Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Dr. Friedemann Schaub. Let me tell you a little bit about Friedemann. I interviewed him the first time more than a decade ago, and our conversations stayed with me. He’s an unusual person. Take a listen. He received a medical degree from the University of Munich in Germany and then pursued a career in cardiology. He became concerned practicing cardiology about how little time cardiologists had to spend connecting with their patients. And he decided to take a break and accepted a scholarship for a postdoctoral research position at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned a PhD in molecular biology.
Now the story gets interesting. Friedemann became interested in the intelligence of every cell in our body and how our conscious mind can collaborate with our subconscious mind. Friedemann writes, “From the age of ten until my early 30s, I suffered from anxiety, low self-esteem, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. But once I learned how to work consciously with the subconscious mind, I was able to turn my emotional challenges into catalysts to discover my authentic truth.” And this is what we’re going to be talking about. We’re going to be talking about what Friedemann can teach us about how we each can use our conscious mind to collaborate with our subconscious. Friedemann is the author, with Sounds True, of the book The Fear and Anxiety Solution. And he’s published a new book called The Empowerment Solution. Friedemann, welcome.
Dr. Friedemann Schaub: Thank you so much. I was so excited to be with you again. So nice to see you.
TS: This whole notion that we can collaborate using our conscious mind with our subconscious mind. Let’s start. Introduce us to your understanding of this potential collaboration.
FS: Let’s start with the subconscious, because the subconscious is ultimately something we all use but we’re not really aware of. That’s why it’s called subconscious. The subconscious is that deeper part of the mind that a lot of people blame for all these unwanted thoughts and patterns. I wanted to lose weight, but somehow, I find myself having five pounds [of] ice cream in the shopping cart. How is that possible? The subconscious is often blamed more for our misery than utilized for our benefit. The subconscious is responsible not only for emotions and habits and patterns, but it also is responsible for how our body works, because a lot of things we do are really unconscious. Even when you’re saying I want to lift my arm, well, you do it consciously but then everything—the execution, the flexion of the muscles, and the extensions and all of those things are unconscious or subconscious. And then all the memories we ever had and all our values and ideas of morals all comes from the subconscious and is anchored in the subconscious.
So you can imagine subconscious is a pretty important and busy part. It has only one problem. It pretty much does whatever it has started to do early in our lives. And early in our lives, it was there to protect us. It was telling us, OK, your brain is not very developed. You’re pretty small and helpless, so let me take over here and let me make sure that you’re OK. So it developed ideas of why is Dad always in a grumpy mood or why we are left alone in the room next door for hours? Does this mean something? The subconscious says, OK, maybe it means you’re not really wanted. So how do we make sure that you still get fed and protected? Be invisible, hide out, or be the pleaser and make sure that you are Daddy’s or Mommy’s good girl or good boy, or be the achiever who has always straight A’s, then you may get what you need and a little bit of love on top of it.
So these patterns, these subconscious patterns, most of us still live in. Unless we are consciously telling the subconscious we don’t have to live in these patterns anymore, we don’t have to go through all of these same self-protective motions, it will continue to do exactly that. That’s where the conscious mind comes in and say[s], I need to take over. I need to teach my subconscious what we can do to not just go for safety, but go maybe for fulfillment, for purpose, for passion.
TS: Now, Friedemann, I’d like to understand a little bit more how we actually know anything about the subconscious mind, if you will, because I’ve heard statistics that it’s running 70 percent of our behaviors of our life. I’ve heard it as high as 90 percent. How would we even know that number? You’ve made a lot of claims in this first answer about what the subconscious mind is. That it’s here to protect us. That it was formed early in our life. How do we know these things?
FS: In fact, we don’t really, and the numbers are also very controversial. Is it really 70 percent or not? Most of what we know is either coming from way back from Freud and Jung and so on who didn’t necessarily do the research around it, but they certainly had a lot of people they worked with that made them realize, OK, the system that we are really entangled in is not so much our intellect. It’s really much more the emotional, the deeper parts that play a role.
What I know, and what we all know, is our subconscious in action. A very simple example is, you go to work and you’re already thinking about maybe a meeting there or a difficult discussion, but somehow, you’re driving and you’re not even paying attention. Who does the driving? Who stops at a red light automatically? Who somehow pays attention that someone is passing by? You just have this little notion, this little intuition, and you look and say,
“Oops, that was close.”
There are all these under-the-radar functions that we are not choosing. Same thing with negative thoughts. How many times do we have a negative thought at the most un-opportune moment? You go on a date or you are supposed to give some talk, and all of a sudden you have the thought of, oh, this is going to not go well. You’re not really smart enough. And then you’re interpreting something as negative automatically, even though you know, no, I should be focused. I should actually be charming for my date. Or whatever the thing that you’re consciously knowing better, they get overridden by something that, inside, has another idea. And that is where the subconscious comes in. What you could maybe say is what the subconscious and the conscious mind is differentiating is that the subconscious is what we are not really consciously deciding. It’s more whatever automatic comes up.
If I were to ask you, think about the room you grew up in. You haven’t thought about this; it just comes up, that memory of the color, maybe you can see the window, maybe you even have a certain smell of that room. Where was that memory before? Yes, somewhere in your neural network. But if we go to the discussion of conscious/subconscious/higher consciousness, that’s just the other way of looking at it. And I think it’s a much more empowering way, because I cannot really go into my brain to make changes, but I certainly can go into these conscious/subconscious patterns to make changes.
TS: You mentioned a connection between our emotions and our subconscious mind. Can you help me understand that more?
FS: When you really think about emotions, especially the emotions that we call negative, they are equally coming up at times when we don’t want to feel them. We can wake up grumpy. We can wake up with the wrong side of the leg or the wrong leg hitting the ground or whatever we talk about. And we don’t even have a reason why. We don’t even know why. At the same day, we can all of a sudden feel in a great mood. Once again, nothing changed—same person, same circumstances—but something shifted inside. What shifts is simply that this subconscious is looking at the world, deciphering and detecting certain things that then get taken in and interpreted either as bad or something we have to protect ourselves from or as positive, something to be happy about.
And they have done these wonderful studies, for example, in how fast the subconscious can compute information. People sitting in cinemas, and they’re watching something like a happy little story. While they are watching it, there have been, very quickly, disturbing images interdispersed into this happy story so fast that the conscious mind doesn’t really compute it. But what changes every time there is an image of someone dead or a kid crying or anything that was shaken up when you would look at it consciously, the subconscious picks it up. And what changed with the people that watched it, even though they were not aware of it, is either the heart rate or the resistance of their skin, which indicated that there is stress happening. That there is something that the subconscious noticed that is not really fitting into this happy story, and it’s what startled. Consciously no idea, subconsciously we were aware of it.
TS: You mentioned that the filters of our subconscious mind are formed primarily early in our life. Talk to me about that. What is this formation in our subconscious mind of these filters that we then see the world through?
FS: You can imagine it starts with an event. Often, when I talk to people about what happened the first time you experienced some kind of an anxiety, it often starts with a startling, confusing event. Something that just doesn’t really fit into the idea of us feeling safe or loved. Then if the event is repeating itself, then there’s usually an emotion with it. Maybe from the confusion comes stress, comes anxiety, comes insecurity. That’s already a big—OK, I need to be prepared. I need to watch out for this not happening again. If these events happen again and again, the subconscious says, OK, we have to somehow make sense out of this.
For me, for example, I was a happy-go-lucky child. I was just looking at the world with all the magic possible. I saw walls moving and all these little energetic particles, a little bit like in The Matrix. And my mom just said, “You probably have a fever.” But I was sure I can see the energy of everything, and life was good. But then all of a sudden, there were some startling moments. My father was in a bad mood, and there was fights, and they didn’t hide their fights from me. I had a bad grade in school. I was definitely scolded for that. Things that occurred that made me just feel shaken up. It made me wonder, is the world really safe? Is it really, here, peace and harmony? And keep in mind, my name is Friedemann, which means man of peace. So my whole idea and identity was all about peace. And when things didn’t feel peaceful anymore, I felt unsafe.
Eventually, I heard from my parents saying that you’re not really smart. You are kind of a late bloomer. You’re probably going to have it always a little hard in life. That made me of course wonder, oh my God, how will I ever not only succeed but also receive approval, love, a sense of belonging? So what my subconscious said, here is a solution. You’re not that great, so let’s just work extra hard to always somehow succeed. Reach higher and higher goals, be the best in class, become a doctor, and then make another doctorate happen. All of those things were really based on these early beliefs of me having a sense of conditional acceptance and conditional love. That happened very early on. And when I tracked back to [these] early times, I realized that the sting and the pain and the confusion hadn’t really gone away until I worked with it—again, with my subconscious mind—so that it could be released and that I could change this filter. The filter of not being good enough. The filter of only being conditionally acceptable. And I think a lot of people can relate to that.
TS: Of course. I think many people listening say, “Yeah, I have a filter. And that filter says, ‘You’re not really worth anything.’ So I’m going to do X, Y, Z to earn love.” It might be achievement, or as you point out in your new book, The Empowerment Solution, it might be pleasing other people. If I’m a super pleaser, then maybe I’ll get the love that I want. But in your case, and let’s keep talking about you for a moment, Friedemann, you somehow in your early 30s found a way to work through the sense of worthlessness that you felt inside that you were compensating for and all the anxiety that came with it. How did you work through it?
FS: Probably after I had one of the lowest times in my life, when I came to Seattle, being successful in my career as a doctor and realizing, “That’s all I am? I only have that?” I was basically stripped away from my nice apartment, from the relationship I was in, from the status, and I became a little student in a big lab and pretty much a nobody because I had no clue of what I was doing. And I had to face myself. I had to face myself without any of those achievements, no mask or extra layers that protected me from feeling not good enough. All of a sudden, I had to face again the same feeling that I had been facing already when I was little. I am not good enough. Who am I if I’m not really successful or if I’m not having any achievements?
I had so much anxiety and pain and insecurity and felt like, again, how in the early days everyone observes me, everyone judges me. I could see little speech bubbles come out of their heads having negative thoughts about me. Of course all imagination, but it felt terrible. And then I stumbled across yoga and meditation, and that was a first step for me to realize there is something bigger to me than just this sense of achievement or some kind of a degree or whatever I thought I was. At the beginning, I was just feeling the energy of peace after a yoga class or after a meditation, and that lasted about five minutes. And then I felt like, wow, these five minutes are so different. Then the next week it was six minutes, and I just kept on going because it felt so good.
Eventually, I did find that there was something inside of me that I was looking for, which I would say is the essence of our being. I could connect to this through these different means, but I wasn’t able to resolve these patterns and beliefs until I did start working with subconscious methods like neurotherapy or neurolinguistic programming. In some ways, I had to first anchor myself and find that my truth goes beyond the descriptions of my jobs or whatever things I was hanging on my wall. And then I had to go back into my past and basically understood that the past is an enormous library for us to grow from, but it’s not defining us. We are the creators. We are the ones who choose who we want to grow into and what, ultimately, we want to see ourselves as. If we have this essence as a baseline, I think we cannot really go wrong.
TS: OK. Let’s talk more about this knowing in our core, knowing in ourselves, our essence identity. For you, was it a gradual dawning, or was there also some kind of breakthrough and it was like, “Whoa, this is sudden. This is dramatic.” Was it both?
FS: I think it was starting with a really startling feeling of, whoa, there is some energy that is moving inside of me. That was after I did kundalini yoga. There was this one exercise in my first class, which was called Sat Kriya. Sat Kriya is all about mobilizing the dormant energy at the base of your spine. Of course, as a scientist I thought, whatever. But then when I actually did it and I felt the energy moving on my spine, I was shocked and I was really amazed and pleased, because it felt so good. It felt as though something inside of me is alive. Something inside of me is actually making me realize this is my energy, this is an identity that I haven’t really seen before. In meditations, and especially in regressions, I felt that I could go back to a place of my origin. I could go back to, what we would say, the oneness of all there is. I have more and more worked with this concept of can we go really back, not only just to our birth, but even before we were born?
Maybe this is just an imagination—and the subconscious is great in creating and imagining—but when I lead people back to that sense of you are not just matter, there is something, a consciousness, that was there and will continue to be there after you leave this body, the amazing thing, whether they are CEOs or professors or bankers or healers, all have the same sense of something is awakening inside of them. One person who was a CFO of a company, he connected to his essence, and he said, “Oh my God, I realize what a creative being I am. I didn’t realize that at the core I’m a creator. I’m not some number puncher or something like this. I’m actually someone who needs to create.” And he changed his job completely afterwards because he remembered something that he had forgotten. That’s only one story of people getting in touch with what we may be not really able to put into one sentence or one thing that this defines our essence. It’s more an experience, a connection. But once you [have] made that connection, you have gained a deep insight in yourself.
TS: Now, Friedemann, I have a working hypothesis that when people know themselves in their essence and when it starts to become one’s center of gravity, if you will, it really becomes the way you relate to yourself, everything changes. That’s my working hypothesis. And that to know yourself in your essence, it really helps to have somebody who’s had that realization point it out to you. It really helps. It accelerates the process. So I want to take advantage of this moment in time with you, this conversation, and I’m wondering, can you take our listeners through a brief process? We’re talking about less than ten minutes here and point it out. Point it out! Let’s just do it right now. Are you game?
FS: Absolutely.
TS: Let’s do it.
FS: Yes. I like to close my eyes for this, and you can too. If you just take a few moments to inhale and exhale, just gently and sweetly, allowing yourself to connect to your breath and letting your breath connect to your heart. What I would like you to imagine is that you are standing in front [of] a door that leads to your heart. Imagine that you can just call out your name and the door opens. You’re entering in this beautiful, spacious, warm, illuminated place in your heart where you find a pool of pure water. Healing, warm water that you can simply now step into. And all the heaviness that you may have felt just before is releasing as you are immersing yourself in this water and becoming more and more relaxed, more and more at peace, until you are floating like a feather.
I would like you just to imagine as you’re floating that there is a lightness, a buoyancy that you feel inside that makes you realize that you’re ready to connect to your subconscious, ready to go on this journey. At some point, you feel so light and so ready and so uplifted that you’re literally lifting out of this space, out of this pool, out into the timelessness, higher and higher and higher, all the way up there until you reach this beautiful place from where you are looking down and you can see the journey that you have been on. You can see your path of your life. You can see the present moment looking down, but you can see all that was happening before.
I want you just to go back, retrace your steps, and go gradually floating across your past and seeing yourself at different times without getting attached to any event, without wanting to lose this higher perspective. Allow yourself, go back year by year and see yourself maybe in your 40s and younger and younger to your 30s, your 20s. And you may smile at certain things you see. You see yourself in your teens all the way to when you were ten years old. You already notice how much you are letting go as you go back. A lot of what you were holding on to—personalities, ideas, the mask you may have been wearing—they’re all just falling off as you go down and back to when you were nine, eight years old, seven, six, five. And maybe you find the moment where you can see your innocent self again. There’s a moment when you look at yourself and say, “Wow, this was me in the purest expression of who I really am supposed to be. This was before the first confusion, before I felt anxiety of not being enough or not being lovable.”
Just notice this pure, innocent self, and keep on going further back, back to just when you were a little baby, to your birth. And go further back now. See yourself in the womb, nine months, eight, seven, becoming smaller and smaller. Your physical form, just at some point, a little baby in the womb, four, three months, just a little embryo, two, one. There you go to your conception, when you were conceived. And then take one step further back, one step before this conception, before you were made or before any of what you thought you and this life is about really mattered. Go back to your source, back to your origin. What you will see and feel is a vastness of a sea of unconditional love. You may feel drawn to the sea, this light.
You may feel an incredible sense of peace and lightness, and you may be able to see with all this oneness that there is you, the consciousness of what you brought in, like a drop in the ocean. You are in that consciousness, the ocean, and you are the drop. So get closer and closer to this beautiful light of your truth, essence of your being, this consciousness that you chose to bring to this light. As you’re getting closer and closer to this light that is you, that is your essence for this lifetime, imagine that you can delve into it. Just like you were a few minutes ago in this pool, go now into this essence of your being, and let yourself bathe and bask in it. And all these layers and overlays that you may have felt defined you, all these residual ideas of yourself, you can simply let them be washed away, dissolve, release them, and purely entrain yourself with this vast and unlimited nature of your essence.
Like being in a magnet where the iron filings are all aligning themselves according to the field, align yourself with your essence. No thought necessary, pure you being here. Once you feel an alignment, you can ask a question. You can ask your essence the questions around your gifts, your mission, the purpose that you chose to come here into this world for. You may get an answer right now, or simply you may let the answer come to you spontaneously during the day, maybe in a dream, but just know once you have asked, the answer will appear.
And then take this opportunity, being realigned with your essence, to send a beam of this energy and a beautiful arc like a rainbow back into the present moment to the person that is waiting for you to return in the here and now. Fill the body, each cell, spaces between the cells, all the cavities, up with this light of your essence, overflowing so that even the energy around is glowing six feet in all directions with that energy of your essence, with your signature self.
And then know that you can always come back to this place to realign yourself. You can always find yourself again. When you’re confused, when you’re distracted, when you need simply peace, when you need to let go of all this noise and everything that makes you feel so overwhelmed, you can go back to your essence and connect to that truth. Any answers will be the right, any direction you may want to follow. First and foremost, you can find yourself at peace again. Follow this arc back from your source all the way into this present moment, finding yourself, entering into your heart, into your body, feeling yourself float into this pool, coming gently back from your heart, anchoring yourself into your entire being in the now. Maybe you want to wiggle your toes, feel your fingertips rubbing together.
Notice the spaciousness right now. Notice the vibration of your essence throughout your entire being. You may, when you open your eyes, feel there’s a greater light. Maybe the colors appear brighter, more vibrant. Maybe you feel, inside of you, more clear and certain. Just observe without getting too occupied, too attached. Enjoy this first journey back to your essence. And then you can open your eyes. Welcome back.
TS: Thank you, Friedemann. What a beautiful introduction to our essence identity, journey deeper into our essence identity you took us into. Thank you.
FS: Thank you for going there.
TS: When you were describing in your own life unfolding how beyond discovering your essence identity, you found that it was very helpful to go in even beyond that and rewrite, if you will, subconscious scripts or filters that you felt were still coming up in your life, that there was a—I was curious about that. Wouldn’t knowing ourselves in our essence identity, isn’t that enough? Isn’t that the holy grail? Isn’t that good enough? We have more to do? Isn’t that enough? Then the essence identity will creatively express itself as needed. What’s left to be done?
FS: It’s a little bit like having the great GPS in your car, but not really knowing how to drive. You still have to do the driving. And your essence can tell you all the wonderful things, but if your conscious mind says, “No, no, no, no, no, no, we cannot do that.” Or if your subconscious mind says, “Yes, thank you, essence, you’re great, but we are living here in the real world. We still have to make sure that we are, I don’t know, pleasing others or hiding out, because you may get judged and that may hurt. Or we have to avoid any kind of growth, because what if we fail?”
If these old patterns are still running your life, then you go into your essence, but then you’re escaping yourself. You’re not using your essence as this propelling energy that moves you forward. You’re using it as a nice little pillow of peace and compassion, and then you go out and live in survival mode again. I needed to change my survival mode. I needed to change all those patterns that were holding me back. They were patterns of over-giving, over-pleasing, certainly the always-having-to-prove-myself pattern. There was a pattern of not really feeling lovable enough. So I certainly had to learn to trust that I’m enough and that I can learn to love myself. Even though I knew my essence, I still didn’t believe life is good. I still didn’t believe that there is a higher power that I can lean on. So all those little beliefs had to be changed too.
Beliefs are the laws of our life. If we know from our essence we are free, but then we have laws that don’t keep us free, that actually imprison us, then we are in conflict. That conflict can also really be hard for us, because it creates a lot of confusion. I felt my essence was a starting point, but then I needed to extrapolate it to go, now what? How can I start seeing myself differently? How can I engage in life differently, and how can I live with greater purpose?
TS: I don’t know if you would use this word “rescripting” or “rewriting the narrative” or “changing our beliefs,” but as you mentioned, you named three different types of belief formations that I think many of us can relate to. One, this idea that we have to please other people all the time. Let’s just take that to begin with. How did you learn—what’s the process by which instead of being crazy people pleasers, we can be more in our own integrity as we relate with other people? What’s the process?
FS: Well, the process—there are plenty of different things described in the book about this, but one thing I can just tell you, what helped me a lot was to realize that I actually deserve to take care of myself. How many of us are told self-care is selfish right from the beginning? “No, no, it’s much better.” I grew up with doctors, I was a doctor, so it was all about give to others. That’s a noble way of being. And it wasn’t about you look after yourself and make sure that you are having your needs met. So I needed to really see my worthiness, and I needed to give myself the OK that I can do it.
The second thing is, what I also found was that I can let other people be in pain without having to take on the pain. That was one of the big challenges I had. I had a lot of and I still have a lot of empathy, but I didn’t know the difference between empathy and compassion. So as soon as someone was in pain, especially my mother, I felt I needed to run in there and make her feel better. Again, “peace man.” Make sure that you are OK. I absorbed the pain, and I took it on. That pain was ultimately not anything that was less with my mother. She still was in pain no matter how much of her pain I took on. Eventually, I may have convinced her[] to get off the ledge, but I was totally exhausted. She may have felt better, I felt terrible, so it wasn’t really a win situation.
And then I realized, as much as I want to take people’s pain away, pain is also a very important force for us to grow and learn and really ultimately come to ourselves. Pain is like a wake-up call. Whether it’s a physical pain [and] we need to finally get help, or whether this is emotional pain that when we are trying to take away this from other people, maybe we also [are] taking away their opportunity to look at this pain and heal the wounds underneath it and to realize that they also have an opportunity to become whole again. That was number two I needed to learn.
And the number three was it’s OK to have boundaries. The boundaries that I discovered that were the most broken were not just the saying no or saying not yet or not now and I actually need to take care of myself. These were the external boundaries, very important. But the internal boundary, this constantly in my mind thinking and worrying, are they OK and what can I do better and how can I help? Having a boundary with myself to say, no, it’s OK. You did your part; you’re not responsible for other people’s experience and their emotions. That was the biggest boundary I had to learn. Once I realized it was OK to find that no in myself and refocus on myself, then I started to gradually also notice my own needs and unspoken desires or those wounds that were still not healed. I actually gave myself permission to take care of them.
TS: See if I’m understanding correctly this connection between deeply feeling and knowing our essence identity and shifting these patterns. It’s almost like you’re operationalizing the realization of our essence identity in how we behave? Or how would you language it?
FS: I would say connecting to your essence gives you an innate sense of I’m supposed to be here. There is an innate sense of I am, and that’s that. And it’s something that I have been looking for until my mid-30s to really know that who I am fundamentally is enough. I think that is such a freeing understanding. If you would ask a hundred people on the street, “Are you feeling that you’re enough?” I bet most people would say, “I never thought about it,” or they would say, “No, I don’t think so.” There is just something about this enough-ness that brought me a lot of peace versus giving peace to others.
The operational part is just the human experience. Yes, we are, let’s say, a spiritual being having a human experience, but never anyone teaches us how to be the best version of ourselves, the best human based on our essence. We may know how to be the best citizens or the best doctors or authors or whatever, but just really feeling like what does it mean to be the creator from this essence being in your life? What does it mean to share your gifts with the world in a way that is not limited by these old patterns that either make you hide out or give it all to others and not really feel like you’re replenishing yourself? What does it mean to live in this holistic way? We need both.
It’s a little bit like heart and mind. If the brain is running the show, we may do a really great job, but we don’t really have a feeling or a real connection. If we only live in our heart but we are not really engaging our brain, we may be all beautiful emotion, but we may not really go in a direction. We may go in circles and that could be enough, but I think we have to find the marriage between head and heart. So we have to also find the marriage between being this essence and operating as a human being in the way that we are, I believe, meant to be, which is ultimately supporting each other more now than ever. That’s where I think we are becoming these creators or leaders of our lives.
TS: I wanted to ask you more about the formation of the subconscious mind in relationship to our very early life. And in the exercise we did, we went back and you said, “See yourself as a very small child, infant. You’ll see this pure you.” In my own experience I was like, “No. Actually, there was a lot of pain that happened even when I was back in the womb and certainly in the birthing process.” I’m curious about that, what you think of imprints that can happen very early in our lives, even when we’re in the womb, let alone the whole initiation that is coming through the birth canal or being born Cesarean or whatever.
FS: It’s huge. Absolutely huge. The epigenetics and what happens early in the womb is well documented that when the mother goes through trauma and stress, that it already is not only noticed in the child because the heart rate is increasing and there are just these physiological changes happening, but long term, and now I’m talking more as a researcher, but long term there are also certain genes that are activated that are more predisposing the person to be anxious in the future based on what happened early on in the womb. Yes, this is a phenomenon that is well known subconsciously, I believe.
I love the concept of the subconscious as simply something to work with. The subconscious is ultimately our nanny as soon as we are in this physical form. It just watches over us; it pays attention. If you are in the womb, experiencing trauma—I had a client, for example, who had this trauma of—actually, he didn’t know that he had this trauma because he was always afraid of water, and he had all these recurring dreams of drowning, and he didn’t know—“I never really had any problems with water, because I always avoided it.” When we went back, he had this experience where he was a few months in the womb, and the mother almost drowned in a lake. The subconscious obviously took note of that. When he went to his mother and asked, “Is this really true? I had this really crazy experience.” She said, “Yes, it’s true. I really was fighting for my life. I just never told you, but that was something that happened. I’m so sorry that this affected you so badly.”
So the subconscious does pay attention, and then the subconscious early on draws conclusions. One of the saddest conclusion[s] that I hear very often is when people that—early in the pregnancy when the couple is fighting or the mother is actually thinking about an abortion or there is this real big existential anxiety around having another child or maybe it’s not the first and then it’s another mouth to feed, that deep guilt and shame of not being wanted, that can haunt us for a long, long time where we [are] really feeling we shouldn’t be here. We are taking up space.
So many people live according to that belief, and they’re not even aware of where it comes from, because “I never did anything wrong. I was always a kind person. I always tried to make it right. Why do I feel this way?” If they go back, they realize there’s really this deep confusion that made them take on whatever the parents were doing and made their identity according to it, because that’s what the subconscious does. It cannot find yet its own identity outside of the context that we are living in, because at that age, whether it’s in the womb or the first 15 years, we are just too young to take care of ourselves. So we depend on others.
TS: Let’s take this example that you’re bringing forward and this notion of the conscious mind and the subconscious collaborating, because I know people who have had early traumatic imprints, and they’re aware of it. They can tell you the story of it. But it also seems like they’ve bought into the idea that it’s not going to change, that it’s always going to operate in their life because it was so early, so intractable. I’m curious what you have to say about that and how there could be a collaboration that could actually generate healing.
FS: I totally hear them. It’s definitely something that if you live something for a long time, you just believe, well, this is who I am. That’s my lot in life. But the truth is, your subconscious is so attached to keeping you safe that all it knows is to make you feel this way so that you are not getting hurt. I had this one client who was beaten as a young child by his father all the time. When he was older, he was still beating himself up, not just with words but with images, because it was safer to expect to be beaten again than feeling free. When someone believes they’re not supposed to be here, it feels safer to hold on to this belief because the idea of “What if I all of a sudden feel I deserve to be here? What if I all of a sudden feel like I can be myself, speak up, have expectations for people to be nice to me, and then what? What if I’m shown again that I’m not wanted and that I don’t deserve to be here?”
It’s much harder to go up and fall down than to stay small without any hope. The reason why the subconscious holds on to that is that it doesn’t trust in the conscious mind. This is really important: that the conscious mind needs to take on the role of the one the subconscious can lean on, can trust in and feel safe with. Most of us, unfortunately, are repeating whatever has been done to us, consciously and subconsciously, because that’s all we think we deserve or all we know. I often ask people, “How do you treat your children?” “Oh, with love and kindness. I’m so forgiving. I’m so patient.” “How do you treat yourself?” “I’m really hard on myself. I always judge myself.” “How did your parents treat you?” “They were always hard on me. They were always impatient with me.” We treat ourselves how we were treated, and we treat others, especially those we love, how we want to be treated and how we really are in our nature.
If we learn to treat ourselves like we treat those we love, the subconscious will finally realize, huh, there’s another way. I can actually feel safe in love. I can actually see that I’m a good person who makes a difference. I can see that I deserve to be happy. But for that, the subconscious needs to really be shown, at least for a few months, that it’s safer and more desirable to follow this path of peace and happiness than going back into this pattern of survival. And the discipline to be the one that is taking on the role of I am now your safe keeper. I am the one that you can find love in. Not anyone outside of you needs to be the scary ones, because I am here for you to feel and experience life in a different way. That discipline takes a little bit for the subconscious to say, OK, you’re right. I don’t have to do this anymore.
That is where, I think, we are such a society of instant change and gratification that we don’t always allow ourselves to work in this way. But if we do, similar to what you said about the essence, everything is changing. Once your subconscious trusts the conscious mind, it does go out of self-protective survival mode.
TS: Describe to me a conscious mind set of behaviors or activities or modeling demonstration such that the subconscious says, “I can trust that. I can trust that.”
FS: It depends on what the subconscious was trying to do. Let’s say, as the one that says, “I don’t deserve to be here. I don’t really belong here.” Usually, those people are very small. They don’t really express themselves. They don’t necessarily ask for what they want. They also wear colors that seem to be more blending in than standing out. So one behavior could just be to show the subconscious that it’s OK to be seen. It’s OK to say what you want. It’s OK to speak up. And that’s in small ways. The fact is that most people do the right thing. I have lots of people that would say, “I am a complete invisible wallflower, just not in work. In work, I’m shining. In work, I’m a leader. In work, I’m really someone people look up to,” but it doesn’t compute to them that whatever they do there says also something about them. That whatever they do there that makes them feel safe, they can also do in their personal life.
The important thing is that we are owning that we are in many ways already living outside our self-protective modes and that it’s safe to do this. I have people tell me, “Oh my God, I was so worried. And then I did go on another date,” or, “I did actually ask these other moms if they want to have a coffee. That was a big thing for me.” And then I ask them, “Did you celebrate? Did you take this in? Did you show your subconscious, see, it’s safe?” “Oh, no, no, no. I was too busy just being relieved and worrying already about the next time.”
It’s like our successes, things that we are actually doing well, our changes, out of habit we are not really grateful for them. We are not appreciating ourself enough. That is, I think, something where the subconscious just doesn’t see the world as our creation. It just sees as duck and cover. We dodged the bullet, but who knows? The next one will come, because in our mind, we are not necessarily seeing that we do actually have already so many more reasons to believe in ourselves than to doubt ourselves.
TS: OK, Friedemann, I’m going to make myself vulnerable here for a moment. My pattern is the super achiever pattern. If I achieve enough, maybe I’ll be worth something, even though I know deep inside that value is inherently the nature of my being. How do I help my subconscious know? What behaviors would tell my subconscious I know I’m valuable? I don’t have to make X number of dharma programs between now and tomorrow morning or make Y amount of money. I’m good. I’m good. What do I do? What behaviors?
FS: It sounds like me. I definitely had this achiever pattern, too, but for me it was, I think, recognizing that all the achievements didn’t give me lasting peace. No matter how much I achieved, as soon as I achieved something, I already thought about the next thing I had to achieve. It wasn’t really sinking in as a part of my worthiness. In that regard, I just felt, OK, wait a second, so I can achieve, but I need to achieve with a different motivation. I need to achieve from a place of this is my passion, this is my purpose, this is my contribution. I don’t need to achieve to get something in return, any kind of approval or accolades or being seen as something. All of those things I need to find in different ways.
I need to find this by seeing myself, by seeing myself as one who is not defined by my achievements, by seeing my worthiness by petting a cat, by helping a little bug turn back on its feet, by having a nice conversation with a friend. All the normal things that make me human that I didn’t see as enough, making those things enough, making my presence, my essence, my being enough. Then the attachment to the achievements decreased dramatically. I just felt in that moment, OK, achievements are nice. I will always be a creator. I always like to do things. But it just felt more like an expansion than something out of a need. I don’t know if this resonates with you.
TS: It does a lot. Yeah. You write in The Empowerment Solution, “Although it may appear that our subconscious only cares about our safety, it has another mission: to make us happy.” And I thought, first of all, how does Friedemann know what the mission is of the subconscious? And then I thought, well, I can track with him in terms of this idea that it wants to keep us safe. That just intuitively makes sense. But the subconscious also wants to make us happy? I’m going to have to ask Friedemann about that so he can explain that to me.
FS: The best example—and of course, you could say that’s a terrible example, but it’s a good example because the subconscious likes to give us some kind of satisfaction. Smoking is a perfect example. We know all it’s totally unhealthy. It’s bad. You’re probably going to get a heart attack or maybe cancer. The subconscious would actually get it and say, oh, no, no, stay away from those cigarettes. But it feels so good. It feels so relaxing. It’s such a relief. And so the subconscious says, yeah, I’m going to let you smoke because you’re just so much happier this way than when you are in stress mode.
So it can be a really powerful drive, this looking for happiness. But it’s also true when we do find our passion, when we have our routines, when we wake up at 6:30 in the morning because we love to go to the gym, it’s not the alarm that wakes you up. It’s your subconscious saying, hey, you’re excited. Let’s go. Let’s do it. And it just keeps you motivated. This is not always a conscious decision. The emotions that we have are not all just negative, self-protective emotions. We have a whole big array of positive emotions. If we are subscribing to the idea that emotions are not intellectual but that they are something from a deeper part of us, what about curiosity? What about fulfillment? What about ecstasy? Bliss? All of those emotions are also emotions that would come from that subconscious part.
Those emotions are not designed to protect us. Those emotions are designed to elevate us, to make us thrive. But as I said before, if the subconscious says you’re not safe in the world, it will first hold on to that and not necessarily make you be all joyful, because that doesn’t feel really necessary. It’s more important to make it another day.
TS: Now, Friedemann, to end our conversation, I wonder if you’d be willing to share a story with me of someone you worked with who did embody the discipline that gave their subconscious the willingness to trust them when it came to safety. At first it was like, “No, I’m not going to trust you.” But there was a journey, and the person made that journey. Share a story with us.
FS: There is Mary. Mary was a woman that I met in her early 60s. She came to me because she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that didn’t allow her to swallow solid food. The doctors basically said, “Sorry for that. You probably have to end up on a feeding tube.” And for her, this was a non-acceptable option. So she said, “I need to find another way. This is not something I want to live in.” So she connected to me to get more into her subconscious mind-body connection and so on. When we looked at her story, what Mary was dealing with was the classic pleaser-and-avoider pattern in regards to having a very stern mother who was very unpredictable, often abusive, and she made Mary always eat her food. And she was a terrible cook. Mary often remembered how eating the food was torture in itself because she had to really push it down. It always made her almost want to throw up, but she couldn’t because she would get in deep trouble with her mother. So until she was 18 years old, she was force-fed this food. Swallowing was something that already there was a big issue for her.
Now, Mary made a big break by saying, “I’m going to move away from the East Coast and go all the way to the West Coast to get as far away from my mother.” That was a big jump for her. At the beginning it all worked out, but then the guilt set in. The mother made more of those calls of why you’re not there and how dare you? So the umbilical cord stretched all across the country and made her more and more miserable.
But again, Mary didn’t give up. She became an artist. She had her own company. Things were going well. She even met someone who actually loved and was showing her that she’s worthy. But the deep nagging feeling that she doesn’t deserve so much happiness, especially as long as her mother is miserable, brought her into more and more inner conflict and inner turmoil. Yes, on the outside everything is good, but there must be something bad happening because I don’t deserve so much good things, especially if it is at the expense of my mother. So this friction inside created an autoimmune disease, which is what autoimmune diseases are. They are battling ourselves. This battle started to rage inside of her and created exactly in the area she felt the most vulnerable, that inflammation in her swallow tube, in her esophagus. She basically felt like, I’m trapped. I’m trapped between my past and my present.
Something inside of her said, the only way out of this conflict is for you to die, to waste away. What Mary did was making a stand by saying no to the doctors and saying, “Yes, I have to heal myself. I have to believe in myself. I need to reclaim my right over my life.” So we started working on releasing the emotions of the past, working on finding her self-worth. And what Mary did was diligently comforting this inner child that was still afraid of the mother, diligently working on herself to set boundaries to only be in writing communication, no longer hearing the berating voice of her mother. Diligently also start[ing] to see her goodness. She was an artist, so she drew all these little images and comics of herself being a superhero and showing to her subconscious that you can do this. We are here for a purpose. We are not here the slaves of Mother. We can create so much beauty and change, and look at all these people that love us.
After six months of working together, she actually felt so much better. And she felt for the first time in her life not guilty anymore not to go back to visit her mother for her yearly visit, but say, “No, sorry. I have to take care of myself.” And then she started trying solid food again. And she tried to eat first a little salmon and a little mashed potatoes, and that actually went down. That was great. And then she became a little bit more brave, always continuously really working on herself until she was back to normal, until now.
Before I published the book, I checked in with her, and she said she’s doing great and she eats normal food. Yes, sometimes there are still some emotions coming up but mainly with the family that she married into, not with her mother anymore. And she just feels the solid ground of finally having claimed her right to be here. And nurturing and eating and feeding yourself is such a basic right that she had felt her mother had taken away early in her childhood. When she was able to reclaim it, her life changed as well.
TS: Thank you, Friedemann, for telling us that story. I am going to ask you one final, final question, which is I read in the acknowledgments of The Empowerment Solution—and sometimes I do that. I don’t know if everybody likes to read the acknowledgements, but I often read them.
FS: I don’t think so. It’s wonderful.
TS: I often read them even before I read the book, but you wrote, “Last but not least, thank you to my essence and guides.” Then you continued, “Their input and inspiration kept this book in alignment with its higher purpose, to reconnect with our truth and open our hearts to love and compassion so that we can transcend the self-protective patterns that separate us from ourselves, one another, and our sacred responsibility to become the caring stewards of this planet.”
The sentence that got my attention, “Thank you to my essence and guides.” I wanted to ask you about that because you’re an MD, you have a PhD in molecular biology, and you are thanking not just your essence but your guides. I thought it’s important, because often people would keep something like that to themselves. They wouldn’t put it anywhere in their book, and yet you included it, obviously because there’s a sense of gratitude that you feel that’s immense enough. Who are your guides? What does that mean?
FS: I have a whole bunch of them, but the thing is that I know that they’re there or whatever we want to call it. I think these are my guides because this book is not written by me. It started with a little walk that we used to do around our neighborhood, and all of a sudden, the clarity came in. This is your next book. It was just so clear. It was not something that I was hitting my head against the wall. It was just clear. When I was writing the book, I just noticed there were so many things that just came together. All of a sudden, I saw a little note or some author that, wow, interesting, I got to look it up. It was exactly what I needed to hear, exactly the inspiration I needed to get, whether I was doing research—and there’s so much research out there. I found always like a blind person, the right space, the right way.
When I reread the book—I did an audio version of it, and I reread the whole book. I realized I did not write this book. Who wrote this book? It wasn’t me. It just felt so much more something that was done in collaboration with my essence, my higher self, guides or whatever. My brain was certainly a part of it, but it was just a beautiful way for me to also realize this is meant to be. And I think we all have that. We all get steered in the direction.
Just briefly coming back to you, I think when you talk about your purpose and when you talk about being someone who loves achievements and so on, I also do believe a lot of your achievements and a lot of your directions are probably guided and not just coming as your “brain children,” but also something that you know you are meant to do here. I certainly admire and really love what you’re doing in the world for that. I know that you’re here, a big light. Thank you for being here.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Dr. Friedemann Schaub. He is the author of the new book The Empowerment Solution. Also, a book with Sounds True called The Fear and Anxiety Solution. Joining us here from the south of France with a stable of horses and cats in his home, beautiful, bright soul. Thank you so much, Friedemann Schaub.
FS: Thank you.
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