Your subconscious drives are reorganizing your mind to try new strategies til one works, and since they aren't conscious, they aren't constrained by: • what you think is okay • your own… belief… that you're not allowed to fuck around and find out?!? 🤯
Why subconscious drives outmaneuver conscious intentions
10 tweets · August 2021 · 184 likes · 8 retweets · read on Twitter
Holy shit that actually explains why your subconscious seems (/is?) smarter than you! This came from @jondubin pointing at the question of why a given part wins an internal conflict. Not sure I'd seriously thought about it like that before.
From a PCT lens, when there's a direct internal conflict, nobody wins, it's just a tug of war that either stabilizes at some compromise (with both sides still tugging full-force!) or oscillates if perturbed from that compromise.
But what if the internal conflict is indirect? Brain is a learning system and in general tries to reorganize itself in order to achieve the various aims it's pursuing at various levels. And I've long been aware eg school traumatizes ppl away from that natural learning process…
…but I'm realizing that there might be a sense in which the learning process itself goes underground a bit, and renders shadow parts more capable of outwitting you than you are at outwitting them! Hence the experience of these persistent weird desires that can't be tamed.
The brain's learning/reorganization system is kind of endlessly creative as long as it's able to run. But when we're doing things consciously we often think we know how they should work and we don't let the reorganization happen naturally. Or if the first try fails, we give up.
By contrast, if our unconscious drives are, by their nature, not under conscious control and thus also can't be criticized into giving up (to avoid fear of failure)… …they'll just keep trying stuff, and sooner or later come up with a new way to thwart most counteractive moves!
The takeaway here is that just because your shadow parts manage to win a bunch of your internal conflicts, doesn't mean that those desires are more true for you. Conflict is a whole phenomenon itself!
No, I spoke too soon. The *real* takeaway here is that you can't beat your shadow in a fight.
And thus, integration is the only way to sustainably get what you want. Thinking through this thread helped me grok a whole nother level of what's going on with internal conflict—a topic I've been exploring for 4+ years.