Letting Your Unconscious Work Itself Out

I hyper-extended my elbow the other day, and it’s still a bit tender. Usually I’m a fairly rugged guy. I’m not picking my teeth with oak trees, or anything like that, but I can suffer in silence with the best Irish men. I only mention my typical stoic response to pain because the severity of my injury, in relation to my behavior at the time it happened, is pretty much the punch-line of this story. A story that helped me remember the importance of letting your unconscious work itself out. So before we lay down the moral of the tale, as I created it, here’s the back-story:

The Phantom Space Slug Attacks

I’m sitting at my desk. It is a little past noon. I’m caught in a writing vortex of concentration and output. The keyboard is my punching bag, and I’m wailing on it with a furious rhythmic glee that would make every hack proud. At this moment in time, and for all cognitive purposes, the word around me doesn’t exists anymore. I’m all fingers, buttons, and right brain. Thirty nude women, and ice cream cones with donut feet could be dancing around my room, and I wouldn’t notice a thing. My only conscious thought is on the next word. I’m in flow, without a hint of pause.

I’m hammering home the point of how oblivious I was to any context other than my fingers, my words, and my keyboard, because there was no other input occurring, no sounds, no random thoughts, or smells, or sights, or actions. I’m sure most people have had this experience, being immersed in a vacuum of present activity. And so here I am riding the great creative wave when -“BANG”- out of nowhere I freak out. I start flapping like a sizzling sausage because I feel something crawling up the back of my thigh, closer to the ass than the knee.

“Mother Fucker,” I yelled as I leaped out of my chair, contorting my body in ways the human body shouldn’t. My grey swivel chair goes flying against the wall as I scramble to the middle of my room patting and wiping down my body like someone dumped a bucket of hot ash over me. After fifteen seconds or so of this, I’m not finding anything suspect, but apparently I wasn’t convinced because I rip off my shirt, and then my shorts. And there I am, standing naked in the middle of my room, searching for the brain eating space slug I’m positive was about to crawl up my asshole.

The whole ridiculous episode was finished in thirty seconds, and as my mind started to settle back into reality I noticed my elbow throbbing with dull pain. Somehow my irrational fit was so absurdly violent I tweaked my joint. I started to work it out a bit as I put my clothes back on. And, you know, then I had to laugh at myself because it was pretty damn funny. It made me think video-taping every moment of my life in order to capture one moment like this would be worth the hassle.

The Demon Spider

Aside from the fact that my brain punked me into a naked rain dance in the middle of my room, I laughed because it dawned on me what had sparked my melt down. It wasn’t so much the phantom threat of an alien attacking my ass. It was the lurking memory of what was underneath the blue plastic cup, turned upside down, that stood on the floor near the foot of my desk. For trapped within that prison was one of the bigger spiders I’ve ever seen outside of a glass cage. It was this spider, long dead, but still trapped in plastic at the foot of my desk, that had return to haunt me.

A day prior to my freak-out this monstrosity of a spider scared the shit out of me, and it got The Cup for its infraction. As it happened, I was sitting at the same desk, listening to a Red Sox game while mindlessly surfing the net. I was decidedly not in any flow, but I was in a drool inducing slumber. My brain had shut down, and I was going through the motions like Romero’s zombies walking to the mall. Out of my stupor, I noticed this creature crawling towards my foot.

Now, I don’t exactly enjoy the company of spiders, but they also don’t make me limp with fear and disgust. This beast was different. This beast scared the shit out of me. I mean the thing was fucking huge. It was obviously the escaped remains of some whacked out super secret military experiment. The thing was that big, and it looked pissed off to boot. So I did what I could, and what any Darwinian human would do. I survived by snatching a plastic cup off my desk, and slamming in over the creature from Hell, trapping the vile bastard underneath. Then I sat back down, and resumed my prior activities.

Even though I had secured the Beast I couldn’t really enjoy my lethargy because a dreadful uneasiness kept poking me in the ribs. I kept getting mind flashes of the damn thing’s girth. Then I started to convince myself it was big enough to throw off the burden of my puny plastic prison, leap onto my face, and start gnawing through my skull with its poisonous lubricants -”You wanna play dirty soft flesh being.”-

So, there was that, and, perhaps even more of a bother, I knew it was a simple matter for me to slide a piece of paper under the cup, and toss the Unholy thing outside. But I didn’t. I left the spider under the cup, and it died, because I never let it go. I may have bested the Beast, but not before it got the last laugh by needling its way into my unconscious thought.

Letting Go of the Demon Spider

I’m pretty sure, no, I’m positive, the reason I had my melt-down was because my unconscious mind never forgot my act of wanton callousness. I let the spider die. For some of you this might not be a big deal. Spider dead, what the fuck do I care? I’ll kill ‘em all with a smile. That works, but for me, one who is usually compassionate and caring, leaving a spider to slowly suffocate is a incongruity that demanded an accounting. However, an accounting I never gave it. I never stopped to give my action much thought, other than a brief pause when I first trapped the spider, so my unconscious mind forced it upon me, and caused me to strip naked in the middle of my room.

This is an example, obviously a very specific one, of how you need to let your unconscious thoughts work themselves out. If you don’t you run the risk of a melt-down, which doesn’t often take the form of a strip show in the middle of a room, which is to bad really, but will often manifest itself as anger, guilt, grief, shame, or fear.

For example, maybe you have a coworker who annoys the shit out of you. Maybe your boyfriend keeps picking his toes, and you want to cut off his fingers with a dull chain-saw. Maybe you want to bone your next door neighbor. Whatever the situation, it could be anything, if the corresponding feelings are left unattended, if they are consciously neglected, or forced to sit in a dank corner of your being, you can be sure they’ll eventually manifest themselves in some manner. Indeed, the manifestation will often be a bold bitch of a problem, and the old adage, what you resist, persists, may very well become your reality. Quite often a neglected unconscious will explode with a force disproportional to what it would have been if it was dealt with in the beginning.

In my example, if I had simply dealt with the fucking spider, and my guilt over trapping it to die in a plastic cup, I’m quite sure I would not have lost my mind and hyper extended my elbow. I neglected my feelings on the matter. I choose to pay attention to a Red Sox game, instead of addressing my personally dichotomous behavior. We’re all aware of this to a certain extent, the importance of living with awareness, of always being mindful of our inner life, not the hodgepodge world of outer experiences, but the power inside that gives us meaning and context.

There’s a lot of ways to let your unconscious work itself out. I’m no expert on the matter, but meditation is the tired and true method. You could also keep a journal, or exercise, or both, or, better yet, both, plus speak your feelings. Not with callous disregard for another. That’s narcissism masquerading as enlightenment, and it’s the worst kind of living, but speak your truth.

Speak with compassion, and wonder, and honesty, and integrity. Speak with humility because we can’t control how another may receive our truth. It is out of our hands, but we are in control of how we communicate with each other, how we choose to convey our feelings.

Choosing not to voice them at all can visit the curse of the demon spider upon you. So tell your coworker what’s bugging you. They’ll be disconnection, but work towards re-connection. Tell your boyfriend to stop picking his toes in front of you. It might be small of you to want this, but there it is. Go ahead and tell your neighbor you want to ride him like a Russian stallion. Where’s the harm in risk, except the one you create.

So the demon spider helped me remember an important aspect of holistic living, let your unconscious work itself out. Doesn’t always have to be spoken, but I’m of the opinion that it needs to be honored. Honor it in your own way, and in your own space, but if you don’t, you risk my fate, standing naked, throbbing with pain, and confused as to how you got there.

September 19 2007 12:16:46 PM EDT