A Little Subconscious Programming Story…
Now that you know how the mind is set up (from my last post…) I can give you some insight on the inner workings.
When you experience something in an awake state, your subconscious makes that experience mean something. It can make it mean something positive or negative or anything in between. The meaning becomes an emotion and that emotion becomes a feeling.
As a child, you created meaning from the situations you experienced with your child mind. The child mind thinks in absolutes. It doesn’t have the capability yet to understand things that you, as an adult, have no problem understanding. But while you were experiencing things as a child your subconscious was absorbing the experience and creating beliefs through the lens of that child mind. Those beliefs get reinforced through similar experiences you have over and over again and then you have a program in place subconsciously. And your conscious is directly influenced by your subconscious.
So let’s say there’s a three-year-old and she knocks a glass of water over on the dinner table and her dad loses his temper because she spilled her water and now it has to be cleaned up. Let’s say he raises his voice and looks at her like he’s really mad. Now that three-year-old is experiencing this as:
I’ve done something wrong.
Dad is mad.
Dad has a mean face.
Dad is yelling.
Dad doesn’t love me when I do something wrong.
I’m feeling nervous/sad/scared.
I don’t like feeling this way.
All of that gets entered into the subconscious as data. And over time, when similar things happen that cause dad to lose his temper, they become events that reinforce the beliefs that the three-year-old is unloved, in danger, etc. when she does something wrong.
That becomes a program. And that three-year-old becomes a 5, 6, 9, 14-year-old who doesn’t like to get in trouble. Maybe she’s super careful around dad, maybe she’s super careful around her male teacher because she’s avoiding feeling nervous/sad/scared/unloved.
As she grows up, the program keeps getting enforced. Those neural pathways are fired and wired over and over again. As an adult, she might find herself in relationships where she pleases and overcompensates to keep the peace. She goes out of her way to keep herself feeling safe and loved sometimes at the expense of what she really wants to be doing.
Her subconscious programming is stronger than her conscious desires.
She might know that things feel off or out of alignment between what she wants and what she does and she may not understand why.
Maybe she’s tired of feeling small, or settling, or giving way beyond what she’s capable of giving all the time but she can’t make the changes because when she tries, she gets reset right back into the old ways. She might even try a new relationship because the old one didn’t feel right and yet she finds herself in that same cycle with the new partner.
The subconscious mind wants to keep us feeling safe and loved, so it creates programs around the beliefs we have to behave a certain way to stay feeling safe and loved. Think about how strong these neural pathways are when they’ve been fired and wired for decades.
No wonder it’s hard to make changes!
We are wired the way we are wired from the beginning. Our little child selves believe things we would never believe as an adult. We would see the water spilled on the table and Dad reacting the way he did without the ability to see the bigger picture… that Dad’s tired after a long day at work and he’s got all kinds of things on his mind (and he’s got a TON of subconscious programming of his own!) And just because he gets mad doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her.
Our behaviors, habits, patterns, beliefs, attachment styles, relationship dynamics, our personalities are formed in our subconscious. Our lives are formed by our subconscious beliefs and programs.
We can change, we just have to get into the subconscious to do it.
