Looking beneath the surface
By Manfred Kets de Vries
There’s an old tale about a girl and her drum. Day and night, she was beating on it relentlessly. No one could stop her. But the constant drumming drove the villagers to distraction.
One by one, they approached her. “You’re damaging everyone’s hearing,” they said. “Drums are meant for sacred ceremonies.” They offered her books and toys to distract her. Nothing worked, however. She kept drumming.
Finally, when the people in the village had reached their breaking point, a wandering sage arrived. After hearing their complaints, he approached the girl and asked a simple question: “I wonder what’s inside that drum?”
He asked the village elder for a hammer. When the elder struck the drum, it cracked open revealing a deadly snake coiled inside. The girl hadn’t been seeking attention; she had been trying to warn them. Only then did the villagers understand: what lies on the surface often may conceal something deeper, something more urgent.
This story reminds us of a truth we often overlook that appearances can be deceiving. Many of our behaviours, beliefs, and emotional reactions are shaped by forces beyond our conscious awareness. We live much of our lives on autopilot, reacting rather than reflecting. But when we look inward, beneath the surface, we can begin to uncover what’s truly driving our thoughts, choices, and relationships.
The unseen influences within
We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, fully in control of our thoughts and actions. But much of our behaviour is driven by unconscious processes. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung put it succinctly: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
But it is quite easy to overlook those hidden parts of ourselves. People act out behaviours they don’t fully understand, repeating patterns that no longer is serving them. Only later they may realise that they have been reacting from a place they weren’t even aware of.
Gaining insight into our inner world isn’t easy. It takes courage and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. But without this awareness, we’re not really in charge. Life simply happens to us, and we’re left trying to make sense of the wreckage. But choosing to become conscious of our behaviour patterns gives us the chance to break free from them. We stop falling and start jumping. We gain more agency over our story.
The iceberg model of the mind
In fact, studies suggest that about 95% of brain activity occurs outside conscious awareness. Rational thought does play a role — but often it’s more of a commentator than a controller. We may believe we’re making deliberate choices, but in many cases, our unconscious mind has already made the decision.
Think of your mind as an iceberg. The small tip above the surface is your conscious awareness: the thoughts you can name, the intentions you can claim. But beneath the waterline lies a vast, hidden mass — the unconscious. This is where memories, emotions, beliefs, impulses, and behavioural patterns reside. It is the part of your psyche that truly drives how you think, feel, and interpret the world.
Neurologists often distinguish this hidden territory into two broad forms: procedural and declarative. The procedural unconscious is the warehouse of everything you’ve learned to do automatically: walking, driving, tying your shoes, typing without looking at the keys. These are the “how-to” routines of life, etched so deeply into the nervous system that they unfold without deliberate thought. In fact, they are often most visible when they fail — the stumble on the staircase, the sudden blank when muscle memory betrays you.
The declarative unconscious, by contrast, refers to mental contents that are not currently in awareness but could, at least in principle, be brought to mind. This is the realm of forgotten memories, latent knowledge, and unacknowledged wishes, material that lingers outside the spotlight of consciousness yet quietly shapes our choices, biases, and moods. Where the procedural unconscious is about knowing how, the declarative unconscious is about knowing that.
Together, these two domains remind us that much of what guides us lies beyond the reach of deliberate thought: some of it automatic and inaccessible, some of it hidden but retrievable, all of it shaping the texture of daily life. Hence, the unconscious is not a passive basement but an active workshop, quietly scripting behaviours and responses before the conscious mind even enters the scene.
Think back to the last time you drove home after a long day. Do you remember every turn you made, each lane you chose? Likely not. Your procedural unconscious took the wheel, guiding you through familiar streets while your conscious mind wandered to other concerns. That simple commute is a glimpse of how much of life is lived on autopilot — and how profoundly these unseen systems run the show.
Your brain’s emotional architecture
Three key regions of the brain shape your emotional life. It consists of the insular cortex, which processes internal sensory experiences. Then there is the anterior cingulate cortex, involved in empathy, emotion regulation, and decision-making. Finally, there is the medial prefrontal cortex, which supports self-awareness, focus, and self-control.
In childhood, your brain absorbs emotional data from the environment, effectively writing the code it continues to follow into adulthood. If those early experiences were stable and nurturing, your internal scripts likely support resilience and healthy coping. But if they were chaotic, neglectful, or traumatic, those imprints may still be active, quietly shaping your behaviour and holding you back. These early emotional blueprints influence how you perceive the world and how you respond to it. As a result, even in adulthood, your unconscious may still be running on outdated instructions, making life feel harder than it needs to be. When your conscious and unconscious minds are out of sync, you may find yourself wasting energy just to maintain a fragile sense of control.
The catch is that these patterns don’t vanish with time. They stay buried in the unconscious unless brought to light. That’s why people often repeat the same mistakes, despite good intentions. The mind, it seems, remembers everything — and it’s reluctant to rewrite the script.
Indirect ways of communication
Because the unconscious doesn’t communicate directly, it often reveals itself in indirect ways — physical sensations, dreams, slips of the tongue, and emotional outbursts. Sigmund Freud famously called dreams the “royal road to the unconscious,” suggesting they offer a glimpse into our deeper, unspoken conflicts and desires.
Another revealing signal is acting out, a defence mechanism where repressed emotions emerge through self-destructive behaviour. Tantrums, addictions, or self-harming tendencies may seem irrational, but they are often expressions of pain that has no other outlet.
Take self-harm, for example. To an outsider, it may appear senseless. But for the person experiencing emotional turmoil, perhaps linked to trauma like abuse, it can be a way to transform emotional pain into something tangible, something controllable. While these actions are damaging, they are also telling. They offer insight into unresolved issues hidden beneath the surface.
Carl Jung called the parts of ourselves we hide or reject the shadow. This includes the anger, fear, insecurity, envy, and shame we pretend not to feel. But the shadow doesn’t go away just because we refuse to look at it. It operates in the background, influencing decisions and behaviour, often in disruptive or self-sabotaging ways.
If ignored, the shadow doesn’t sit quietly. It grabs the wheel, leaving you in the backseat, shouting vague directions. You might think you’re in control, but unresolved parts of you are making the real choices.
Waking up from the script
Sometimes, this fact hits you quietly: you’ve been going through the motions, making choices on autopilot, as if someone else has been writing the lines. You look around and think, “Wait — who’s in charge here?” Then you realise, uncomfortably, it’s you. And it has been all along.
Acknowledging the parts of yourself you’ve been avoiding isn’t always dramatic. Often, it’s more like noticing a leaky faucet you’ve been ignoring — annoying, persistent, and harder to fix than you thought. But necessary. Because until you face what’s under the surface, life can start to feel like a loop — the same patterns, the same frustrations, but no clear reason why.
When you begin to connect the dots between your conscious choices and the quieter, less visible parts of yourself, things shift. You stop reacting out of habit and start responding with a bit more thought. It’s not magical. Just clearer.
And yes, it can be unsettling to realise how much of your life has been shaped by things you weren’t even fully aware of. But it’s also freeing. Suddenly, you’re not just following a script, you’re editing it. Maybe even rewriting it.
If you ignore your “shadow,” it won’t throw a dramatic tantrum. It’ll simply find sneakier ways to take the wheel. That’s when your well-meaning plans keep getting sidelined by patterns you swear you’re done with. It’s frustrating, but not uncommon.
The good news? Once you start looking at those hidden parts with curiosity instead of judgment, they stop feeling like enemies. You begin working with yourself, not against. That’s where real change happens — not overnight, but steadily.
And then, something subtle but meaningful happens. Life starts to feel more aligned. You’re no longer drifting through scenes as a background extra, you’re a little more present, a little more in charge. The story may still be messy, but now it’s yours.