Why working with the subconscious is the key to lasting change

Have you ever read a book, listened to a podcast, attended a seminar and had so many insights and ah-ha moments that it feels as though your life could never be the same again? 

But then after a week, maybe two if you're lucky - you forget entirely what it was you learned and your life feels and looks as it did before any of those big insights?

Have you ever had such startling clarity on why a certain behaviour or pattern exists in your life — and yet — it still exists?

I can’t tell you how many of my clients come to me with similar sentiments. 

The are mostly highly sensitive, wholehearted women with a great deal of self-awareness. They have often done a lot of ‘work’ on themselves and whilst they have had benefits from this — they find that they haven't managed to shift the core pattern that is limiting their life and the full expression of who they are. 

Why The Conscious Mind Isn’t Enough To Get Us Unstuck

It can feel like a very frustrating place to be; to clearly see a pattern playing out in our life, to know where it came from, and yet to still be stuck in the repeated expression of cycles of self-limitation. If we don’t understand about the nature of sustained change and the subconscious, then it can make us feel as if we have completely lost the plot. 

If this is you - you are right on time. You are also right where you need to be to begin breaking patterns that stifle all you are meant to be; right here, right now.

In our adult life, so much of our learning is predicated on the conscious mind. We read a book, attend a seminar, analyse things, problem solve, ‘think things through’. So naturally, this is the focus of our energy when we want to change things about ourselves and our life; we come at our problems and challenges in what I call a conscious-confronting manner. The intention is often good - to help us understand ourselves better and to break these patterns we feel exhausted and frustrated with - but the consequence is often one of resistance, force, over-analysis and confusion. This is because we are conditioned to come at our problems from within the same stress-based consciousness that created them. It is like a golden nugget dangled in front of our face but when we go to touch it, it moves further away. 

In a lived experience, what this looks like is the conscious gaining of more and more ‘knowledge’ of the self, without the accompanying transformation in the self. In an almost ironic twist of fate, the gaining of more conscious knowledge in the absence of the resonant subconscious change is a key factor in our experience of inner frustration and inadequacy. Because, as as self-awareness increases and we see our patterns more clearly, there is the greater expectation of change. When this expectation doesn't marry with the accumulation of knowledge or insight, it actually augments the pain and frustration of our perceived inability to actually…change. It sounds like ‘I can see exactly what I’m doing, so why do I keep doing it? There must be something wrong with me!?’

And yet, because us humans are stubborn and tenacious beings, instead of seeing that this cycle of conscious learning doesn't equal our level of inner transformation, what we do instead is push harder and harder in the same direction. 

It turns life into a struggle. It’s exhausting. And it depletes our inner battery. 

The truth is, there is no subconscious change without conscious change. We do need to use our conscious mind in order to embed subconscious change, and the gaining of conscious self-awareness is an important part of deep change — it’s just that it’s not sufficient in and of itself. 

The difference between conscious and subconscious mind

The conscious mind holds all of the information that we can be aware of in the moment, including thoughts, feelings, aspirations, desires. It is what allows us to problem solve, to hold different ideas in our awareness, to think about what we think about. It is a thought-based, rational and creative mind and it is where our explicit memory is stored - those things from our past that we can consciously recall and remember. 

Our subconscious mind is a habit mind. It doesn't have the ability to think for itself but is instead a storage bank of everything we have previously learned about ourselves and life. The information that is stored in the subconscious is outside our window of moment-to-moment awareness and includes feelings, drives, needs, attachments and beliefs that we do not ordinarily have access to. It is the seat of our implicit memory - which we can think of as the emotional memory of the body.

All of our intentions, goals, business strategies, desires for our life and future — these are all components of the conscious mind. But our drives, emotions, behaviours, capacity and decisions are all dictated and driven by the subconscious mind. We like to think of ourselves as rational, sensible beings. Whilst we do have an aspect of our consciousness that is true to these things, that is not the part of our consciousness that determines who we are, what we do, and the results that we get in our life and our business. 

This is because, as shown by the groundbreaking research of neuroscientist Antonio Damascio, we do not act according to what we want (conscious), we act according to how we feel (subconscious). How we feel is one of the biggest aspects and expressions of our subconscious programme. It also doesn’t matter how much we consciously align ourselves with our desires; if the emotions that we live by are stress-based and self-limiting, then whatever we consciously know to be true about ourselves and our ability is, in essence, insignificant.

Conscious-Subconscious Opposition

This is when the drives and desires of the conscious ‘thinking’ mind are in opposition to the programmes of the subconscious mind.

Let’s look at an example.

Conscious desire: To write a novel. 
Conscious knowing: I am a brilliant writer. I have a gift with words. I have a wonderful and unique story that has never been told before. I can be a success.
Subconscious program: emotions of fear, anxiety, unworthiness. Beliefs of inadequacy. High stress hormone baseline. 

So we can see that the conscious is in opposition to the subconscious. The result is that whilst we continue to hold fast to our conscious desires and opinions, what plays out in every aspect of our life is the contents of the subconscious. This puts us in a state of perpetual inner-conflict (I want one thing, but I do another), which over time is a huge source of low resilience and depletion due to the effect it has on the nervous system. It is also has the effect of continually eroding our self-worth and reinforces the subconscious programme of inadequacy, unworthiness and stress. 

This is because subconscious programmes are designed to self-perpetuate themselves; they are a closed feedback loop. Emotions drive decisions drive behaviours drive beliefs drive emotions drive behaviours etc. In understanding this it’s important to realise that the part of the brain that holds our subconscious programmes is all about our survival. It’s job is to ensure that we respond to events and circumstances in our life in pre-programmed ways that fit a known pattern. It doesn’t matter whether we consciously like this pattern or not, because the subconscious has no understanding of an intrinsic ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Instead, it assesses everything on the basis of ‘safe/unsafe’. If the subconscious makes an assessment of something as being ‘unsafe’, then it will cause us to move away from it (psychologically, physiologically, physically) in a survival drive of moving back to ‘safety’. When we understand that this part of the brain makes no distinction between what is safe vs what is familiar, we can begin to see where things get stuck in sabotaging and limiting patterns.

Journey to Reprogramming The Subconscious 

Let me give you an example from a woman I worked with recently. I’ll call her Anna. 

Anna had spent her whole life not wanting to be seen. She hated being the centre of attention and always tried to blend in wherever she went. She came to me because she was having trouble showing up in her business in the way that she wanted to. She had big goals and was very gifted, but she was unable to get this out into the world. ’It’s like every bone in my body is stopping me from putting myself out there’ she said. 

Anna’s conscious drive was: ‘I want to be seen and heard in my business (so that I can let more people know how amazing I am and attract more clients)’ 

But her subconscious programme was:

belief - ’it’s not safe for me to be seen’. 
nervous system - stuck in depleting emotions of fear, anxiety, insecurity, unworthiness: stress patterning
physical body - stuck in holding patterns of constriction, shrinking and protection  

The reason it felt so hard was because it felt unsafe. And the reason it felt unsafe was because it was so unfamiliar. Her subconscious was doing everything in its power to keep her repeating known patterns to maintain the status quo of familiarity = safety. In our work together we retrained Anna’s nervous system to sustain more elevated feelings that were aligned with worth and visibility (pride, joy, excitement, passion, trust - and we used biofeedback to measure this), built Anna’s capacity to hold the discomfort of showing up (an important part - teaching body that discomfort doesn't = threat) and helped her release the energetic body blocks around feelings of low self worth and fear. 

This is also why it is essential to work with the subconscious if we want to experience deep and lasting change in our life. It’s not enough to just try to ‘think’ differently. Because if you could have done that, you would have done it already. It is my belief that deep and lasting change requires a bottom up (somatic, nervous system, heart-based, energetic) approach so that we can align what we want with what we do, and blossom into the highest expression of ourselves.

My understanding of the subconscious and the way I work with it goes far beyond a generic idea of rewriting a simple ‘belief’ or changing the ‘mindset’. My work is grounded in over 10 years of working clinically and my extensive mindbody training in integrative health, clinical psychoneuroimmunology, yoga, mindfulness, neurocardiology and neuroscience.

*I currently have a couple of spaces for 121 coaching opening. If my work resonates with you, then book your free, no obligation connection call today.