How Your Subconscious Determines Your Relationships

Continued from yesterday…

Whenever you meet a person for the first time, especially if you want a relationship with them, you try to learn more about who they are. You may ask them questions about their family, hobbies, job, education, background, their beliefs, passions, pursuits, and so on.

While you are gathering information about the person, you are also trying to figure them out. Who are they really at the core? Can they be trusted? Does this relationship have potential? Are they similar to me? Will they be able to relate to me? What would this relationship do for me?

The answer often comes to us in how we feel. We may conclude, “I feel good about them,” or “There’s something off about them, but I’m not sure what it is.” The chemistry may be instant, or it may be lacking. We call this our gut instinct. But what’s really happening here?
On the one hand, your conscious cognitive mind asks the questions and listens to the answers. This conscious mind controls what you say, what you do, and what you see. It contains all the thoughts, memories, feelings, and hopes that you are aware of at any given moment. At times, we refer to this mind as the logical mind, because it’s aware of its own thought process. This conscious mind is able to process 2,000 bits of information per second. Yet no more than 10 percent of the mind’s activity happens here.

On the other hand, you have a metacognitive mind at work. While absorbing more than 400 billion bits of information per second, your non-conscious mind is responsible for up to 99 percent of all the action in your mind. The unconscious controls your entire body and makes sure that it functions. It also contains the memories that you are not consciously aware of.

Since you were a child, your mind has processed all external input and interpreted its meaning through the ego’s perception. These memories have been stored in your subconscious, creating the subscript of your life. This unconscious subscript manifests itself in feelings that shape your thinking, thought-building, and beliefs.

So when you engage in a conversation with another person for the first time, your non-conscious mind plays a significant role in determining what you think of the person that is sitting across from you.

While the cognitive mind is busy processing what the person is saying, how they look, what they are wearing, and any other information it gathers during the conversation, the subconscious uses that information to search through its rolodex of past experiences and knowledge to determine whether it’s a relationship that is worth exploring.

Continued tomorrow…

Adapted from Section 3 of Awakening To I Am Love by David Youngren