Raw Spirituality: Discover Your Concealed Personality Part 3

Beyond your conscious awareness resides your collective subconscious with unique fears, biases, defenses, and abilities that comprises the real you.

One of the fastest ways to advance your self-knowledge, thus, spirituality, is to delve into your concealed mind; self-awareness is one of the keys to optimizing your talents and opportunities, making the most of your life.

“The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears its truth.”
Gaston Bachelard

“Hunches [are] just messages from the subconscious, which [is] thinking furiously all the time and processing information we have not consciously noted.”
Dean Koontz

You mostly can’t control subconscious impressions and how your subconscious operates, which greatly influences your thinking.

Nobody is perfect. Due to the ingrained nature of each individual’s distinct concealed fears and defenses, it’s wise to be sympathetic to the fact that an individual can’t simply put them aside on demand and be perfectly rational, just like he can’t simply put aside his inability to defy gravity.

It’s possible to modify many subconscious fears such as fear of flying, but you must learn to live with other, more entrenched fears, and subconscious defenses can’t really be modified very much.

Subconscious resistance-type defense patterns such as resentment and aggressiveness are some of the more threatening and troubling personality traits and are hard to adjust.

Even more difficult to amend than the above-listed defenses are escape-type subconscious defense patterns such as acute self-deception and secretiveness.

Below we outline multiple, common, problematic subconscious traits, including fears and defenses.

1. Excessive desire for the acquisition of money and material things can be good for a business that pays its sales reps on commission, but this trait can be toxic otherwise, such as in relationships for obvious reasons. Coupled with deviousness, it can also easily lead to underhanded or even criminal behavior.
2. Someone with a savior complex does “the right thing” to his detriment. He typically enters a relationship with someone who is markedly mentally or emotionally wounded in attempt to save that person, whether he is conscious of it or not. It becomes a problem when he helps everyone but himself.
3. A person with excessive vanity and narcissism is a liability to any partnership or organization (and to herself) due to, in part, the fact that she can be manipulated through excessive praise and admiration. This trait is sometimes confused with having a “big ego,” but it’s actually representative of a weak ego, a weak ego-self.
4. Excessive rationalization, self-deception, and lack of objectivity are very common negative characteristics. Everyone rationalizes a little every now and then, but when it’s a full-blown, full-time idiosyncrasy, these are the types of people who firmly believe their lies, to the astonishment of those around them. It usually begins in childhood when the subject learns to fool himself because the truth is too painful for him to face squarely. For example, in his memory, his father didn’t abandon the family; he was merely pulled away due to strange life circumstances.
5. A person with excessive restlessness may jump from project to project, never completing much. It’s possible the process of focusing for too long on any given area of interest may unearth some secret memories in her subconscious she is unwilling to confront.
6. Perfectionism and, or excessive attention to detail causes a person to get lost in details while they miss the big picture.
7. Problematic emotional balance and maturity causes someone to lapse into an immature disposition while under pressure, to the chagrin of those around him.

Amazingly, simply being aware of the fact that you have hidden personality traits, beyond your persona, can be a big step toward self-awareness and getting more out of life. Once you address your hidden challenges, it’s much easier to cultivate your hidden talents.

Copyright © Scott Petullo, Stephen Petullo