Messages from the unconscious

Is your unconscious mind sending you a message to change course?

Many of us view depression as something destructive and catastrophic. A mood disorder to be avoided, medicated away or otherwise banished.

Another perspective holds that depression serves a purpose. It is a message from the dark recesses of the mind and therefore something to pay attention to, not rid ourselves of. A signal or even an alarm generated by ourselves.

The psychologist Carl Jung viewed depression as feedback, something to act upon. It could be useful.

He stood in contrast to the Freudians who considered depression as a trigger to look backwards at the source of trauma or pain, helping produce insights to comprehend a present mental state.

Jung recognized this retrospective analysis had its place but viewed depression as a prompt from our minds directing action into the future. He believed if we had the courage to face what the depression is telling us we could benefit by changing direction.

Listening to the unconscious mind

We are taught that pain and discomfort are bad, so it can be difficult to pay attention to depression and use it as a channel for information. But the Jungian model suggests it is feedback emanating from the unconscious parts of the mind.

The unconscious is the non-conscious part of our psyche, something we understand is there but cannot access directly. It organizes and recombines information. It is often the source of creative ideas which we experience as inspiration or flashes of intuition.

The unconscious mind seems to re-sort information. Memories, sensations and ideas are reordered and reset beyond conscious awareness, almost as if the unconscious is cleaning up psychological mess.

Jungian psychologists believe the unconscious contains all the unintegrated parts of ourselves. Fears, urges and traits we wish to disown but cannot. The mature mind integrates these to become whole, to be at peace with itself. The immature mind rejects them, so they manifest in confusing behaviours and personality traits we disown because they make their way to the surface regardless.

Whenever you are upset by someone else’s actions it is almost always some unintegrated part of yourself you are reacting to.

These sorts of triggers are a kind of message although usually experienced as an unpleasant feeling we want to avoid. They may even manifest as anger or annoyance at others because we tend to project our anxieties onto others as a coping mechanism. For example, we get angry at overconfident people because we ourselves lack confidence.

But we must look beyond the momentary discomfort for insight. The skill is to not react to the superficial feelings of annoyance or anger but to detach and observe, then attempt to make use of the information emanating from the unconscious mind. What is this telling us about ourselves?

As Jung reminds us, barely conscious urges and feelings can drive our behaviour. We think of them as fate, but most are just unresolved issues, things we have not yet faced down and conquered; fears, anxieties, past horrors as well as present ones. Our impulses, our addictions, the behaviours we would rather were absent, and we have yet to confront. Everything is swilling about in our minds, even if beyond conscious awareness. All of it combined makes us who we are.

Our minds are creative

Ideas, notions and concepts can emerge from the unconscious and affect mood. These impressions feel like they come from nowhere, but this is not the case. They emanate from deep within our own minds.

If we understand this, and treat the resulting sensations as useful information rather than feelings to avoid, we can make use of how our brains and minds actually work. As they churn away in the background our mental processes can be put to work for us, to improve our lives.

We can harness the creative capacity most of us possess. We can learn to pay attention to what our unconscious mind is trying to communicate. And one of the most common is the mood shifts we associate with depression or depressive episodes. Rather than being something to avoid they are something to examine.

It can be useful to think of them as a signal sent by our unconscious mind. We must train ourselves to pay attention to the underlying message not the surface level symptoms like angst or anxiety or fear.

The horror of facing up to this, pushing through the immediate pain to get to the insight buried within it, is the primary goal. If there is a message embedded, we must work hard to find it. We must swim through the distasteful feelings of anxiety and fear to access it.

One way to accomplish this is to change how we think about psychological pain.

Embrace the discomfort

The Western world has developed a worrying habit of avoiding pain and discomfort. This is not a new observation. Religions and philosophies have been warning about the dangers of comfort for millennia.

It is in discomfort where growth occurs. Facing up to psychological discomfort is part of that growth process.

For example, we can become depressed by our bodies or health, the way time seems to slip away from us, or the circumstances we find ourselves in. But we must embrace these insights to help us develop.

If we can use these depressions as a guide they may tell us something important. Often the message is our unconscious mind rejecting the excuses we use to avoid facing up to reality.

Maybe your job depresses you, but at some level you appreciate you weren’t meant to sit in an office for forty years updating spreadsheets. The dissatisfaction with your life choices, manifesting as a depression, is therefore meaningful.

You weren’t supposed to have a thick layer of fat covering your body for years on end. Like all animals you are designed to move. Being depressed about the state of your body is a sensible reaction to the lifestyle choices you are making if they have led to you being overweight and unhealthy.

By listening to these cues many conclude they were designed for a quite different environment than the one they became trapped in; fast food, immersive entertainment and a slow death doing work that saps any sense of joy from life. The resulting depression makes sense. It is a message to attend to, not something to fear.

These depressions can be understood as your deep-self looking back at all you have wrought and saying no, change direction now while you can. This isn’t working. You can do better.

The pain isn’t just pain, it is discomfort as a precursor to change. This is what Jung understood depression could be, providing we have the courage to pay attention and to act on what our minds are communicating to us.

It is a crude signal using distress to capture attention and focus the mind on change. But it involves facing our poor choices and understanding them as choices and not fate or circumstances we cannot control.

We are choosing the job we hate. We don’t need to binge watch television or eat a poor diet. We know we are avoiding the physical activity that leads us to health and strength.

Depression as a consequence of these decisions is then warranted. We are in a battle with our own bodies and minds. But we have hidden advantages, the deep power of our unconscious mind, always working away, always on our side. Its message may be uncomfortable and difficult to understand, but it is there if we pay attention.

And some of the message is wrapped up inside a forbidding sense of doom and dread. For those with the courage to delve into that, to unpack the depression and really face up to it, the prize can be a new life and perhaps even a life we once only dreamt of.

Clarity is the ultimate prize

The sense of existential dread that often characterizes depressive episodes is a microcosm of many people’s lives, perhaps even the Western world itself.

The superficial pain wraps a deeper source of satisfaction, a map that can guide us to a better life more suited to our talents and preoccupations. But it takes effort to get it.

The depression is your unconscious mind using the tools at its disposal. Most turn away because of the immediate discomfort. Their journey ends there, or perhaps triggers a quest to focus only on the symptoms and forever remains ignorant of what might lie underneath or why our own bodies and minds would generate unpleasant sensations in the first place.

Some, however, discover there is much more beneath the surface. A rich well of potential that encourages the integration of all parts of our psyche, including those elements long repressed.

Many suppress their true desires and discover indirectly these don’t disappear but bubble up from the unconscious where they remain. Neglected career ambitions, creative goals we have talked ourselves out of, or life paths we know we must take but have avoided.

All this and more remains forever in the back of our minds, and our minds conspire to bring it to our attention. We cannot escape our real selves.

We must train ourselves to face this, to accept the message about the wrongness of our direction, then begin to take the necessary steps to fix it. The alternative is to alleviate the pain, to medicate the symptoms while the underlying disease rages. To blot it all out as the majority do.

Most who get lost in Netflix and pizza binges reach a point of disgust with themselves, usually when they are fifty pounds in and wondering how they got there. Embracing this blunt reality is the opening to something deeper; avoiding it keeps you forever trapped.

To dampen the messages from our own minds with avoidance or distraction or drugs is like gagging a friend trying to help you at a difficult time. It makes no sense. But it makes even less sense if we understand low moods and depressions as a sign from our unconscious. Ignoring a potentially transformative opportunity is insane.

We must train ourselves to absorb the discomfort and the anxiety and to see through it into the rich source of information our mind is presenting to us. Only then can we reassess and recalibrate, both necessary ingredients to changing course. It is this process that converts the existential horror of depression and low mood into the tools needed to turn our lives around. It is open to anyone with the courage to face their demons and embrace all aspects of their personality, warts and all.