Are humans really two personalities woven into one person?
It’s a funny thing- the personality of the unconscious mind correlates to a person’s behavior, and the person’s conscious mind correlates to a person’s behavior…but, the conscious mind and unconscious mind of that person don’t correlate to each other!
People typically look to make sense of themselves and the world around them. Because we all do and say things that truly surprise us, we must construct (fabricate) a narrative (story) that makes sense of those behavior that conflict with our intentions. The rationales and explanations help us put the incongruency behind us and move on to other things.
What makes understanding our selves and others even more difficult is the painfully distorted memories we all carry in the three pound universe. The brain simply isn’t a video tape recorder that records events. The brain is a vast array of storehouses and interpreting functions that constantly store, re-store, interpret and reinterpret our memories and beliefs. False memories are so common that almost every conversation of any length includes reference to at least one memory that never happened.
Recognizing these two defective elements of the human experience (our suspect memory and the dual nature of our personality(s), one can understand the arguments, the fights, arguments and butting of heads that take place in relationships and communication in general between people who have lived through the same events and remembered and interpreted them so differently.
There appear to be five specific parts of the unconscious mind that establish the rules for our behavior:
- How people construct themselves and others
- Expectations about themselves and the social world
- Goals and values
- Emotions
- Competencies and self regulatory plans
What’s interesting is that people do not have access to these elements of our unconscious experience, therefore we may be poor at “knowing who our unconscious mind is…and how it will cause us to behave in a given situation.”
Recent research does show that there is some predictability in how we will respond to other people. If for example a person is fond of their sister, they will tend to be fond of people who exhibit similar behaviors as their sister.
So, how do you actually come to know your “self”? Continue…
