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Are You Un-conscious? Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Carl Gustav Jung

Writer's picture: Rjurik DavidsonRjurik Davidson


Perhaps the most important psychological idea is that of the unconscious. This idea has been around since the late nineteenth century, when it was sometimes referred to as autonomism, or the “automatic” actions of a person. It’s also the idea that many therapies don’t really understand or work with. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, for example, treats most things as a conscious process. At its worst, if suggests that if you can just think about things differently, then you can outthink your problems.

Anyone who has tried to do this knows how it never works.

Think about your life. Where do you simply find yourself repeating the same things every day. Even when you’ve said you don’t want to. Do you:


Always sleep in past your alarm?

Always find yourself reaching for that cigarette?

Always have more drinks than you intend?

Always end up buying ice-cream when you’ve sworn you wouldn’t?

Always find an excuse not to exercise?

Always choosing the same, wrong, type of partner?

Always finding ways to undermine yourself?

Always returning to the same bad habits?


True, you might be able to force yourself to change for a day, a few days, a week. But sooner or later – as smokers will attest – you look down to find yourself doing that very thing you said you wouldn’t. Most people then use this to confirm an idea about themselves: “I’m just weak." “That’s just who I am.”

The secret is this: your unconscious mind is more powerful than your conscious one. This is also good news, because it’s the part of you that calculates at incredible speeds, that interrupts your conscious mind when you’re in danger, that we call “instinct” and “gut feel.”

This issue is this: how can you direct your unconscious mind to do things that are good for you? So, you find yourself behaving in ways you want, not ways you don’t want? How do you give it the right directions?

In previous newsletters I’ve mentioned several ways to reprogram your unconscious mind. In upcoming newsletters I’ll examine the unconscious more closely, different ways therapy can help you direct it, so that you find yourself living the way you want to be, easily and without struggle.


If you’d like to reprogram your unconscious mind with a compassionate therapist, coach and trainer, email me at rjurik@me.com or find me on my website at primetherapy.net

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© 2022 by Rjurik Davidson, Ph.D. Opening Date May 2023.

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