The Unconscious Is Not Inside You — You Are Inside It
To heal in a way that is true, not just tidy, you must stop treating the unconscious as personal and start listening to what it carries through lineage, culture, and the body.
Too often, people come to therapy hoping to fix something. But the unconscious doesn’t want fixing. It wants attention. It wants reverence. It wants to be felt. And healing, at this level, isn’t about learning how to be calm. It’s about learning how to stay. Stay with the discomfort. Stay with the memory. Stay with the desire to run, and ask why it feels so familiar.
You cannot heal the personal without meeting the cultural. You cannot meet the cultural without honoring the collective. You cannot do any of it without the body.
This is why somatic depth work matters. Because the body is the only place all three levels of the unconscious converge. It is where memory, myth, and inheritance live. And it is where healing — real, honest, integrated healing — begins.
When I hear my clients speak about the unconscious, they often reference it as if it were a single place — something buried, mysterious, waiting to be uncovered like a locked box at the bottom of the psyche. But the unconscious is not one thing. It is layered. Lived. Textured by lineage, culture, and breath.
As a somatic psychologist, what I wish more people knew is that if you want to heal in a way that is true — not just tidy — you need to understand what lives beneath what you call your ‘awareness.’ You need to understand the unconscious not as a thing within you, but as something we all exist within.
My second master’s degree in depth psychology required that I study Carl Jung. During my time studying, I learned that Jung offered us all a map: the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious, and the Self. But that map, while revolutionary in its time, was not complete.
It did not name the cultural body, the ancestral scar, the memory of women who learned to smile while bleeding, or the silent adaptations passed down in families shaped by war, poverty, and displacement. It did not account for the way grief can be inherited, or the way the body sometimes trembles with stories it never lived, but somehow remembers.
In the therapy room, this forgetting shows up quietly. A woman tells me she can’t feel her anger. She says it calmly, like it’s a fact about her personality. But I watch her hands curl into fists without her noticing. Her jaw clenches. Her body remembers what her mind cannot say. This is not personal repression. This is generational conditioning. It’s not that her anger doesn’t exist — it’s that she was never given permission to feel it.
This is the nervous system of a woman raised to regulate her rage into silence — a silence so practiced, it no longer feels like suppression, but personality. And this is where my support with her, as a somatic psychologist, begins.
The personal unconscious holds our individual pain. The traumas we tucked away to survive. The memories we blurred, the stories we’ve outgrown but still carry like second skin. In this layer, healing looks like remembering. Feeling. Letting the body metabolize what the mind has tried to forget. It is intimate work, and it is never just about the past. It’s about how the past lives on in our skin. But not everything in the unconscious belongs to us directly.
There is another layer — what many of us now call the cultural unconscious. It is not personal. It is patterned. It lives in the body’s relationship to systems, to legacies, to the unspoken rules of survival passed down through generations. This is the layer where lineage speaks. Where race, gender, land, and ancestry are not abstract concepts but embodied truths. Where trauma is not something we experienced, but something we inherited.
If your great-grandmother was punished for saying no, your body may flinch when you set a boundary. If your lineage endured famine, your hunger may never be satisfied, regardless of how much food you give yourself. If every woman in your history had to marry for safety, not love, you might have unrecognizable panic before committing to your beloved. If you were raised to believe that being good meant being quiet, you may mistake self-abandonment for peace.
This layer of the unconscious does not unravel with talk. It reveals itself through repetition. Through instinct. Through grief that feels too large for one lifetime. Through dreams that haunt. Through decisions we cannot rationalize. Through pain that penetrates every part of our heart. And this layer of the unconscious demands that you stop pretending that your healing is only individual. It’s not. It never was.
And then, deeper still, we meet what Jung called the collective unconscious. This is the realm of archetypes. Not fixed images, but living patterns — the mother, the shadow, the lover, the exile. These are not roles we perform, but movements the soul makes. They emerge in dreams, in synchronicities, in the quiet ache that whispers: this matters, go closer, something ancient is unfolding. Something larger than you is asking to be lived through you.
But even archetypes are not untouched. They have been shaped by power. Distorted by systems. Constructed by culture. Filtered through the eyes of those whose stories were always centred.
To work with these deeper patterns is not only a spiritual act. It is a political one. Because you are not just healing a wound — you are reclaiming the right to name what the wound truly is.
You cannot heal the personal without meeting the cultural. You cannot meet the cultural without honoring the collective. You cannot do any of it without the body. This is why somatic depth work matters. Because the body is the only place all three levels of the unconscious converge. It is where memory, myth, and inheritance live. And it is where healing — real, honest, integrated healing — begins.
Effective communication is your gift. Your expertise is obvious. You clarify deep, complex concepts so effortlessly. I'm a "five year old," and you explain everything so I can understand it. That's what's harder to grasp. How did you learn to write while training to treat clients. It's a little confounding.
Your training required deep thinking, I'm sure. But few disciplines teach good writing, even when writing papers is the primary requirement for proving knowledge or understanding. The quality of your work goes beyond those expectations. You teach without patronizing. You give without condition. You heal without equivocation. You lead with humility.
There is true power in your voice. Power to break the chains of generational, cultural, and personal pains; the seven sons of seven sons worth of "sins of our fathers" so many carry in their flesh and in their blood. In one article your words flap like butterfly wings and the trajectories of a hundred deaths are flung toward life. And those hundred pour purer waters of life to hundreds more, and so on infinitely.
That is what I feel when you communicate truth the way you do. Maybe because it's sunset where I am now, but honestly, reading this piece felt like I was given a special seat at the foot of a wise counselor in a Garden of Gethsemane type setting.
What you're doing is important. Thank you for doing it well.
I love this and I feel I'm starting to have a better understanding of myself and my greater heritage. For a long time, I even blamed myself if I had a week of 'bad' dreams, as if I was failing in some way and this would spiral into trying to feel more relaxed blah blah blah! Yesterday, I felt very sad and flat all day and I observed those feelings without needing to analyse them. I woke this morning feeling something very tight inside me just let go, almost like a melting sensation in my torso. Something feels different...learning to feel in my 60s after decades of living in my head and trying to control everything is challenging, but also fascinating and it somehow feels like coming home 🩷 Karen