You are a combination of both your conscious thoughts and unconscious thoughts.
What are unconscious thoughts? These are thoughts that stem from beliefs or values you’ve programmed into your unconscious mind through repetitive experience or trauma throughout your life.
Example of repetitive training of the unconscious mind. Driving a car requires a tremendous amount of attention with lots of micro adjustments and corrections, yet, after a few months or years or driving, somehow we’re able to maintain lane integrity throughout the drive while thinking about something completely different. Who is now driving the car? Your unconscious mind adopted this responsibility for you. You’ve trained your unconscious mind through continuous repetition what to do in most situations giving you a freedom to focus on other things while you go from one location to the other.
How can I tell wether the voice in my head is my concscious self talking or my unconscious self talking? This is very hard to do specifically because there is no change in tone or cadence or volume between the transition of your conscious self’s voice or your unconscious self’s voice as there would be if two different people were in a room talking. They sound like the same voice or person talking. The easiest way to distinguish between your conscious voice and unconscious voice is to watch your thoughts and hear which voice believes a thought you disagree with and hear the voice that is disagreeing with the thought. The voice that believes the thought is your unconscious mind and the voice that is disagreeing with the thought is your conscious mind or your true self/spirit/soul.
Why does my unconscious mind think the way that it does? Unconscious thoughts are programmed from your experiences in the past and the beliefs you had back then while you were going through those experiences. The good news is we’re older and wiser now and have more information and compassion to better understand and interpret the world. With that new knowledge, we comfortably reprogram old beliefs by revisiting the original experience when we felt the original belief and change the belief from what we believed then to what we believe now. The key to this process that we do all the time is revisited the original experience that inspired the original belief and rewriting the meaning of the old experience with the new wiser information we have today. That’s the good news. The bad news is sometimes a belief was put in place during times when we were hurting and to revisit those beliefs means revisiting some of that past pain before we can see what the old belief was and change it to the newer wiser belief that has more understanding and compassion. Since revisiting old pain can be hard to do, often we avoid doing so to protect ourselves. By avoiding the previous hurt, we’re allowing the old programming/beliefs to stay in place and continue to run our lives in ways that we don’t always like about ourselves.
How do I change a negative unconscious belief into a positive unconscious belief? Thank you for asking such a great question. This process is often a lengthy patient journey of digging deep into ourselves to better understand what from our past is where inside of us and having the courage to face those past experiences and rewrite a new story with the updated knowledge and compassion we have today. There are exercises to practice this and my next illustration will focus on one of those exercises and describing what that process of self healing looks like.
