17/07/2024
The Subconscious Saboteur
To many people, the subconscious is a dark and mysterious place where secrets and other ‘naughties’ are buried, along with a few dark memories of times and events past.
BUT… it doesn’t actually exist. The term was coined in the 1890’s by Pierre Janet to account for why we sometimes behave irrationally. The Victorians loved the notion of this secret mental storage facility and it quickly caught on.
But it’s from a time before aeroplanes flew, before women were able to vote. Before any living person’s lifetime, in fact. So, time for an update.
It’s actually likely to be a physical part of the brain, the cerebellum, once thought to be only concerned with movement and coordination. Recently, though, it was discovered to be connected to every single part of rest of the brain, so it has a part in every single thing you think or do!
Although nobody has yet discovered how it works, it is known that it has 80% of the brain’s total neurones, stores patterns of everything we encounter, and assesses everything we experience to check, among other things:
* Have we experienced it before?
* Does it present a risk?
Now, the intrinsic task of this part of the brain is to ensure survival and avoid risk. So, if it recognises a potential threat, it will either create anxiety to try to make you avoid it… or if it’s relevant, a sense of boredom or some other negative feeling so you stay away from it.
It can be totally invisible in operation, quietly comparing everything you experience with everything already stored there.
And if it finds something that was nasty once and that has never been defused – even if you’ve consciously forgotten all about it – it will do its best to stop you getting involved with anything even remotely similar, even stopping the thought from appearing in your mind.
In other words, it can sabotage your plans in order to keep you safe and you won’t have the vaguest idea why you accidentally deleted an email, dropped your phone down the loo, overslept or experienced some other minor disaster.
It might sound far-fetched, but this is the part of the brain that shoots out a hand to catch something you’ve knocked off a shelf, stamps on the brake when somebody runs in front of your car, and even continues to drive safely when you’ve consciously zoned out.
It’s the part of the brain that looks after you to the best of its ability for the whole of your life. Never mind what you consciously want – this part of the brain rules! And in an extreme case, you might even think you’ve been jinxed in some way.
But the good news is that if you want to sort it out, I’ve taught dozens of BWRT practitioners how to do exactly that! Just type ‘Smashing Limits’ (without the quotes) into the search box here: https://www.bwrt-professionals.com/pages/practitioners
And set yourself free!