I’m standing in a field full of greyhounds. Thousands of them. Silent. Still. And for some reason, this is my job. I have to lift them, one by one, and pile them on top of each other. It doesn’t make sense. They’re not moving. They’re not in danger. And yet, I keep going.
When I wake up, I think, what on earth was that about? At the time, I had been sitting with a dilemma, turning something over. And then, almost immediately, something lands. Why don’t I just let them lie? Why don’t I just let the situation be?
And then there are moments when you are awake.
I walked into a room and saw two people I care about, two friends, both of whom I love, laughing together. They’d never met before. And there they were, already connected, already sharing something. And I felt it. A flash. A pang of jealousy. A sense of being outside.
It passed quickly. I joined them. No one would have known. But I noticed it. And I thought, where did that come from? Because it didn’t feel like a chosen response, and yet moments like this don’t come from nowhere.
They come from somewhere.
What is happening in moments like this is not random. Something in us is recognising a pattern. Not consciously, but emotionally. A look, a tone, a configuration of people, something that echoes an earlier experience. The unconscious does not wait for us to think. It scans, matches, and reacts. It says, this feels familiar, and before we have time to question it, the feeling is already there.
We talk about “the unconscious” as if it’s something abstract or distant. But what we are really pointing to is something much simpler. A system of responses, shaped over time, that begins before we are aware of it.
The unconscious is a kind of inner memory bank, made up of early experiences, emotional learning, things we couldn’t process at the time, desires we didn’t feel allowed to have, and fears we had to push down just to cope. It’s layered. It’s alive. And most of it sits outside our awareness. Not because it’s deliberately hidden, but because, at some point, it had to be.
As children, we don’t analyse, we adapt. If something is too painful, too confusing, too overwhelming, we don’t sit with it and make sense of it. We absorb it. We organise ourselves around it. Parts of us, our feelings, needs, even impulses, get pushed out of awareness so we can carry on. That’s what repression really is. Not dramatic. Not conscious. Just survival.
And this is why Freud said the task of therapy is to make the unconscious conscious. Because it shows up in our automatic responses and our decisions. It does not stay dormant. It is active, shaping how we feel, how we perceive, and how we interpret what is happening around us.
So that moment in the room? Part of me was an adult, fully able to understand what was happening. And part of me wasn’t. Something in me was recognising something familiar. You’re not in this. You’re on the outside. It didn’t reason. It didn’t pause. It felt, quickly and completely.
So over time, the unconscious becomes a conglomerate of memory, emotion, belief and instinct. Not just thoughts, but patterns of being.
Freud described this through the image of a horse and rider. The horse, the unconscious, is powerful, instinctive, shaped by everything it has learned. The rider, the conscious mind, tries to guide. But it is not fully in charge. And importantly, the horse isn’t wrong. It is simply carrying what has not yet been fully understood.
And this is where we have to be careful. Because there is a growing idea that we can fully direct this system, that if we “get our unconscious right,” we can shape everything, our outcomes, our lives, even what happens to us. It’s appealing, because it gives us a sense of control.
But it can slip into something else. Into the idea that if something difficult or harmful happens, there must have been something in the person that created it. And that’s not just inaccurate. It’s harmful.
We do this, often unconsciously, because it soothes us. If everything is controllable, then we are safe. If everything has a cause within the person, then nothing is random, nothing is unjust. But life doesn’t work like that. And deep down, we know it.
So, what are we in control of? Very little at the beginning. We don’t choose the first reaction. We don’t choose the first thought. We don’t choose the pattern that formed years before we understood it.
But there is a moment, just after. A small space. And that’s where something like the RAIN technique becomes powerful. Not as a technique to fix ourselves, but as a way to meet what is already there. Recognise. Allow. Investigate. Nurture.
The unconscious is full of things we didn’t choose. Full of reactions we don’t always like. But within it, there is history. And understanding. That moment in the room wasn’t really about those two people. It was about something already living in me. Something older. Something learned. And when I could see that, it softened.
So perhaps the unconscious isn’t something to control. It is a living record of what we have experienced, how we adapted to survive it, and the parts of us that are still responding, even now.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are” – Anaïs Nin
Also read Farah Naz’s last month’s article: Women in spring
