Tag Archives: mindfulness

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Pip: Liberty Psychological Association — where the unconscious mind, the words we choose, and the people who disappear without texting back all get equal billing.

Mara: Shervan K Shahhian at Liberty Psychological Association covers a lot of ground this week — conscious versus unconscious processing, how language shapes perception and identity, the psychology of ghosting, and what it means to feel a movement before you make it.

Pip: Let’s start with the foundational stuff — what the mind actually is, and why most of it is running without your permission.

The Conscious and Unconscious Mind

Mara: The post on conscious versus unconscious mind lays out a core distinction: one is the spotlight, the other is everything the spotlight isn’t hitting.

Pip: The post puts it plainly: “The conscious mind is what you know you are thinking. The unconscious mind is the vast amount of mental activity influencing you outside awareness.”

Mara: So the unconscious isn’t mystical — it’s automatic habits, implicit memory, emotional conditioning, all the processing that happens before conscious thought catches up. Modern neuroscience supports that framing.

Pip: Which connects directly to anxiety among college students — a lot of what drives that anxiety operates the same way, beneath deliberate awareness.

Mara: Right. And the labeling post adds another layer: when we assign a name to a diagnosis or emotion, that label itself shapes how the mind processes the experience — for better or worse.

Pip: The language we use turns out to do more work than most people realize — which is exactly where things get interesting.

Words That Shape Reality

Mara: The post on hypnotic language opens up a question: how much of what words do to us happens without us noticing?

Pip: The post defines it directly: “Hypnotic language is a way of using words to guide attention, influence internal experience, and increase suggestibility, may often be without the listener fully noticing how it’s happening.”

Mara: What that means in practice is that techniques like embedded suggestions, presuppositions, and pacing work because they route around conscious filtering — the conscious mind hears a casual statement while something else is already being processed underneath.

Pip: It’s the linguistic equivalent of the unconscious mind doing its thing — and it’s not limited to therapy rooms.

Mara: The post on person-first language — “they have schizophrenia” versus “they are schizophrenic” — shows exactly that. A single word choice either fuses someone’s identity with a diagnosis or holds those two things apart. That’s real influence, no trance required.

Mara: And the labeling post extends this further: labels can clarify and guide treatment, but they can also calcify into self-concept. Someone who internalizes “I’m broken” as a fixed identity is experiencing the same mechanism — language shaping the internal world.

Pip: So whether it’s a hypnotic script or a diagnostic shorthand, the words land somewhere below the surface.

Mara: That same dynamic — avoidance, silence, the absence of words — shows up in a very different context next.

Ghosting and the Psychology of Disappearing

Pip: Ghosting is the subject here — not just what it is, but what it reveals about the person doing it.

Mara: The post on ghosting frames the core tension clearly: “Being ghosted may feel confusing because there’s no closure. Usually, the healthiest approach is to avoid chasing indefinitely, assume the silence is an answer, and move forward.”

Pip: The upshot is that ghosting is almost always about the ghoster’s coping limits — conflict avoidance, avoidant attachment, overwhelm — not a verdict on the person being ghosted.

Mara: A companion post on ghost movement takes the concept in a different direction — the perceptual experience of sensing motion that isn’t there, driven by hypervigilance or pattern recognition in ambiguous environments. It’s a reminder that absence and ambiguity both prompt the mind to fill in the gaps.

Pip: Whether it’s a person going silent or a shadow at the edge of vision, the mind insists on finding meaning. From disappearing people to the felt sense of movement itself.

Feeling Movement From the Inside

Mara: Kinesthetic imagery is the focus here — specifically, what it means to feel a movement rather than just picture it.

Pip: The post defines the distinction precisely: “Kinesthetic imagery is a form of mental imagery where you feel a movement rather than just see it in your mind. Instead of picturing an action like a movie, you internally simulate the sensations, muscle tension, balance, timing, weight, and motion.”

Mara: The reason this works is neurological — kinesthetic imagery activates some of the same motor planning pathways as actual movement. The mind can practice without the body executing. That has real applications in sports performance, rehabilitation, and reducing performance anxiety.

Pip: It also connects back to the ghost movement post — athletes describe kinesthetic rehearsal as a ghost movement happening inside the body. The same perceptual machinery that misfires under hypervigilance is the one elite performers deliberately engage.

Mara: And the post notes it pairs well with attentional guidance and automaticity training — essentially installing movement patterns below the threshold of conscious effort.

Pip: So this week’s territory runs from the unconscious architecture of the mind, through the words that quietly reshape it, all the way to the body rehearsing movements it hasn’t made yet.

Mara: The thread connecting all of it is how much consequential processing happens outside deliberate awareness — and how much the language we use, or withhold, shapes what surfaces.

Pip: More from Liberty Psychological Association next time.