Our Mind as A Blessing and Cursing

How can we still survive countless traumatic events, from ecological catastrophes to political unrest to familial calamities to personal hardship, while some do die as a result? We must be joyful because we were provided a natural-like mechanism that deals with all those stresses on our behalf. Otherwise, we would have to face them all day, and indeed, we would go crazy.

We all have two minds: the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. Please do not get confused: our brain refers to a physiological realm, while our mind is the thinking realm.

The conscious mind connects us with the exterior reality using the five senses and the short-term memory. In contrast, our unconscious mind takes control of the interior reality and the long-term memory. The unconscious mind handles all the countless traumatic events we talk earlier due to the mechanism of forgetfulness or repression. Now we understand why we do not go crazy after being exposed to a traumatic event: the unconscious did, at best, an excellent job as a shock absorber. That is a blessing, as we appeared to be resilient.

Do not rejoice too soon! 

The bad news is that our mind is divided. The unconscious mind purposely does not maintain a proper communication channel with the conscious mind yet deliberately operates in complete secrecy. The unconscious mind has its reason, which the conscious mind does not know. As a result, the traumatized lose information and cannot accurately explain what happened or even find words to describe the unspeakable. Mental health professionals are at pains to offer the proper talking cure to aid them.

At worst, when it comes to pain management, the unconscious mind is a very bad fixer. We read that Humanity became a perpetrator of the trauma she experienced at the age of 14. There is no such thing as a survivor who can claim to be a whole human being. Survivors do not ultimately survive, although craziness is not written on their faces.