Stuff I like Part 3 Repression

Years ago, a friend of mine said something interesting to me. Something I did not get at first. But with time, I have come to understand it. What she said was this: we are not our thoughts. In fact I would push it further and say: we are not our minds. I think the mind maintains an existence totally separate from the rest of consciousness. It is not who we are. It is a tool that conciousness uses to express itself, but the tool has, well, a mind of its own. You know when thoughts cross your brain and you wonder, where did that come from? It is as if they thought themselves and you had little to do with it. As if the mind is spitting out words, images and ideas, whether you like it or not. The mind can be our greatest enemy, but also our greatest friend, although its motives, I think, are purely selfish. It wants to survive, to be free to go on thinking and imagining, like a lab rat, in endless psychic circles. In order to ensure its survival, it has to ensure ours. So it finds ways to keep us going , to protect us from pain and trauma that it assumes we cannot endure. One of the ways the mind does this is through repression. We live through unbearable experiences and the mind just erases it. Pushes it so far down, we never even know it happened. The memory is literally wiped away, at least consciously. But there is more to us than just our minds, our bodies hold memories too, and that doorway to the soul, the unconscious, is a storage bin for everything we experience, and the unconscious is not a fan of repression. Stuff something down there and the unconscious will spit it back up. In a dream, in a disturbing feeling that rises from nowhere, in something as simple as our unexpected response to a word or photo or sound. It wants us to know. The mind of course panics, tries to bury the memory deeper, but the fact is, the harder the memory is pushed down, the harder it comes back up again.