So I was doing some reading earlier – psychology and philosophy – and some smart and capable thinkers took on a question:
Can you feel an emotion outside your conscious awareness?
Can you be angry, sad, scared, happy or whatever, and not even realise?
Forget about mentally ill folks who’re violently repressing their own experiences. Focus on typical people.
Many of these experts said, no, of course you can’t feel something and not know it. Some of them even said that idea is a contradiction in terms.
Well, good for them. I’m sure they’ve put a lot of thought into their absurd and ridiculous take.
I could talk about this from a neurological perspective. I could point out that emotions evolved before consciousness and tend to emerge closer to the core of the brain, bypassing the self-reflecting parts towards in the frontal cortex, but I won’t.
You can relate to all these experiences, whether you’ve lived out these examples or not:
There’s someone in your social circle who you don’t think much of. Then when they become unavailable – they move away or start dating someone else or whatever – you realise how fond of them you’ve always been.
A friend gets a promotion while you’re struggling at work. You’d swear you’re happy for them, except you spend the rest of the day in a foul mood.
You love your job. Then, after spending a few weeks on holidays, you dread going back. You realise you always dreaded it but you just sucked it up and got on with it.
This can happen for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes you don’t want to admit how you feel. Sometimes you and your life are so complex you don’t even know what you feel.
Here’s the thing:
Emotions compel you to act.
They don’t need you to think. In some cases, thinking will just get in the way.
It’s funny how much of your life happens outside your awareness. That doesn’t mean it’s outside your control, though. You can train, guide and refine the unconscious parts of you.
Not by choosing to.
Plenty of folks choose to give up smoking, sugar or erotica, only to fall back into old habits.
No, your unconscious mind needs a different approach.
If you don’t spot what that approach is in Your Story Isn’t About You, that’s fine. It’ll still work out for you: