Romance And The Unconscious
What is the "unconscious"?
If you think of your mind as a house where you store everything, you've got your closets filled with all the stuff you've lived through and everything you've experienced and had happen to you...your subconscious, your unconscious is the basement. Thats the place where you store all the stuff you really don't want to look at. In some instances you haven't seen in so long you wouldnt recognize it as your own anymore. Its the scary basement you probably shouldn't wander on down into without a weapon of some kind. We absolutely all have an unconscious, the conscious is the stuff that we know about ourselves, the things we remember... the unconscious is the stuff that upset us so much that we sorta pushed it away where we can't see it, but it still affects us every day. THIS IS NOT PARTICULARLY TRUE.
How can my unconscious influence my romantic choices?
When we search for a partner, we don't just have conscious needs - (those things that we say we're looking for) whether it's a sense of humor, or a great personality, or whatever. There are also unconscious needs. There are things within us that we really don't recognize we need. Great example: you may have grown up nurturing your parent, and getting great satisfaction from that. If you can find someone who's very needy, you might have a wonderful relationship, because you can get that satisfaction again as an adult, even though you might not say to somebody, "I'm looking for someone who's needy".
How is it possible to examine the unconscious?
If you want to examine your unconcious, there are basically five exit doors through which your unconcious briefly makes itself conscious. Those are dreams, freudian slips, emotional over reactions, repetitive behaviors, and also symptoms.
How can my dreams help me examine my unconscious?
We all look at our dreams and say "that's crazy, it doesn't mean anything", but dreams have a wealth of information if you know to look beyond what's just happening in the dream. If you look at the plot alone it might not make that much sense, but there's so many elements. There is who's in your dream, how you relate to them, and how does that jive or not with how you relate to those people in your conscious state. Also things like what's it like in your dream; is it cold, is it warm, are you comfortable, are you uncomfortable. All of these things are elements of you and how they relate to each other and to the plot of the dream can tell you oodles (to use the technical term) about how you feel about people when you're awake.
What are "Freudian slips", and how can they help me examine my unconscious?
A Freudian slip is just a slip of the tongue, when you mean to say one thing and you say another. Freudian slips may have a lot to do with what you're unconsciously feeling about someone or something. One example was of a woman who called her boyfriend, who she really wanted to break up with, and his name is Bob, and she said, "Hello Blob," which is really not that subtle. My favorite example: my co-author had a woman come to his office complaining about problems with her "relationship", only she left that last 'P' off and put a 'T' in instead. If you do the math you can figure out it probably was her relationship that was causing her trouble.
What are "emotional overreactions", and how can they help me examine my unconscious?
We all have a dial for our emotions. If someone you know dies, you're very, very sad. If someone you've never met dies, you might register that it's a sad thing, but you probably shouldn't be inconsolable. If the death of a total stranger makes you completely inconsolable, that's an emotional overreaction. That means there's something you're anxious about that's coming out in ways that you really can't see on a conscious level. You know, a great example is- a child spills a glass of milk, and the father goes berserk. That's emotional overreaction, probably having to do with some kind of anxiety the father can't deal with.
What are "repetitive behavior patterns", and how can they help me examine my unconscious?
Repetitive behavior patterns are those things that we all do over and over again. Basically, the things we make New Year's resolutions about; the things we want to stop doing, but can't seem to stop doing. Well, there are unconscious reasons we can't stop doing them, and if you look at specifically what it is you do over and over again that you wish you didn't, that can give you some clues as to what's in the unconscious.
