Unconscious Response
It had been several months since her husband died when a friend told me that people were urging her to move on, that her grief had lasted long enough.
"I just can't," she told me. And she had put on a façade to stop the useless advice.
A broken heart is not healed by some schedule created by external demands - or for the comfort of others.
My friend was in shock for a while before she could even realize the impact of her husband's death on her and their young children.
He had been her strength and her provision.
His death was sudden and unexpected.
Her whole being was shaken, but the demands of survival pushed her body through the routines for her family's sake. People usually mistake this for recovery.
She found some support from me, but even I could not know what it would take for her to be restored to full strength, nor how long it would take.
The 12 Phases™ can help gauge our recovery in the adequate space of time, by our whole health, not what appears whole to others.
Time is relative, as Einstein taught us. My friend's perspective was a composite of her life from childhood to adulthood, with her happiness disrupted to a high degree.
This was a period when she felt little hope and could not imagine how she would manage raising her children alone.
Who can dictate when hope must return?
In my experience with roots-deep disruption, hope only appeared as I watched it rebuild itself.
In science, living organisms are self-governing and responses are inherently positive in that there is one overall purpose: to sustain life no matter what obstacles arise.
It is the same for the human organism.
Light in the darkness
I once came to a full stop, refusing to do anything without feeling its purpose.
That lasted until my bladder became full. If I am to live, I must attend to my body - its need for fuel, protection, and strength.
The next direction of my listless mind was toward my younger child. I was responsible also for his life.
This is an example of the automatic sequence in the first three phases: 1) full stop; 2) natural necessity; and 3) relevance.
In the 12 Phases™, progress is movement by movement, just like the minute hand on a clock or the digital ticking, moving steadily forward to make you whole again.
On impact, there's a fail-safe that engages instantly, an unconscious mechanism from brain to body.
The experience moves through your organism:
Tick, tick, tick goes the process...
Tick, tick, tick goes your healing...
The journey back to homeostasis is the 12 Phases™.
Your first impulse might be different, based on your life navigation system.
Coming to full stop was my intuitive response to the biggest life crisis I had ever experienced.
Meaning had evaporated. My inner compass failed.
Being a person who followed my heart, the sudden emptiness left me paralyzed.
Being an unminded response, the Phase 1 experience carried a seed of recovery, planted in my unconscious where it would grow until homeostasis - intrinsic full strength - would be restored.
Although I felt paralyzed and unmotivated, the unfelt, true state of my condition was that my now-sterile heart was impregnated with the seed of a new hope.
Nature went to work, as always, nurturing and supporting the spark of survival.
The event and the environment I found myself in actually worked together to revive me.
Phase 2: Your hierarchy of priorities shifts when disruption puts the current experience at the top.
Unconscious response is the automatic action or inaction in your behavior. In retrospect, a new logic forms as intuition dictates choice, without forethought.
You feel the impact of Phase 1 as you realize it is unavoidable.
The unconscious memory of life-saving priorities "grabs" the disruption and chooses what it likes from it - what is compatible with survival - and discards the rest.
Phase 3: From the restored wholeness of navigation by priorities, how you relate to others becomes a compelling factor.
In my situation, care for my child was not a necessity of survival or obligation, but a strength that came from love.
Identifying the first three phases was just the beginning, and it is a series short enough that you can test it in yourself.
Any time you experience something unusual in a usual day, look back on the shift in your mind...
See your first impulsive reaction, then how you snapped back to your way, and then how you made a choice toward the person or persons involved in the situation.
You will see that these are unconscious responses, because there was no space taken for thought.
Does the unconscious matter to your life?
If you were able to find the first three phases in your own mind, imagine what you can learn about yourself in all twelve phases.
The peak of an iceberg is much like the peak of a mountain. It is a very small percentage of the whole mass of the mountain.
That is the relation of your unconscious mind to the conscious mind, the mind you use intentionally.
The massiveness of the unconscious may feel intimidating, as if it is in control instead of you. But it is a reservoir of life information that you saved for your own benefit.
There's no way to know, consciously, everything that is in your unconscious mind, but you can see evidence of it in your unconscious responses.
"Unconscious response" in the 12 Phases™ is visible evidence.
When you see a feather in the wind, the evidence of wind is in the movements of the feather.
Another example is when you let go of an inflated balloon, the evidence of the force of air propels the balloon in a direction.
In the Mapping Memories™ tool, we connect the timing of significant life events to the sequence of homeostatic forces in the 12 Phases™.
What appears to be random events that shape and reshape your life take on the appearance of logic and choice.
That "choice" is your organism's response to the greater wisdom and the collection of life information in your unconscious.
There is a distinction between the reservoir of the unconscious and the way we pull available information together in the subconscious. You can be aware of the strategies forming "in the back of your mind" - the subconscious.
The importance of the unconscious mind is in how it reflects autonomy.
Before we engage in the material world of things, situations, and people, you have autonomous strength in your will.
Whatever the demands of life, you may be willing or unwilling to participate.
Maturity happens as we discover the unavoidable unpleasantries of life and changing resistance to acceptance - knowing life as it is, rather than as we prefer it to be.
Free will means we choose when and how we yield to life's constraints. This adjustment happens with respect to autonomy.
How your life appears to others is also a consideration because acceptance of your individual value means the difference between happiness and misery.
But self-acceptance comes first. You must respect yourself, and that comes from the unconscious reservoir of life successes that build a strong whole self, heart, body, soul, and mind.
The heart-to-body motions are the strongest evidence of autonomous motivation, and autonomous motivation is the engine of initiative.
The internal forces of autonomous choice
Initially, I saw the whole phenomenon as one integrated system, so I called it the Cycle of Unconscious Response™.
Now I know the cycle part is the 12 Phases™; unconscious responses are evidence of the twelve phases phenomenon as an attribute of the human experience.
I have separated the 12 Phases™ as the sequence and the operating principles, and the Cycle of Unconscious Response™ as coordinates that follow the sequence.
I must apologize for any confusion this has caused; I am working outward, from observing the operation as a whole, toward how it can be explained and illustrated in the conscious experience.
I call it "the heart's mind" because there is clearly an agenda at work for your good that you cannot initiate, guide, or influence with your conscious intention. You can only recognize it and cooperate with it.
As a device to measure the connection between life experience and the inner life force of an individual, the 12 Phases™ seems to stand alone.
The phenomenon can be detected in subjective experience, but there is so much needed as a prerequisite to scientific research. Although, brain imaging shows promise in connecting unconscious response to brain activity.
My unofficial work in over twenty years, so far, must stand on its own merits. Let my audience judge it as a developing work.
Within homeostasis, people create and innovate, having an observable effect on human evolution,
a fact emphasized by Damasio's upregulation and Sara Walker's inclusion of information in human evolution.
The twelve phases phenomenon may be the missing link between societal advancements as evolution and the microorganism of humanity we call the individual.
We cannot trace the origins of the arts and technology except through discrete individuals and their histories.
Will science undertake the daunting challenge of proving links in the path of homeostasis?
From cells to neurons to the nervous system; from the body to the brain and back again; to the mental images that make design the start of creativity; to the compulsion of problem solving and the lineage of human evolution…
What is the human organism if not the highest form of life on Earth, as well as having intricacies so unknown to science?
This question will likely outlive me, at least, if not several more generations. How exciting! Yes?
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Referenced in this blog:
Publications by Elizabeth Diane on the Theory of Unconscious Response™, the 12 Phases™, and the Cycle of Unconscious Response™: