The unconscious mind and Doctor Who.

'Smile, we're being recycled.'

If like me you're a Doctor Who fan, you'll have seen series 10: episode 2. In this episode, the aliens are The Vardy. Millions of nanobots that maintain an off world colony. The cute looking avatar robots that abound here we can see have a big smiley face. So far so good?

The nanobots are programmed to make the colonists happy. They monitor the emotional state of the colonists through emotion badges placed on the humans and sensed by the bot avatars. One of the humans dies naturally, this creates grief amongst the crew, an emotion that the avatars were not programmed to register. Taking this as a sign of disease, those who display unhappiness are terminated. This inevitably becomes as Wikipedia calls it, a "grief tsunami". All humans not in hibernation are wiped out.

Can we blame the Vardy? Were they doing their job? Absolutely they were. They weren't killing people with evil intent, their intent was essentially from a good place, you can argue even from a place of love. And what about those who are terminated? Recycled to fertilise the gardens to produce food for the humans. Makes sense doesn't it. A highly eco efficient system. Waste not, want not.

So what has this to do with my work, helping people move forward? Our unconscious minds are there to protect us, to care for us. Sometimes though the intent, as well meaning as it is, is no longer serving us. We have patterns of behaviour that are no longer helpful. A baby who suffers malnutrition in the womb statistically may become obese as it grows as the unconscious strives to keep it well fed. A person who has autophobia, a fear of abandonment, may have once been lost temporarily in a supermarket at a very young age. Harry Potter could have ended up with agoraphobia from having to live in a cupboard under the stairs.

The unconscious mind serves to protect and doesn't understand that its initial good intention to keep us safe is impeding us in some way. It could be a small impediment or massively impacting on our lives.

My job is to help people think differently, to tap into the unconscious, to recognise and respect the intention of the unconscious and work with it to effect change, to start running a new pattern of behaviour.

Although I'm not about to advocate human recycling any day soon, the purpose of the Doctor Who nanobots illustrate the intention of the unconscious, how it wants to protect, how powerful it is and how we can harness that power to good effect.