The subconscious - friend and foe.
You have both a conscious and subconscious mind. The goal of the subconscious mind is to protect you physically and emotionally and it wants you to live your life true to you primal human needs. On the other hand, your conscious mind has goals of the ego, it wants you to fit into modern life with its many personal, social and financial goals. In other words, it wants you to live a happy, healthy and fulfilled life as seen through the perceptual filters of modern living.
The problem is that there can be a conflict between your subconscious goals and your conscious goals and this is where emotional and behavioural problems are created.
For example, you might have a shy person who is suffering from social anxiety. This person would love to be good at mixing, confident and enjoy social interaction. This would be their conscious goal.
However, that person could have suffered emotional pain at the hands of others in the past. Maybe they were bullied, threatened, punished or shamed for making mistakes, saying the wrong thing at the hands of peers or significant adults in their life. So, that now they associate social interaction as emotionally painful.
The shyness is protecting them from engaging in communication in social situations. The anxiety is the subconscious mind’s effort to get them to stay away from such situations. Remember, I told you that a significant subconscious goal is to protect you emotionally.
You might ask the question why would the painful emotional experiences they had in the past affect the person today as he or she is no longer interacting with the people who caused the emotional hurt.
The problem here that the subconscious mind tends to generalise. I will give you an example of this. Let's say that your physical security was put at risk when you were attacked and bitten by a dog in your past. Your subconscious mind would not only develop a fear of the particular dog that bit you, it would also tend to create a fear of all dogs that could present a similar threat. We can respond to threatening experiences with people in the same way.
Now let’s look at an emotional state where there is no obvious object to be afraid of General Anxiety Disorder (GAD). Take the example of a girl walking along at night listening to music on her headphones and gets attacked. The subconscious mind can create super alertness so that she is not attacked unaware in the future. This person is always afraid, however, she doesn't know what she is afraid of. While the anxiety is protecting her it might be causing problems with her ability to relax, work, sleep etc.
Another way the subconscious mind learns protection is through being a witness to another person's experience. For instance, if a young child sees their mother jumping up on a table screaming when she sees a mouse the subconscious perceives the mouse as threatening and can mimic the fear for self-protection.
The problem with the subconscious mind is that it tends to overprotect, it goes to the extreme. Your subconscious mind will always try to protect you, you are hardwired and there is nothing you can do about this. However, when you access the subconscious you can create better responses that both protect your primal needs, meets the positive intention but also are more in line with your conscious needs.
I explained to you WHY we develop emotional problems, the exact same process drivees all our habits and behaviour.
You NOW know why you fail.
If you want to break any habit: stop smoking, stop eating junk food and emotional eating, etc. or change emotional problems, the REASON you can't switch to and then maintain the new habit or emotional state is that you are trying to do the opposite to what you want to deep down. This is what WILLPOWER is trying to do, it is like swimming against the tide, it is only a matter of time before you run out of the energy and drive to continue.
You might also be interested in a related article WHY we fail. HERE is the link: