How to drive consciousness into the unconscious
I often encounter people who are aware they have ‘issues,’ but have no leverage for resolving them, resulting in these issues circling endlessly. The reason for this is that most people don’t have a mechanical understanding of their own inner world. When we gain this understanding, we recognise that the only true solution is to drive consciousness into the unconscious.
Our unconscious, as Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes, contains the “unfathomable depths of the rejected, the unacknowledged, the unrecognised, the unknown and undeveloped elements of our existence.” [1]
The dysfunctions stemming from these elements are the output of a system decades—often generations—in the making. Patterns of abandonment, shame, emotional disconnection, and boundary collapse are rarely personal inventions. They are inherited structures, replaying endlessly until they’re recognised and released.
If you want symptom management, stay above the waterline in your conscious mind. If you want root-cause resolution, there’s only one place to go: the unconscious. Like the immense pressure of the deep ocean, the difficulty lies in penetrating its depths.
The nature of the unconscious
Every unconscious pattern shares three defining characteristics. You are:
- Afraid of it
- Ashamed of it
- Unwilling or unable to take responsibility for it
This triad keeps the pattern hidden. Not because it’s invisible, but because you’re conditioned not to see it.
The unconscious is not passive storage. It’s an active process, a rumbling volcano, constantly scanning your inner and outer environments for anything triggering. It generates behaviours, emotional reactions, and relational dynamics in real time. It’s not behind you; it is not your friend. It operates through you, whether you like it or not. It reacts mechanically to what it reacts to. The unconscious does not create randomness. It creates repetition.
The principle: make it conscious
There’s a simple principle at work: that which you make conscious cannot remain unconscious. But as the saying goes, simple does not mean easy.
To bring something into consciousness is not merely to think about it. Yes, we must form a clear mental picture of it. More important, we must form a clear emotional sense of it—without distortion, denial, or theatricality.
This is a skill that few possess, to begin with. In holistic healing circles it’s called ‘embodiment’—when truth descends from the ivory tower of the mind into our psyche and the tissue of our muscles to become lived truth, rather than an abstract intellectual belief.
Most people attempt to bypass this. They analyse without feeling. Or they feel without understanding. Both approaches fail, because the unconscious operates through integrated systems—thought, emotion, and behaviour moving as one.
To interrupt the system, you must first see the system then feel the system.
So how do we bring the unconscious into conscious awareness? Not by thinking harder. Thinking is part of the system and is easily deflected into delusion and self-defence.
The process: drive consciousness
Instead, we observe outputs. Every behaviour is data. Every emotional reaction is a clue. Every repeated relational dynamic is a pattern attempting to reveal its underlying structure. A distress signal from the unconscious. Sigmund Freud called these parapraxes, repressed fragments of consciousness not entirely robbed of the ability to communicate.
The process is—again—simple but not easy:
- Track the pattern: Identify what repeats. Not once, not twice—but consistently across time and context.
- Remove the story: The conscious mind explains, rationalises, and justifies. Strip that away. Look at what’s happening, not what your narrative around it is.
- Locate the emotional charge: Where there’s disproportionate emotion, there’s unconscious material. Shame is a both a marker and a blocker.
- Trace it back: Patterns originate in early development or inherited trauma. Follow the thread. Where have you felt this before? Where might it have existed before you?
- Take responsibility: Not blame, but responsibility for your own participation. The moment you can say “this stops with me,” the pattern begins to loosen.
By connecting with the emotional charge—without shame or judgment, of ourselves or any of our ancestors who may have carried this before us—we create a psychic opening that briefly allows us to penetrate the unconscious.
This is a moment of supreme discomfort when we fully feel what we—or our ancestors—were unable to feel. This is also the only moment a trauma can be healed.
This is the moment that we drive consciousness into the unconscious: full mental and emotional presence with whatever lurks below. The moment requires the delicacy of the surgeon’s knife and the brutality of the gold digger’s pickaxe.
The barrier: avoidance
Most people will not do this work. Not because it’s complex but because it’s confronting.
To enter the unconscious is to encounter what has been avoided: shame, grief, rage, and fear.
We must resist the urge to bypass, numb, or outsource the process. This means staying with the material long enough for it to reorganise into something new.
Only then can reintegration occur. Only then can the pattern complete.
The work
Most people spend their lives fighting what they do not understand. The unconscious is designed to not let you in. Failing to understand it, they turn away.
A smaller number turn towards it.
If you’re willing to look—properly look—at what has been hidden, the unconscious will reveal itself. Not all at once, and not without resistance, but according to principles that are consistent and knowable.
Understand the principles. Follow the process. Avoid the pitfalls.
And what was once invisible will begin, piece by piece, to come into the light.
Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash
References
[1] Knight-Jadczyk, Laura, Debugging the Universe (2001)