3. What is the Sub-Conscious Mind?
Your subconscious mind is the ‘all-knowing’ part of your mind. Your ‘conscious’, or ‘thinking’ mind can only hold information pertinent to your ‘here and now’. Its contents are of immediate value to you, and can and will, be changed as required. Due to this immediacy, its knowledge, at any point in time is always limited.
When you learn any new task, it is learnt consciously using the ‘thinking’ part of your mind. Once the ‘subconscious mind’ has mastered the task, it then takes over and the ‘conscious’ mind no longer has to think about what you are doing - unless something out of the ordinary happens which requires thought and presence of mind.
For example, when you first learn to drive a car, a driving instructor will teach you, on a conscious level, everything you need to do, and everything you need to think about. Initially, this is a lot of information to take in, but over time, you adapt and come to know how to coordinate it all together.
Consider the act of braking: Your instructor will tell you that the brake is the pedal in the middle! However, knowing how hard to press it and at what time you should press it – bearing in mind your current speed and how immediate your current need to stop happens to be – this is a knack which you learn through practice until it becomes ‘instinctive‘. At the point where coordination becomes instinctive, you know that your sub–conscious mind has taken control of operations.
This is how your sub-conscious mind works throughout your life. From the moment you are born, your subconscious mind absorbs and stores information which is made available to you in the future. When you encounter a situation which requires a response, your sub-conscious mind automatically provides one based on your previous experience. Should a situation arise and you ‘draw a blank’ regarding how to respond, it will be because you haven’t encountered a similar situation in the past. Consequently, your sub-conscious mind is unable to offer a tried and tested response and therefore, the conscious mind has to produce one for you. Your sub-conscious mind will then store this response for future reference, and so the cycle continues.
However, because this cycle of learned responses begins in childhood, any inappropriate responses that were not corrected by your carers at that time, may well persist into adulthood where they can create problems for you. Likewise, when deciding how to respond on a conscious level, a child will take ‘inspiration’ from significant others around them. If those adults did not receive appropriate teaching as children themselves, they will most likely, unwittingly, pass on inappropriate or unhelpful responses to their children which will then be innocently absorbed, learnt and accepted without question, by the young person’s subconscious mind.
Equally, this applies to what those around us, tell us about ourselves. If a child is consistently told that they are stupid, or fat, or clumsy, their subconscious mind will accept these statements as fact. Children do not have a store of information in their subconscious minds that would refute or contradict these harmful suggestions. So this information takes root and becomes a belief which that person holds about themselves. Once the belief is formed, people will only tend to notice ‘evidence’ which confirms the belief. Unfortunately, any ‘proof’ that they are not ‘stupid’, for example, will most likely be dismissed as inaccurate.
Hypnotherapy can help you:
