Chapter 28 - Making the Unconscious Conscious- Why You Keep Repeating the Same Patterns

Making the Unconscious Conscious- Why You Keep Repeating the Same Patterns 

What if the life you’re living isn’t random… but patterned? 

In this powerful episode of Burn It Down and Begin Again, Erica dives into the work of Carl Jung to explore one of the most confronting—and freeing—truths of personal growth: the parts of you that remain unconscious are the ones quietly running your life. 

If you’ve ever found yourself repeating the same relationship patterns, reacting in ways you don’t fully understand, or feeling stuck in cycles you can’t seem to break… this episode will hit home. 

Erica breaks down Jung’s most impactful concepts—the shadow, projection, unconscious patterns, and individuation—not as abstract psychology, but as real, usable tools for change. Through deeply personal stories and raw reflection, she shows how awareness becomes the turning point between repeating your past and rewriting your future. 

This episode is about: 

•  Why your patterns are not bad luck—but signals 
•  How your unconscious beliefs shape your relationships, choices, and identity 
•  The truth about triggers—and what they reveal about you 
•  Why healing requires facing, not avoiding, your shadow 
•  How to stop living on autopilot and start choosing differently 

If you’re ready to stop calling it “fate” and start calling it what it is—a pattern you can change—this conversation will shift something in you.
 
Because once you see it… you can’t unsee it.
 And once you become aware… you become powerful.
 
This episode is part of the Chickology podcast collective—real women, real stories, real transformation.
 
If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And remember:
 
You are not too broken.
You are not too late.
And you are never alone.
 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

What if the life you think is happening to you is actually being run by parts of you that you've never examined? Carl Jung said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. So the question is, are you living your life or are your patterns living it for you? There are parts of you you don't see, but they are running everything. Your relationships, your reactions, your choices. Carl Jung called this the shadow, and ignoring it doesn't make it disappear, it just makes it louder. If you keep ending up in the same situations with different people, that's not bad luck. That's pattern. Carl Jung said what you don't face inside yourself will keep showing up in your life until you do. Today on Burn It Down and Begin Again, we're stepping into the work of Carl Jung. Not as philosophy, but as a tool. A tool to understand what's been operating beneath the surface of your life and how to use that awareness to make different choices moving forward. Because once you see the pattern, you can change the direction. Welcome to Burn It Down and Begin Again. Because sometimes the only way out is through the fire. I'm Erica, and I'll tell my story one chapter at a time. Not to relive the pain, but to reclaim the power that was buried beneath it. Too many of us carry stories like mine of trauma, silence, survival, and shame alone. But healing isn't just about surviving what hurt us. It's about becoming the people that we were meant to be. It's about transforming pain into purpose and rebuilding life on our own terms. If you hear yourself in my words, know this. You are not crazy, you are not broken, and you are definitely not alone. Now let's begin. Hi, I'm Erica, and I want to welcome you to this chapter of Burn It Down and Begin Again. Thank you for being here. I want to take a second to thank those of you who are showing up every week, who are giving me your feedback, and who are a part of this growing community of people who are committed to reclaiming their lives right where they are, right where they're starting from. I appreciate each and every one of you. And I will ask you if you are on a platform, whether it be Amazon or Spotify or Apple, please take a moment just to go and give me a rating and leave a comment. It really, really helps a lot. And I appreciate you guys taking the time to do this. Thank you so much. So, as always, I start with a challenge of the week. And this week, my challenge is about learning to balance rest and recovery. Because if I'm honest, when my body tells me to stop, like really stop, I struggle with it. I'll hit these moments where I feel like I need to completely shut down. And even though I know that I need it, my mind is not quiet. It gets louder. Everything that I need to do, everything that I want to do, and most especially everything that I feel like I should be doing, it all shows up at once and it's so loud in my head. And I recently started using this tool called Luminate, and it's this really cool device that's supposed to help me get into a more meditative, creative, or even relaxed state, depending on the program that I'm I'm uh putting it on. And basically, this is a headset, it uh goes over your eyes, it completely blacks you out, you close your eyes, and then you run the app and you know you've got your earphones in, so you've got this really nice uh, you know, voice or just music that corresponds with the visual effects that are happening. So these bright LEDs flash behind your uh eyes, and of course you keep your eyes closed, but it's supposed to stimulate the uh the cerebral cortex that with the front of your brain, right? And with different light sequences coupled with the sound and different tones that will help you achieve a state of zen or of more focus or more creativity. I've been using it and I actually really have enjoyed it. But I'll tell you what, this week I really, really shut down and instead of it calming my mind, it almost amplified the noise because I'm sitting there watching the lights, you know, and my thoughts are getting sharper, not quieter. And I think that's part of the process, right? But I'm realizing something. I don't struggle with rest because I don't need it. I struggle with it because I don't feel safe in it. I don't feel safe in rest a lot of times. There's this constant pressure, like there's not enough time to do all the things that I want to do. Like I need to keep moving, keep building, keep going, keep, you know, building upon myself and doing my projects. So when my body forces a reset, as it often literally does with me, it's like, okay, you are done. You are exhausted. You either, I don't really get sick very often, but what will happen is my mind will just turn to jelly and I'll feel like I have zero motivation and I feel like I just need to eat and sleep. I do that, but then my mind labels it as falling behind, right? And I'm starting to try to see that differently. I know cognitively that rest is the, you know, is not the opposite of progress. It's part of it. But when that guilt shows up, that's my conditioning. It's not truth. So this week, my challenge is really simple. I have to allow the reset without turning it into a problem for myself. Because if I can't sit still and turn that off, it doesn't matter how much I accomplish. It's going to backfire in the end if I can't take that time to rest and reflect and to be able to get that nourishment in terms of rest, because rest is a nourishment, you guys, into my body. And that brings me directly into today's episode. Because what I'm describing, the noise, the pattern, that internal pressure, that's exactly what Carl Jung was talking about. And today we are going to talk about Carl Jung, the parts of us that operate beneath the surface, the ones that we don't question, and the ones that quietly end up running our lives. So let's dive in. So Carl Jung and the work of becoming who you truly are. Jung was one of the most prolific and influential figures in modern psychology because he went deeper than behavior or diagnosis or symptom management. He really explored the unconscious, the shadow and the archetypes, the individualization and that lifelong process of becoming who you actually are instead of becoming who you were conditioned to be. Young was not interested in polishing the surface of life. He was more interested in wholeness. And that matters a lot to me because at this stage of my life, I'm less interested in performing strength and more interested in integrating truth. Well, that's not entirely true. I am, of course, in interested in my performing strength. But let's put it this way: it has to be integrated with that truth inside, right? So I'm less interested in looking healed, and I'm more interested about being honest, what's still living underneath the surface. And that's why his work really, really speaks to me. It's like an excavation of oneself. So let's look at the first one. And these are often misquoted on social media, but uh here's a great one. Your vision will become clear only when you look into your own heart. Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakes. So most people build their lives outwardly, right? We all do. Career, relationships, achievement, approval. We live in Western society, and that's very common, right? We keep looking outside of ourselves for direction, for validation, confirmation, and for identity. And that is normal. I think that's the way that we're raised from a very early age. We talked about this before. That simple question, what do you want to be when you grow up, right? And that becomes a whole can of worms because it sets us up for everything else in our life that comes afterwards. What do you want to be? And everything is focused on the outside and becoming and achieving. But clarity doesn't come from more noise. It doesn't come from a performing version of yourself that other people can applaud. Although those things feel nice, it actually comes from self-confrontation. Awakening begins the moment you stop asking, what do they want from me? And start asking, what is actually true for me? And that is a question that can rearrange a whole life. If your path feels unclear right now, maybe the answer is not more information. Maybe the answer is silence. Maybe it's true honesty with yourself. Maybe the answer is finally sitting still long enough to hear yourself. And that's what I did this weekend. I had a lot of time to just kind of shut down. And I found myself wanting to go into my head and examine all the things that I needed to do and all the things that needed to get done instead of actually focusing on my rest and recovery and kind of just listening to that inner voice guide me instead of all that outside noise. So that was really a challenge for me. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. That's one of my favorites. And it's brutal because it removes victimhood, right? The unconscious is your conditioning, your wounds, your beliefs, your patterns, your unprocessed pain, the emotional software running in the background while you tell yourself that life just keeps happening to you. And if you don't examine it, you're gonna repeat it. You're gonna choose the same kind of relationships, the same emotional dynamics, and the same self-abandonment, the same fear, the same overgiving, that same story. And you're gonna call it fate. You're gonna say, it's bad luck. This always happens to me. But very often it's just a pattern. In fact, most of the time it is patterned. And that was a hard truth for me because once I started to see my own patterns, overgiving, over-merging, self-erasing, making myself smaller, trying to earn safety, trying to earn love, trying to be indispensable, I couldn't unsee that. And that absolutely was a pattern for my whole life. And once you see that pattern, you've you have to become responsible for it. That is the beginning of freedom. Not when life changes first, but when your awareness changes. So I'll give you a case in point in my life. After I divorced, I felt like I needed to try and date again. So it was like maybe two years post-divorce, and I started dating this guy, and he seemed very different than my ex-husband. But about six months into dating him, I realized that he was treating me in many of the same ways, that he had a kind of a callous disregard for my needs, and he was more focused on what I could do for him. So it was that same pattern of person that I was picking, different guy, looked different, but really the same core elements. And I realized very profoundly at that time the problem was not the guy, it was me. My picker was broken. And I made a promise to myself that I would not date again until I did the inner work, until I began to really truly deeply understand why I kept picking a different version of the same person over and over again. And the funny thing is, guys, I have not dated since. And the interesting thing is I learned about myself once I started doing that inner work and sitting with that and really understanding that I was choosing these men that were going to mistreat me because of the way that, you know, whatever their psychological makeup was, my psychological makeup was picking these guys. And I realized that I, along the way that I loved my own company. I learned that I could count on myself. I learned that romantic relationships are very different than friendships and relationships, say, with your children. Those relationships don't have the same expectations as a romantic partner. A romantic partner, because when somebody is involved in your romantic, you know, sphere or they're your romantic partner, not only are you physically intimate with them, but you also are sharing your day-to-day life. You know, what do they want for dinner? What do you want for dinner? What do they want to watch? What do you want to watch? What do you want to do on the weekend? Integrating your kids or your, you know, friends or whatever. There's so much integration going on. It does often require a lot of self-sacrifice. And that's where I made the determination for myself that I wanted to live a life that would revolve around my friends, myself, and my kids, and that I could create something beautiful and have more energy to spend creating in a short amount of time the kind of life that I wanted to create for myself. And I have loved that decision for myself every step of the way. I am not lonely. As a matter of fact, that's something I think I'm going to dive into next week, which is loneliness for next week's podcast, because I do see a lot of loneliness and I don't feel it, but I do see it a lot in the world. But anyway, I took that time to really utilize that particular philosophy of young into my own life, and it's made a huge difference. And I can tell you that I wake up every day very satisfied with who I am. I really do understand my patterns and relationships, and I have vowed not ever to make them again. Here's another one. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. That is projection. And projection is uncomfortable because it's humbling. When somebody triggers you, really, really triggers you, and I had that happen to me this last week, it doesn't just annoy you, but it activates something deeper. Usually there is information there. Sometimes it's a trait that you've discovered in yourself. Sometimes it's a boundary you have refused to set, or it is a strength you never gave your permission to embody. Sometimes it's pain you buried and you're now seeing it reflected back at you. So shadow work is not about shaming yourself. It is about reclaiming the parts of yourself you were taught to suppress, reject, or hide. And for women, especially, this matters because many of us were rewarded for being agreeable, selfless, accommodating, emotionally available, endlessly giving. And later we wonder why we feel resentment, depletion, invisibility, and rage. And that was such the story of my life, right? We have to be responsible for that. We did that to ourselves. Part of that rage may be the shadow knocking, and part of that irritation may be the self saying, hey, guess what? I'm still here. So I gotta tell you, that happened to me this week. I had a run-in with my ex-husband, who I usually get along really great with. But without getting too deep into the story, he really triggered me. He has a tendency to, uh, I think we both do, honestly, of interrupt one another or maybe try to get our points across because I don't know, for me, I feel like I was stifled for so long. I think I do have a tendency to want to get my point across. I was still trying to look back on the situation and kind of dive into it. And a couple of interesting things happen to me when I have a situation like this with him, which I do occasionally. There is this automatic shutdown that occurs where I don't want to remember or think about the situation. And that is, again, that unconscious being conscious, right? That survival mechanism kicking in where I have this really uncomfortable interaction with him. And I go back to reflect on it, and my mind's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It doesn't, it doesn't want to look at it. So that's the first barrier that I had to get back. And then the second one was my reaction. I felt like he railroaded me and wouldn't let me talk and kept, you know, speaking over me. I mean, this very quickly escalated from something that shouldn't have been a big deal into this big situation. And he was so loud and vehement about it. He's still very much the same person that I literally started to cry. I literally, I just felt all of this emotion well up in me, all of those years of feeling suppressed, of feeling squashed, of feeling unheard, of feeling unimportant. They are still there. Man, those things, I don't know if they'll ever heal, right? I mean, I think I have to learn to live with them. They've healed in the sense that I don't allow that into my life anymore. But in this particular instance, tears welled up in my eyes, and I just felt so frustrated and so angry and so squashed and so unheard. His response was to storm out of the house. And I got up in my in my car and left. And we we haven't spoken for like five days. I just spoke to him the first time this morning. And it's interesting because the minute we started to discuss it again, those defense mechanisms go into place for both of us. All right, let's look at another one. No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. This is one of the most honest things ever said about growth. You don't become light by avoiding darkness, and you don't become strong by pretending you're fine by cutting off every part of yourself that feels painful, messy, ashamed, or angry, needy, or wounded. Growth requires that confidence without confrontation is fragile, and healing without grief is incomplete. We need to grieve. Peace without truth is performance. So some of the deepest growth in my life did not come from success. It actually all came from my collapse. It came from the addiction, it came from betrayal, it came from loss, it came from being forced to look at parts of myself that I think I would have rather avoided.

unknown 16:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

And I think that's true for a lot of us. So if you're in a dark season right now, it may not be punishment. Take a look at it, guys. It just may be root expansion. This may be an opportunity for you to take a look at what lies underneath and really look at it as uncomfortable as it is. One of my other favorites is the privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. Not the person who people applaud, or the people, you know, the person that people can use, or the person who keeps the peace, not the one who earns approval, not who performs competence while secretly falling apart. It's gotta be you. That is the work. Most people never really become themselves. They become roles, right? They become adaptations, defenses, masks. They become what was necessary, what was rewarded, what was expected. But but individuation is different. Individuation is the stripping away. It's not always about becoming more. Sometimes it's about becoming less. And I think midlife brings us to that question. It brings it into really sharp focus, actually. Who am I without the mask? Who am I without the performance? And who am I without the need to be wanted, needed, admired, chosen, and validated? Who am I when I stop negotiating with my own soul? That's not a small question. That is a big life question, you guys. And finally, this I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become. And that doesn't deny pain. It doesn't minimize trauma, but it does not pretend that the past didn't matter either. It says something harder. It says that your pain actually shaped you. And I know my pain shaped me, but it does not mean you get to own it forever. Agency begins when you separate identity from injury. What happened to you, it matters deeply, but it is not the whole story. And the moment that you stop building your identity entirely around the wound, you create room for a new self to emerge. That is adulthood at a deep psychological level. Not blaming yourself for what happened, but taking responsibility for what happens next. And to me, that is the heart of Young's work. What is unconscious inside you shapes the life outside of you. Your beliefs, especially the one that you never questioned, build your reality. And if you truly inside believe that you are unworthy, you are gonna tolerate more. If you believe that you are not enough, you're gonna overprove. If you believe that love has to be earned, you're gonna chase it. And if you believe that abandonment is inevitable, you will either cling or withdraw before anybody gets too close. Your patterns reveal your beliefs. And until you make those beliefs conscious, they're gonna continue to write your story from the underground. So today, don't ask what you want to become as much as asking yourself something more honest. What do I actually believe about myself right now? And that can be hard to look at. Not the polished answer or the spiritual answer or the aspirational answer, right? But the honest one. How do you really feel about yourself? Because when you change the belief, you change the behavior. And the only way we can do that is by looking at the root. When you change that behavior, you get to change the pattern. And when you change the pattern, then that's when your life starts to change. And that's not surface positivity, that is responsibility and consciousness and the work of becoming. Thank you guys for being here and holding this part of my story with me. If it resonated with you, share it with someone who might need to hear it. And if you're walking through your own fire right now, remember this you are not too broken, you are not too late, and you are never ever alone. This is Burn It Down and Begin Again. I'm Erica, and I'll see you in the next chapter.