, war and peace. But, the subconscious (often referred to as the "unconscious") is not accessible to conscious thinking and exists in the periphery of deliberate attention. Yet, when specific external and internal variables are aligned (triggers), subconscious impulses and memories can rapidly rise to consciousness, resulting in all manner of mental and physical chaos in which you have no clear salient idea as to the cause of your feelings and behaviors and all of the attempts by your frontal lobe (adaptive, thinking cap) to attain stability become fruitless endeavors magnifying your helplessness.

"When the time comes to physically act on a decision, various unconscious processes deliver their opinions to a central “hub,” like voters congregating at town hall. The hub listens in on the conversation, but doesn’t participate; all it does is provide a venue for differing opinions to integrate and decide on a final outcome. Once the unconscious makes a final decision on how to physically act (or react), the hub — consciousness — executes that work and then congratulates itself for figuring out a tough problem." LINK

The idea that you can literally "just ignore" past trauma (and everyone at some point has experienced trauma along a spectrum of light and dark based on inherent coping mechanisms) by simply refusing to "think" about it, can result in symptomatic behaviors that consciously seem to have no logical cause and effect catalyst or antecedent. Your confused and chaotic behaviors have no rational (conscious frontal lobe) activating event to logically identify as cause, even after years of attempts at trying to understand why you do what you do in specific situations.

A subconscious process may be provisionally defined as one of which the personality is unaware, which, therefore, is outside the personal consciousness, and which is a factor in the determination of conscious and bodily phenomena, or produces effects analogous to those which might be directly or indirectly induced by consciousness. LINK

Subconscious shadows can literally reinforce repeat performances due to scripted responses hardwired from chronic stress occurring at some point in your past. This hardwiring is not only a product of childhood stress, but also any long-term period of helplessness or hopelessness experienced at any time in your life. Consciously unidentified subconscious shadows can sabotage not just portions of your life, but the entirety of your existence by introducing chemical and behavioral addictions and dependencies as a means of self medicating psycho-emotional pain hardwired in your cortical and subcortical neuro-circuits.

Yet, there are ways of overriding the subconscious directives that impair mood and functioning, but they require time and persistence that not many in our quick-fix, take-a-pill culture are willing to consider.

The idea that the brain is plastic in the sense of changeable, adaptable and malleable is the single most important change in our understanding of the human brain in four hundred years. Neuroplasticity is that property of the brain that allows it to change its structure and its function, it’s a response to sensing and perceiving the world, even to thinking and imagining. Human thoughts and learning actually turn on certain genes in our nerve cells which allow those cells to make new connections between them. LINK

IDENTIFY and REPLACE: The chief function of recovery is to identify wounds and the second is to develop a recovery plan to heal the wounds. The idea that simply 'not thinking' about past trauma or emotionally intensive episodes is the primary means of relief can only result in a lifetime of suffering because the subconscious realm of mind pays no heed to you conscious directives.

Your entire life is stored within 100 billion neurons connected through 100 trillion miles of neural pathways and from this menagerie, you respond to your world and with each repetitive response, the pathway that controls that response is reinforced and eventually hardwired into the system. Yet, hardwiring can be redirected, pruned, diluted and basically shut down.

THE GOOD AND BAD CHILDHOOD

The Subconscious Life is not Worth Living

ACCEPT YOUR WOUNDS: Neurons that Fire Together, Wire Together

Confronting the Demon of Doom