The Unconscious/Conscious Minds & Centering Your Self

-Written by Michelle Fuller

“The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral

sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgement go, is completely neutral. It only

becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree

that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate

contents that were previously unconscious, its danger diminishes. The dissociation of

personality, the anxious division of the day-time and the night-time sides of the psyche,

cease with progressive assimilation.”

~C.G. Jung, Collected Works 16, § 329

“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

~C.G. Jung

Your unconscious state of mind=feminine energy. It's what you create (your womb). Your entire world is developed by it because your internal world creates your external world.

Your conscious mind=masculine energy. This is the way you go about asserting yourself in your reality; how you navigate the reality that you’ve created from your unconscious mind.

When Jung writes about “dissociation of personality” (referenced in the above quote), he is referring to the conscious identifications of a person as separate from the unconscious. An example might be:  

Conscious identification: “I am a good person.”

Unconscious need: “I need others to reflect back to me that I am a good person, or it is not true.”

When someone with the above need sets a personal boundary or has a preference or priority that conflicts with someone else’s preference or agenda, their conscious identification and unconscious need will be in conflict. Tension results, which can feel like shame, confusion, and rumination—AND can be the catalyst for the expansion and integration of consciousness.

Using the same example, here are examples of questions to ask ourselves:

“Why do I need to feel like I am a good person?”

“How was the definition of a good person (or good woman/man) defined in my family of origin? What is MY definition?”

“What will I create instead with my actions when I merge my unconscious need with my conscious creations? How will I feel?”

"What do I really WANT to experience, now that I know what I thought I wanted in the past may have been informed by an unconscious need? If I no longer have that need, what does my life look like? What actions will I choose now that I am free?"

The Collective Mind(s)

There are also the conscious collective and the unconscious collective minds.

Individuating* from both is part of making the individual unconscious conscious. This is because many unconscious core beliefs were created by societal/cultural collectives and then made conscious/put into action inside agreed upon belief systems- with NO awareness for the hidden, unconscious mechanisms driving it all. These belief systems create the constructs with which we collectively participate and deem “reality.”

*Individuation is all about knowing who we are as creative main characters. Integrating the collective mind means we observe the collective mind with awareness and then figure out our unique nature with the understanding that individuation and our differences are important.

Healing codependent unconscious needs leads to individuation and personal power.

For clarity, “codependency” does not refer to someone being dependent on someone else for material needs. It refers to a need for the world to reflect (like a mirror) that one is “good,” which gives all our power away. This next part is about increasing personal power and self-trust.

Centering Your Self:

Integrating Codependent, Unconscious Needs Created by Family Systems & Culture

-What does it mean to Center others: You will find yourself focusing on others, what they are doing or not doing, what they are saying or not saying, what you think they think about you, what you perceive they think about themselves, how you can either accommodate them OR are worried about them, or angry at them, because they are not being/doing what you think they should.-What does it mean to Center yourSelf: You ask yourself in every beneficial scenario, what is MY purpose? And respond from YOUR purpose. What are MY knowings and wisdom? And trust yourself. You separate yourself from the agendas of others.

You focus YOUR energy on YOUR self-development and expansion. Service to others emerges organically from that unmeshed space. This eliminates giving your emotional and cognitive power over to anyone else and eliminates allowing your energy to fuel the life of another grown person. When you center yourself and you see something external which you don’t prefer, you can see what it shows you and then do and be the thing you want to see. The goal is to establish a more consistent, GENERAL feeling of neutral centeredness no matter what is happening in your experience, while also embodying more of your power and soul essence. This takes patience with Self, practice in action, and is linked to masculine/feminine energy integration.

*Remember that those who experience CPTSD will often label themselves as “bad” when experiencing some emotions, because at some point they internalized they were bad for feeling them. So you will reject the feeling and label it as evidence that there is something wrong with you. This is the springboard for self-abandonment and the centering of others (presuming that another knows better than you, is more ‘together’ than you, etc).

Go back to your Core Belief steps when this occurs. There's a free download for you entitled "6 Steps to Identify and Shift the Core Beliefs That Are Holding You Back." You can find it here on FullerConsciousness, under the Free Psychoeducational Downloads tab.

And love yourself deeply. Your feelings of "badness" were conditioned.  Centering yourself means alchemizing shame and converting your stories into power and love.

Centering yourself means respect and trust for your personal journey. It means knowing you ARE divine love.