The brain is an iceberg.
I recently learned some confronting and empowering news. It’s a scary puzzle piece I’ve been missing, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to change my life.
I haven’t been able to stop digging into it, sharing with friends how it’s become my new hyper-fixation to research and wrap my little head around. Every day it’s illuminating past moments and helping make much more awful sense of them—like this one:
In the summer of 2021, I took a trip to New Orleans to meet up with a friend I’d known for nearly a decade. In addition to facing my fear of alligators via a swamp tour where the term “death roll” reverberated through my head the entire time and soldiering through the worst hangover of my life, I cautiously shared with her how I’d been seeing someone.
I prepared myself for the loving onslaught of questions.
And they came.
What I didn’t anticipate was that she would be utterly confused by my answers.
HER
So are you guys talking every day?
ME
No, thank God. I put a cap on that right away.
HER
What do you talk about?
ME
You know—all kinds of stuff.
HER
Have you been sharing personal things, family stuff, etc.?
ME
Kind of. I don’t know.
HER
How long have you been dating?
ME
Three months.
She was flabbergasted by how nonchalant I was in my responses and how seemingly surface-level this relationship sounded. After confirming I was, contrary to how it seemed, into this guy, she looked me right in the face, “This isn’t normal. This is weird.”
I immediately regretted bringing it up. I pushed back making the case for how I was pretty sure we were both fine.
I lied to/assured her, “Neither of us want to put pressure on things.”
In actuality, this guy had communicated early on that he was looking to make this into something serious and long-term. But I skirted that small detail.
He was fine. I was fine. This was normal.
My friend didn’t buy it.
She dropped the hammer, “You’re resisting opening up and you know it. This is a waste of time if you’re not willing to work towards that. I think you need to be more vulnerable.”
Like nails on a chalkboard, her advice screeched into my psyche. That’s exactly what I didn’t want to hear and exactly what I needed to. I rolled my eyes back and scoffed trying to save face, meanwhile keeping to myself how the idea of being vulnerable made me want to crawl out of my skin. Plus, if I was as honest with myself back then as I’ve learned to be now, I felt incapable of knowing how to be truly vulnerable even if I wanted to.
Nevertheless, my friend’s words of challenge were still ringing in my ears when I boarded my flight home. By the time we hit 30,000 feet, however, I had found a way to solidify how I disagreed with her. Something yanked me away from the idea of letting my walls down and I found a lot of logical reasons why I shouldn’t.
But fast-forward two years and I can confidently say she was right.
I see today how I was keeping this guy at arm’s length emotionally, and I was doing so on autopilot. But at the time, I didn’t have an understanding of why.
Now I can tell you why in exhaustive detail.
What I’m learning that’s bringing moments like these into new light is that our subconscious directs 95-97% of our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The great majority of what we do is determined by an underwater web of personal narrative and perceived reality that we are painfully unaware of. Unless we’re actively doing the work to bring these automatic responses to the surface, trace their roots, and reprogram them, our subconscious will determine most of our lives for us—for better or worse.
In the words of the big kahuna himself, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Carl Jung
So my most relied upon asset—my noggin—I’m coming to find actually runs, at most, 5% of the show.
As someone who was taught to not trust their emotions, this is terrifying.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
I fell into this rabbit hole when my YouTube algorithm spat a video on the concept of Attachment Theory across my screen one day. I had a loose understanding of the idea and had heard a friend mention it before, but never looked into it for myself.
Now I can’t stop.
Here’s the gist:
Attachment Theory, originally developed by psychologist John Bowlby in the late 1960s, explores the ongoing consequences of the bonds we form with our primary caregivers roughly within the first 18 months of life. According to Bowlby, we all, without exception, develop a secure or insecure style of attachment as a biological means to survive. Our attachment style emerges in response to how attuned our caregivers were to our physical and emotional needs growing up.
Put simply, if a baby makes a fuss and is consistently responded to by being comforted, changed, actively played with, and fed, he’ll subconsciously learn that his primary caregiver is attentive to his bids for care and connection. He can rest knowing he’ll be properly responded to when in distress. He develops a secure attachment.
In the case there is a lack of attunement or simply an inconsistency, this baby would instead be subconsciously programmed to expect that his environment may not meet these needs on a regular basis. This can trigger his survival mode to desperately fill the gaps or cause him to repress his needs to avoid the pain of neglect. The baby will develop an insecure attachment.
What Bowlby goes on to suggest is “later relationships are likely to be a continuation of early attachment styles (secure and insecure) [leading] the infant to expect the same” of others later in life.
This analogy colored in some of the lines for me: when two adults, each with their own attachment style, come together, they both have their separate embedded expectations of how things will go, what works, and how the other person should be—all stored at a subconscious level. It’s as if you’re sitting down to play a board game together and one person has the rules for Scrabble and the other has the rules for Monopoly. As you play the game, neither parties know the other person has different, unspoken rules—all they see is the other person violating theirs. Undoubtedly, this creates a lot of unnecessary friction, miscommunication, and disappointment.
Bowlby’s studies rolled over into the work of Mary Ainsworth whose "Strange Situation Assessment” offered groundbreaking results differentiating attachment styles and sparking decades of further research.
Today, four main attachment styles exist in the conversation:
Fearful Avoidant
Anxious Preoccupied
Securely Attached
Dismissive Avoidant
We all exist somewhere on these spectrums of attachment. Take this 5-minute quiz if you want to get your ass lovingly handed to you as I did.
In essence, I’ve learned that my neural chemistry was programmed to interpret love earlier than I can consciously remember. And today, in all my interpersonal relationships and in my relationship with myself, my subconscious is consistently working to reinforce that original programming—often shooting me in the foot and leaving me to wonder why I’m bleeding.
But it makes sense. My brain developed strategies as a kid to keep me physically and emotionally safe and so far, according to the fact I’m still alive, those strategies have worked.
The trouble is this: I've lived enough life up to this point to recognize how these patterns are no longer helpful in becoming the person I want to be—both the person I want to be for others and for myself. In fact, they could be antithetical to it.
But there’s hope.
The beauty lies in neuroplasticity. In addition to being fun to say (go ahead, try it), neuroplasticity is our universal and lifelong ability to rewire our brains. Reprogramming my subconscious responses requires I begin shoveling new neural grooves in the landscape of my mind often enough and consistently enough that the old, unhelpful pathways atrophy over time.
I’ve got my shovel. I’m hard at work. I’m uncomfortable.
And I know that’s an indicator of some growth.
Why does any of this matter?
Because whether I like it or not, I’m going to be with me for the rest of my life. Every day I wake up I’ll be doing it with this funny little brain that’s trying its best, and it’s worth the work to know what I’m dealing with and lend it a hand. If I can demystify the mystery of me, I honestly believe my life would be a lot easier to navigate, and I’d have a lot more fun living it.
And while the self-help industry is oversaturated with motivational talks, books, personality tests, mantras, and life hacks, I’ve been hitting this wall for a long time where I’ll implement these tools and they either backfire or don’t stick, and before I know it I’m back at square one.
I think that’s what makes this approach so revolutionary to me. It answers the question of why I keep finding myself back at the same places without knowing how I got there—that conscious 5% chunk can’t possibly carry the load of the subconscious 95 for long.
I’m diving into the waters of my subconscious to fish out these ingrained beliefs and develop better ways. This work is already requiring a god-awful amount of effort, but I’ll be damned if I let my one brief life be directed by outdated, crappy programming—not when richer life is available to live.