Today I want to talk a little bit about the psychodynamic approach to psychology. It’s not going to be an exhaustive look at it by any means, but there are some things I want to address. For starters, the whole idea that as adults we still struggle with unconscious forces from our childhood always seemed really abstract to me. I kind of believed it, but also kind of didn’t. As I started reading Freuds books some of it did begin to make more sense, but if I’m being completely honest it took a long time for any of it to really click. This is a highly useful concept to understand though, even if it is a little bit obscure. The whole idea here is to dig into your unconscious mind to discover and change any programming that is holding you back or hurting you. Remember that 95% of your life is lived unconsciously. That doesn’t mean you’re asleep, just that you’re not consciously aware of what you do.
Like I said, It took me a long time to start to understand the whole Freudian approach to the unconscious. It didn’t always make sense that something from my childhood could still be affecting me today without me even knowing it. After all, I’m an adult, and I can think for myself now. What’s more I can evaluate myself, and subject my behaviors to the lens of reason and rationality. Sure being lied to and cheated on in the past has made me slow to trust, and suspicious in subsequent relationships, but that’s just me learning to protect myself right?
Children are learning machines. They spend most of their time in either an Alpha or Theta brainwave state. Those are the states that you go into during hypnosis, falling asleep or otherwise are just in a highly suggestible state of mind. We talked a little recently about hypnosis and how trance works. Kids live in that state and they’re absorbing crazy amounts of information on a daily basis. Kids are also really good at acting out what they see around them. They’ll make artwork that reflects their limited understand of how the world works. They’ll play house, and you’ll see them take on the roles of the adults in their lives. What finally clicked for me is that kids are basically parrots, that are just a little bit stickier. They mimic what they see around them. We have these neurons in our brain called mirror neurons, which are a somewhat recent discovery. What’s interesting about these mirror neurons is that they allow us to observe other people doing something and mimic them. They’re basically firing when we see something done, that makes it easier for us to actually do that same thing for the first time. Now we do this without even thinking about it but it’s actually an incredibly complicated process. The end result is that we’re able to learn quickly from those around us. This is a vital skill for us to have, but what about when kids mirror adults who have bad habits? What about when they’re mistreated and go the rest of their life acting out that same old story, over and over again?
You see people who impulsively rebel against anything they perceive to be an attempt to control, and you’ll find some people who see themselves as a victim who is destined to be stepped on.
See this is how the unconscious gets stuck in past trauma. For example if your parents fought a lot growing up, you thought that that’s just how life is. You don’t have a larger frame of reference at that age to compare your life to alternate ideas. When you go to play house as a five year old, you make your toys fight because that’s the story you see played out, and you don’t have the understanding to write a different script so you just follow along. That wouldn’t be such a big deal if it weren’t for the fact that you’re in that state of high suggestibility, and you’re actively learning. You play that story a couple of times and it becomes a habit. Now your unconscious has built a map of what relationships look like, and it involves a lot of screaming and yelling. You don’t even know that you’ve built a map but every time you play, you’re rehearsing those future behaviors. As you grow older you forget that you played these games where you acted out negative relationships, but your habits don’t forget anything. That map is still there in you head somewhere. Now when you get older and you’re learning how to have a relationship of your own, you’re going to automatically revert back to that early script you’ve always been using. The thing is that now you don’t even know you’re doing it. You’ve learned this story and made it muscle memory, and to create a new map requires a lot of work, because you have to completely change your programming. This isn’t to say that everyone blindly copies and pastes their parents behavior onto their own lives. You do make your own decisions even if they are heavily influenced by society, it’s just that you still have those maps in there somewhere.
To make it even more complicated, your partner is doing the exact same thing. You may think you’re fighting with them when in reality you’re fighting the same argument they saw their parents act out. Who knows how far back this goes!!! It’s a generational cylce, and it’s up to us to break it.
This applies to everything by the way. Finances, health, relationships, education, work ethic, temperament; the list goes on. So oftentimes people will feel like they’re stuck in life, and it will turn out that there are these neurological maps that aren’t really leading in the direction they want to go. It sometimes takes a bit of work to discover these maps, and it can really take a long time to discover the root cause of them. The thing is though, until we re-wire these undesirable areas we’re likely to keep repeating the same patterns over and over. This can be difficult. Developing enough self-awareness to bring the unconscious to the light of day is a challenge. Confronting the monsters under your bed that you’ve been trying to ignore for the last 20+ years takes a lot of courage. We like to see ourselves in the most positive light possible, and holding up the mirror to our trauma and shadow self is something most people will do anything to avoid. They’ll drug themselves, medicate themselves, distract themselves, lie to themselves, anything they have to do to justify their behavior and explain away any cognitive dissonance.
So how do we work on uncovering this faulty programming? Well, it’s going to take a lot of self reflection, patience, and a willingness to confront the darker aspects of your nature. There’s lots of ways to take a closer look at the shadow self; journaling is a good one, but I feel like it has its limits. If you sit down to write it’s ok to use that as a time for self expression, to get whatever negative feelings you have out on paper but I would advise that you be careful with this. I think a lot times when people say they’re just venting, what they’re actually doing is focusing on that negativity and magnifying it. Artists are particularly bad about this. They’ll say their work is expressive but in reality they’re pushing themselves further and further into a hole by letting those thoughts and feeling consume them.
This isn’t to say that expressing these emotions should be avoided, just that you should be careful to pay attention to when that expression turns into obsession. The other thing with journaling or just writing these thoughts down is to make sure that the goal is to get to the bottom of it all. It’s important to ask yourself “why do I feel this way?
“What’s the root of all these feelings? What feeling is beneath what I think I’m feeling?”
I remember one time there was a situation in a relationship that was making me really depressed. So I took some time to sit and just observe the thoughts and feelings that came up whenever I thought about it. At first it seemed pretty straightforward, and it was hard not to get stuck feeling down on myself. But I started to follow each of those feelings back to their source and I started to notice something interesting; before the depression, there was a quick flash of anger. I did some more digging and realized that the situation wasn’t making me depressed at all. The situation was making me angry, and I was depressed because I was trying to repress that. I felt guilty for feeling angry, but I also felt powerless because I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it. In prior relationships I was with someone who was manipulative, and she would do things that were wrong, then protect herself by making me feel bad for being angry with her. So somewhere along the way that became a habit for me. I started to unconsciously think that it was wrong for me to be angry with my partner. I didn’t realize I was feeling this way at first, but I had acted out that script so many times that it had become a habit. Once I realized this I was able to address the anger head on. I realized that it was a valid emotion, and was trying to warn me that something was wrong. The anger really didn’t have any deeper meaning other than being a sign that something needed to change. So that anger was my shadow side, and since I was repressing it, it needed to manifest in another way. Just like if you lock the demons up in your basement they’re still there. They’re still going to bang on the air ducts, rattle the door and pee in the vents.
Dealing with the shadow self is a recurring theme in this show. I’ve covered it before and will continue to do so. But I hope that this gave you a better perspective on the Freudian approach. It doesn’t come close to covering everything obviously, but I always had a really hard time understanding it and wanted to share that moment that made everything click for me.
Thanks for reading. Good luck.
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