Why do I feel unhinged?!

Simply put, there is no possible way you can be conscious and aware of all the billions of synapses firing in your brain at any one given moment. Some thoughts and feelings are front and center, others lie waiting on the sidelines to be brought forth by a simple act of mindfulness, while still others are deeply buried, which makes up our most deeply hidden brain.   So if you’re wondering why sometimes your mind has a life of its own it’s because…it does!

What happens when our mind has a life of its own?

For the most part, nothing bad happens when our brain goes into automatic: we can still breathe even if we aren’t aware of every breath.

But at other times, we do feel disturbed by how overwhelmed we can get.

• We may feel overwhelmed that our spouse is experiencing us so badly.  We may feel overwhelmed by our fear or panic around COVID-19.  On some days, we may put on a good face, but struggle against feeling like life is gray.

We can’t always know what we are feeling, because our mind works to protect us from feelings.

So we get busy pushing away anger, without being able to see what the feeling is trying to tell us.  All we feel is that we are in the struggle.

We push away sadness, thinking it’s a weakness.

We push away disappointment, thinking we’re ungrateful.

And we try to give ourselves the best attitude adjustment that we can to stay more positive and on a righteous road.

But the problem with our attitude adjustments is that we can often bypass the message of the emotion.  We can bypass that this anger may need to take us into disappointment (or even grief.)  And if we bypass disappointment, how can we know that we may need to move in a different direction?  We need every single emotion, even the most challenging one, to help us know what’s happening – both inside and outside of ourselves.

Many people are looking to find peace in the present moment.  Well, you won’t find that peace as long as you are busy pushing yourself away.  If you can’t sit still and push thoughts our of your mind to find calm, follow those thoughts, and see where they will take you!

How do we connect back to feelings we don’t want to have?

Since the beginning of time, humanity has been plagued by toxic thoughts and feelings that, as long as they remain hidden and unconscious, can never be resolved and which, in their unconscious state, will defy even the most well-meaning methods designed to address human suffering.

Because here’s the thing: making the unconscious conscious, and discovering your hidden brain, is not a cognitive process. In other words, I can’t tell you what you can’t see about yourself. I can’t give you an interpretation that will help you, because you can cognitively know EVERYTHING about yourself, and it won’t help.

If knowing yourself doesn’t help, what does?

Even though “knowing” yourself doesn’t help, you can discover yourself. In discovery, you re-claim forgotten emotions or thoughts and feelings your consciousness pushed out. This is different from cognitive knowing. It’s an emotional feeling.

Emotional feeling allows you to be comfortable in your own skin, no matter what.

Knowing your unconscious, therefore, happens in an extraordinary, unforgettable moment of revelation, replete with the feelings of relief and exhilaration intrinsic to any act of true discovery. It’s the proverbial “aha” feeling of joyful discovery. It’s a knowing that knows with the heart.

Psychoanalysis, invented as a method for revealing the unconscious, has evolved over the past half-century to become a deeply emotional process.

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