Working with the Unconscious in Process Facilitation
By Irene Tobler and Michael Mervosh
What awakens the unconscious?
The unconscious is everything which is out of our conscious awareness; this is by far the larger part of our reality.
There are many different definitions about the unconscious. Because what is unknown to us troubles us, we try to understand what it is beneath the surface that drives us, what it is that motivates us below our level of awareness.
Some schools of thinking refer to the unconscious as all the automatic processes that are happening outside the scope of our awareness.
As related to depth psychology, the unconscious contains all sorts of significant, meaningful and disturbing material, which we need to keep out of awareness because they are too threatening to acknowledge fully.
In our work, we refer to the unconscious as the unknown, which includes both the personal as well as the collective unconscious.
Within this unknown space we find our darkness and our light. In our process of going deeper, we often have toconfront the darkness first.
When we do this work, we have to learn to tolerate entering the darkness, including our own.
Carl Jung said: we don’t become enlightened by imagining beings of light; we become enlightened by making our darkness conscious.
How do we make our darkness conscious?
The unconscious cannot be controlled. For example, I cannot say I am going to work on my unconscious. It is like fishing. The fish won’t come up just because we want it to come up.
This is often disturbing to us, because there is no clear road to take, other than the one that is unclear and unknown.
Some of you have expressed concerns in the first days of our training week, that what might come up will be too big to handle. Sometimes it can feel like that.
But, as scary as it may feel to dive into the unconscious and repressed material beneath the surface of our awareness, we have already lived through it at an earlier age, when it was quite difficult to experience and handle.
As children we had to suppress a lot of our instincts and drivesin order to be loved and accepted. These instincts then go unconscious and start to have a life on their own.
We learn early that we should not be angry, we should not be too spontaneous, that perhaps our creativity may have threatened or frightened our parents. We should not be too bright, too bright, too ambitious,etc.
We create a personalitythat we think will be accepted by the adult world around us, and we tend to stay loyal to that personality.
Our repressed aspects still live out through us, even though we are quite unaware of them.
We have to realize that repressed material does not resolve or disappear just because we avoid it. It then starts to act out on our behalf, below the level of our conscious mind.
It often comes out in the most inopportune and inappropriate moments.
The unconscious will inevitably come to awaken us, when we do not look to awaken it.
It awakens us through disturbing dreams, annoying neighbors, disease processes, and other people who we just can’t stand. It arises when we are exposed toother cultures and ways that threaten us, including things we do and say when we are out of control.
We will tend to project on others what we cannot tolerate in ourselves.
For some of us, it will be our anger. For others it might be jealousy or envy; for yet others it might be criticism. There are also positive attributes we cannot bear for ourselves. For example, we might be triggered by another’s brilliance, .sex appeal or daring.
We need to find ways to own these rejected parts of us and give them a space at our “table”, so that we do not enact them in our relationship with others.
We will always find others who act out these aspects for us, as a way to alleviate the tension that we may feel or carry inside.
We usually experience shame connected with our rejected and repressed parts.
How Our Bodies Speak
Also our bodies show to others what we don’t want to see about ourselves in the form of unconscious gestures, structural tensions, facial expressions.
Our body’s messages are simple and straightforward, they tell the truth. They show to others where we have our conflicts, where unconscious motivations play out.
Our gestures are often incongruent with what we are saying. We may say we want to risk a new adventure, but our bodies are turning away. Or we may say we want to be patient and wait, while our bodies move forward.
We have to make the inner conflict conscious, and allow the desire to risk and the turning away to live alongside each other for a while, until the risking becomes do-able.
When we tune into body sensations and stay with them - long forgotten, even preverbal memories start to surface - often in the language of powerful sensations and emotions, tears, breathlessness, pressure, etc.
When we stay with our bodies, we slowly find language and meaning in these kinesthetically felt experiences.
Our bodies are dreamers. They dream our unspoken, unaware realities into existence, through our daytime gestures, needs, impulses, phantasies, slips of tongue, as well as in our night dreams.
When we sit with our clients, we sit in a collective dream. We join with our conscious awarenesses andalso our unconscious unawarenesses are joining as well.
One teacher of mine once said, “people come to therapy and the ghosts come for therapy with them”.
The trouble is that our own ghosts are sitting there as well. We are fully capable of projecting all kinds of material onto our clients.
We cannot know for sure which repressed ghosts will emerge in a session, we can only make space for what wants to emerge.
We make space by stepping back, by waiting, by being present and open to the emergence of whatever.
Our embodiment helps us to stay with troublesome material long enough for something new to arise. This is essential to understand and accept, in order to be effective in deepening processes for our clients.
We need to be able to toleratekeeping the disturbance of awakening alive and in the room. Otherwise, it will be easy for us to lead our clients on a different road, which feels more known and more confortable to us.
Lets say I am attached to always be nice and I am also afraid of my own anger. Then my clients will not express any anger in our sessions, because I will signal unconsciously that I cannot take or accept it. Or if they do, I will simply take them towards another path.
The more we become conscious of our own shadow aspects, the more we are able to tolerate them in others, the less we need to judge.
The good news is that there is always some gold hidden in the shadows. We retrieve not only painful material, we also retrieve a disowned and treasured aspect of ourselves.
Keep remembering that we do not only repress our negative sides, we often repress our brightest and most creative sides, in an attempt to be accepted.
1