Everyone has experienced mental and emotional distress, called trauma. Everybody has, no matter how good their childhood may have been.
The physical human was created with a subconscious and a conscious mind. The subconscious mind controls all automatic things of life. Like your heartbeat, body temperature, and digestion. But also learned behavior like driving a car for example.
The subconscious mind is in charge of your beliefs, all of your previous life experiences, your memories and the skills you’ve already acquired. In that way you can focus on other important things in life.
‘The subconscious mind takes over control of anything that interferes with the conscious mind.’ Meaning it helps us to stay alive, but it can also interfere with our lives in a negative way. When the subconscious mind takes over out of survival, it can benefit us in short term. But in long term in can harm our lives. This happens when you’ve gave a negative meaning to a past experience.
For example, you moved when you were 7 years old, and you made it mean that your parents take you away from everything that you love and know. But in your parent’s perspective, they gave you a bigger and more beautiful home. Now you might feel resentment towards your parents, but you don’t know why, maybe you’re not even aware of that emotion.
If the pain you felt interfered with your life enough and so your ‘survival’, the subconscious mind turned on and now your subconscious OWNS that belief. But you have no conscious awareness of the original belief or experience you gave a meaning to!
Your subconscious mind takes over your thoughts and emotions when situations are extreme. It can take over entire memories that are a threat to your conscious mind. If you pay attention to the emotional trigger or painful memory, you will naturally want to avoid it. But that’s exactly why we need to be unconditionally present with it, so that we can release it. You hear people say ‘the only way out, is in’. Well that’s exactly what we are doing during a Shadow Work session.