Leaks and Landmines, Landfills and Landslides

Your stream of consciousness is proceeding in its usual direction, giving you a rambling narrative of the day's events and ongoing tasks, perhaps with your concerns added about what is happening as the day unfolds.

However, you have a sudden change in your thoughts, behaviors, or mood and do not know why. Sometimes when you are alone thoughts unrelated to the day or present situation intrude and you are not sure why they seeped into your self-talk. Or, perhaps you are in a social interaction that seems to be going well, but you interject a thought or sentence that throws everyone off guard, including yourself. You wonder about the origins of these odd thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that could be quite troubling.

Because they might reveal hidden truths about you and your relationship with others, sometimes you build elaborate excuses for them because confronting and dealing with them would hurt too much. Or, you might just go on with the day and do not give them a second thought.

You might use a variety of other ways to defend against the psychological upset that they might generate, such as going in the opposite way that they had indicated. For example, perhaps you thought that you did not have much feelings about a colleague, but then at the work break you say something quite catty about her. In order to make up for the gaff, the next day, you praise her way beyond what she deserves, and your colleagues seem confused.

Or, one of your parents or perhaps your partner asks you to help with a task and, instead of complying, you react quite angrily. In the end, you do much more than helping with the original request in order to make amends, and people are confused.

These examples illustrate the mind games that your unconscious and your conscious worlds play with you in the course of the day. Ideas, emotions, and intentions to act go back and forth between the conscious and unconscious as the day proceeds, and some are locked in the unconscious for quite long.

Defense mechanisms work like that - they help you to hide past hurts, cover up present hurts, or stop from happening hurts that might occur in the future. Defense mechanisms might even involve lies that you tell either to yourself or to others because they provide seeming short term psychological advantage, space, or gain.

We used to think that black holes in space were places where nothing could escape once anything was drawn into them. However, we have learned that matter/ energy can escape from them. The same applies to your unconscious. It is not a psychological place where everything that enters it remains forever inaccessible to you, or permanently unknown to you, forever buried, repressed, or otherwise forgotten. Rather, the unconscious is a place from which ideas, images, words, emotions, and intentions to act can emerge for your scrutiny.

Psychological movements in and out of consciousness could be either minor or major and also could be either controlled or uncontrolled. There are continual movements both ways -- from the conscious to the unconscious and vice versa - as well as continual efforts to try to control them and their effects.

Leaks. When the emergence from consciousness is minor, it appears to be like a leak. The leak could occur in the day or it might be part of a dream. If you are ready to deal with the matter revealed in the leak -- and the leak might have taken place for this very reason -- your reaction to it will be controlled. You can learn from it and integrate its message into your positive growth instead of reacting with great worry and hurt.

Landmines.

However, if the seepage from the unconscious to the conscious reveals serious underlying issues that have not been dealt with at all and you are not ready to confront and deal with them, great psychological turmoil might result. Therefore, I refer to this type of slippage into the conscious as a landmine instead of a leak. The deeper problems at the base of any landmine-type emergence from the unconscious might require much help (from family, friends, self-help books, etc.) and even psychotherapy.

Landmines.

What about psychological movements in the opposite direction, from consciousness into the unconscious? For example, according to Freudian theory, repression takes place in early life especially to remove from consciousness sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent. Many ideas, emotions, and intended actions are suppressed this way because of the hurt associated with them in one way or another.

Landfills. When the movement into the unconscious is a more controlled variety, it appears to be like a slow burial by landfill. The issue at hand is covered more slowly because it is less urgent. It might never re-emerge, especially if it is quite minor or becomes quite minor with time.

Landslides. However, when a psychological difficulty is so great that it needs immediate and massive removal from consciousness, the metaphor of a landfill does not work. Rather, you engage in a psychological movement from consciousness to the unconscious that resembles a landslide rather than a landfill. The matter that required such urgent and extreme psychological burial or rerouting might continue to haunt you without you ever knowing directly what it is or knowing how to deal with it.

Seeking help from and communication with family, friends, therapists, and readings such as in these blogs, along with your desire to grow and change for the better, can help with problems in the psychological movements from the conscious to the unconscious and vice versa. By working with them, in the sense of letting them inform you and important others in your life about your problems, you can take beginning steps in the creation of more solid foundations in your psyche.