Melissa Nadia Viviana uses a submarine metaphor to explain how the conscious mind feeds information to the subconscious, which runs on childhood patterns. When those patterns stay outdated despite life changes, anxiety and depression take hold. Reprogramming requires conscious effort to override what the subconscious believes.
Chapters
I think there's a sort of a paradox in human nature that I've been trying to put my finger on for a while, and I think I'm getting there, but it's taking a while. And one of the things that I realized was that, you know, and if you could just let me parse out my thoughts, because I'm using the word parse correctly. I believe that we as humans have a capacity for mind over matter, which I actually would say mind over mind. It's the idea that we have some substantive mediation of ourselves, of our experience, that we have some top-down causation where we can influence backwards what's happening. Neuroscience, there's one book called The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, and it's a really interesting book because I had this theory actually about the subconscious being sort of a submarine underneath the surface, that the subconscious does not have access to raw data. It doesn't have ears, it doesn't have eyes. The conscious mind is the only aspect of our psychology that filters any information to the subconscious. When people are lacking responsibility in their lives, they often deflect and allow their subconscious to make decisions for them. They go back to old patterns, things that they learned in their childhood, and they allow their subconscious to dominate their reactions to life. That's completely normal, and it's a shortcut actually that we take to function in the world. If we had to make a raw conscious decision every second of every day, we would be really slow. So we use our subconscious. But my theory was that the subconscious was a submarine. So the subconscious can't understand that the world has changed. So imagine that your subconscious gets some program in your childhood, and for the rest of your life you feel, let me just reuse that subconscious programming over and over and over again. But the fact of the matter is that life has changed. You know, circumstances are different. You're different. You've grown up. You have different relationships. Maybe now you're married. Maybe now you're a parent instead of having parents.. And the only thing that will reprogram the subconscious is you making the decision to give your subconscious information. So this was this theory that I had come up with. And I later read in a neuroscientific book that said that the way information goes in and out, it actually happens at the same time. So we don't just accept information. We don't just put out information, we do both. And for me, that was that apex between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind in that we take in information. And also at the same time, our subconscious is using predictive information to push out and project onto our circumstances around us. And so, um, you know, I love it when neuroscience has parallel theories that go along with what I actually experienced in my subjective self. But this was one of the theories that was confirmed. And so in that, I just wanted to say that that opportunity to take the information that's going on around us, raw information, and with our conscious mind analyze and assess that raw information so that we can tell the subconscious what the hell is going on, that for me is mind over mind or mind over matter. It's that little glimpse of time when we can mitigate and reassess, you know, what is reality and what are we feeling. The subconscious is going to keep rebooting those old programs because that's all it can do. So I just think that this is what a healthy individual is doing. It's what the healthy psychology does when it functions. The question is, if you're unhealthy, if you get into the reign of depression and deep, deep, deep depression, deep anxiety, Why is that not working? And the only thing that I can think is it's actually the conscious mind that for some reason can't tell the subconscious mind what's going on. In other words, you wake up in the morning and your subconscious says, don't get out of bed. Life sucks. It's terrible. And everybody hates you and don't go to work because you're going to embarrass yourself. That's a subconscious programming, but your conscious mind also should have the capacity to say, okay, but my boss, did give me a compliment and tell me that I'm really invaluable, and it's mitigated, you know, have that conversation. So I think that people who suffer really— and Gordon, this is addressed to you— because people who suffer really deep, deep depression, I think that they are allowing the subconscious to dominate decision-making, dominate the feeling, the state of mind. Which everybody allows their subconscious to do a certain amount, but not all of it.
