“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
We are often guided by our intuition and validated by a sense of serendipity. Being able to understand immediately – without conscious reasoning - is an invaluable and essential skill. This innate inclination is tough to articulate, yet it’s something that we’re all familiar with. Though vital, it is important to recognize there are times when our unconscious processing can work against us – especially in those with a history of trauma, abuse, neglect or those who grew up with an absence of attuned caregiving. Sometimes our current experience can resonate with our past adversity, and we interpret this familiarity as feeling “right” and use this sense of rightness to condone the behaviors of not only our selves but also others. This is both common and tricky to recognize and as such “the speed and amount of unconscious processing” is included on the list of eight problematic aspects of functioning that cause an individual to consider counselling from Cozolino’s book The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain (2010):
1) The suppression of language and predictive capacity under stress
2) Divergent hemispheric processing
3) The bias towards early learning
4) The tenacity of fear
5) The damaging effects of stress hormones
6) The speed and amount of unconscious processing
7) The primacy of projection
8) Unconscious self deception
Due to our expanded cortexes, much of how we process information relies on the speed and amount of unconscious processing:
"While it takes approximately 500-600 milliseconds for an experience to register in unconscious awareness, the amygdala can react to a potential threat in less than 50 milliseconds. This means that by the time we have become consciously aware of an experience, it has already been processed many times in our more primitive neural networks, activating memories and triggering implicit memories organized by past learning. This unconscious backdrop shapes the perception of what is being consciously attended to and constructs our experience of the present moment." (Cozolino, 2010, pp. 312-313).
This is important to consider for two reasons: 1) as a society we place emphasis on an assumption of free will – this lends itself to the belief that reason and intent are enough to modify behavior and that an inability to do this is a comment on character; 2) traditional therapeutic approaches focus on merely altering negative thoughts and behaviors without addressing the underlying contributing factors. What needs to be understood is that 90% of input into the cerebral cortex is attributed to internal/unconscious processing. It is this rapid and reflexive response grounded in past learning that perpetuates cognitive distortions and has the potential to keep individuals frightened, withdrawn, and confused. This is also why triggering memories of adverse events has such a profound effect on current functioning. Fostering an ability to question one’s self-defeating (potentially incorrect) assumptions is a key predictor of positive outcome in psychotherapy.
Counselling is the process of questioning thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions. Of looking at behavioral patterns and illuminating motivations. Therapists work collaboratively with clients to explore their impulses with the hope of integrating current experiences and responses with memories, emotions, and urges. Talking with a counsellor is a way to discern whether your intuition is helping to guide you or if it’s keeping you stuck in old patterns that no longer serve you.
“Unconscious of your story, you are in its grasp; but with consciousness, an alchemical process begins: The solidity of the complex dissolves and you can open up to the arrival of a new archetype, the birth of a new cycle of life. In the shadow, then, lies our myth and our fate.” - Connie Zweig
References
Cozolino, L. (2010). The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain. W.W.Norton & Company: New York, NY