We can sometimes notice parts of the unconscious, or what it makes us do or feel.We may start feeling sad, scared or angry for no apparent reason, although it does seem to make sense somewhere inside. We may, as adults, sometimes start feeling like a child (and perhaps try to resist that feeling, as we are adults, right?). We may not feel much at all, having the same flat state all the time, while we can remember that this was not the case when we were young children.
We may stay occupied with particular thoughts for long periods of time. We may fantasize about situations from the past, or things that might happen in the future. We can stay angry about things way longer than seems reasonable. Even when we realize that this doesn't actually help us in any way, we are not really able to stop doing that.
We feel we need to protect or defend ourselves from some kind of emotional hurt quite often. While this need feels quite real, we often cannot quite put our finger on what it is exactly that is happening in us that needs protection.
We have pretty standard ways of reacting to situations, that most of us take for granted. It seems that we just are that way, even when we think some of these patterns are not very helpful to living our lives satisfactorily.
Some people seem to be able to get us to do things we had no intention of doing. When that isn't by some obvious display of force, we may even have no idea what actually made us change our mind. We are susceptible to manipulation.
Most of our unconscious was formed during our childhood, from when we were a baby of a couple of months old on (and for some of us even earlier). As a young child, we experience lots of things as too much for us, and we usually then suppress some of the associated feelings.
During our upbringing, we need to learn to deal with other people and society. Learning the rules is a painful process, that leads to lots of suppression of feelings. All this creates our unconscious, that most of us need to live with for the rest of our lives.
It's not only feelings we keep in our unconscious, it's whole views of situations, and ways of acting in them. In the present we take these memories from experiences from the past as patterns of behavior. We habitually take on particular roles from these patterns, in response to situations with people. We react quite automatically and thoughtlessly, exactly like we did in the past.
These patterns are triggered by how we feel in the moment.
When we, for instance, experience a new situation that disappoints us, a pattern may come up from an old situation that made us feel disappointment. We then deal with the actual situation like we did in the old one. If we got angry about the disappointment earlier, we may now become angry again automatically, whether it makes sense or not.
Someone who experienced a stressful crowded situation in a confined space in her childhood, may now become very frightened in an elevator that is nearly full. These patterns make us quite predictable and not very aware of what is really happening. It makes us susceptible to manipulation by others. It is the stuff our egos are made of.
The reason we don't notice this process of old suppressed memories influencing our current behaviour, is that part of the memory is the suppression itself. We also repeat the pattern of suppression. Thus, we keep forgetting.
