by: Clive Taylor
A Model of the dysfunctional, unconscious human psyche.
A way through, from confusion to consciousness.
Introduction
Many people are lost and unhappy, with no clear sense of how to regain access to their true selves. Life seems too big, confusing and fragmented.
The following model of how our unconscious psyche works is based on extensive client-centered, therapy-based experience, backed up with years of personal research into the nature of consciousness.
The Model
From the very earliest time in our lives, we experience a range of situations and “inputs” to our experience of life. These experiences come in many forms: Positive and life enhancing, through to extremely abusive.
As this model is of the dysfunctional psyche we will concentrate on the negative ones.
Abuse comes in many forms: Physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual and, possibly the worst, abuse of the sense of wonder of the miracle of life.
Abuse includes lack of real attention and being “delighted-in”, barrenness of environment (physical, emotional and “spiritual), neglect and abandonment.
“Feeling-Images”
Much of this happens to us before we have any intellectual or verbal concepts or understandings of how the world is and our place in it. So we create, totally unconsciously, “feeling-images” of the world.
These feeling-images have no logic or rationality to them, but are what the world is to us at this stage. These images are created very quickly, very early on.
If the experiences that have created these images continue, they reinforce and bed-in the imagery.
Belief structures (ideas of how the world is) begin to gather and build in the psyche, to make “sense” of the feeling-images, and to bury them deep, away from our awareness, as they are usually too painful to leave exposed.
Our psyches isolate them in a way similar to an oyster isolating a painfully intrusive grain of sand. We suppress and forget them as completely as we can.
(If we are willing, these feeling-images can be just as beautiful a gift-pearl to our intentions for personal growth, later in life!)
Our survival mechanism:
There is a part of our being that nature has set up to look after us.
With complete and tireless diligence it follows the instructions we gave it, unknowingly, from that feeling-imagery, long ago.
It doesn’t matter how old we are, or how “successful” we seem to be, this is the place from where we operate our lives.
An example: The feeling-image might be – “The world is a black hole with huge teeth and I am totally alone, powerless and vulnerable. There is no one around to help me and I’m about to be swallowed-up by the black hole!”
All this in the psyche of a very young child.
Beliefs:
From this totally unconscious place in ourselves we create and gather beliefs from the world around us to allow us to survive in this horror.
Examples of these might be – “I will only be safe if I build a wall of people around me, to keep out the deep sense of isolation and loneliness I feel”. “I must also do whatever it takes to keep people around me, no matter what it costs me physically and emotionally”. “If I’m alone I will die!”
Unfortunately, what also happens is that we create alongside those beliefs, other ones that say such things as” I don’t deserve to be loved by the people around me so they will leave me, and if they don’t, I will make them leave me”. “I don’t want people to get too close to me, because when they abandon me I will feel terrible again”
Behaviours:
We act in such ways as to bring about these outcomes – promiscuous sexual behaviour for example, to make people “want to be with me so I won’t be alone”, but at the same time, we choose people who continue to abandon us. Etc. Etc.
We have entirely forgotten – we never knew – that we have set this up to happen the way it does, so we blame those around us, and the world, for what happens to us.
All of this confirms and reinforces what we believe about the world and ourselves, in a self-reinforcing loop.
There is hope
The solution, is to bring this deep unconscious “source code” into consciousness, so that we can begin understand why things happen the way they do and so that we can choose consciously the nature, content and experience of our lives.
To find out what actually happened in our early lives and become conscious of the unconscious motivations for our feelings, beliefs and behaviours allows us to regain conscious control of our lives.
This leads to liberation from psychological and emotional pain and suffering and is true spiritual sanity.