Originally Posted by
Cpt_Stunning
I think I'm starting to understand anxiety a bit better now I've suffered with for so many years. It seems to be somehow how your subconscious mind somehow has a control over you & making you do things that you know consciously aren't right & you seem to consciously have no control over.
It seems like past memories in life are stored into your subconscious leaving you consciously live for the the here & now & plan for the future, but an overload of nasty memories into the subconscious can make it dominate the conscious mind into thinking that the future will just be as bad as the past, when you know consciously that maybe it will maybe it wont. At least that's what I sort of understand. So you're so scared of the future & what will happen.
Sounds right. Strong emotional reactions suspend what are called "critical factors" like conscious reasoning. The door to the subconscious is wedged open and impressions, artifacts etc. take root in the subconscious where they drive the intellect. Hypnosis does the same thing.
Advertisers know this and like to use emotional impressions along with their logos, jingles etc. Television channels like to flash their logos at moment of highest drama and interest.
People can easily be driven - by the subconscious - to do things they don't actually agree with. They can really beat themselves up and continually ruminate in self-condemnation when they aren't even really "being themselves'. That's why Jung and others talk about a "false self" thats more a creation of harmful external conditioning than something organically rooted in a person's core identity.
Doing things based on artificial drives and compulsions will create guilt and anxiety - which is something of a warning sign that the wrong path is being followed. Suppressing or evading anxiety can be achieved but since those are coping vs fixing they can lead to worse anxiety down the road.
The tricky thing is that doing what seem like "nice" things can be wrong. If a kid feels inferior (often hating parents is a cause - even if justified) and instead of resolving the reasons for that they try to compensate by being super-duper helpful and generous to people they can feel even more anxiety.
Very often we read about students and others who extinguish themselves, and surviving friends express shock that such a "well loved" and "generous person who helped everyone" could have been troubled. The further along the road of compensation they went, the less they felt like themselves and found more torture than relief from their efforts.
