CHAPTER 6 - Grounding Efforts of a Dreamer

A hidden childhood trauma is any experience that presents the child’s mind with a stimulus too powerful to be assimilated in a normal way. This stimulus results in the child experiencing a state of helplessness and the subconscious mind taking over the system by blocking the memory from processing as normal.

But this protective action doesn’t come without its consequences. And this interference into the psyche of the child by turning on the survival mode beginning from the very early stages of his life generates a very particular type of behavioral pattern in his future. It creates a threshold where the child has a hard time establishing a base of normality in his life therefore starts to gradually retreat from the real world to safer alternatives like dreams, books, and films; or not so safer ones like stimulants, alcohol and drugs.

Furthermore, this tendency of escaping the reality makes them even more vulnerable to the unrealistic messaging of the commercial film industry. They tend to unconsciously buy-in to the distorted fictional identities and relationships that they regard as ideal; and connect in a deeper level with the idealized goals and messaging that they have been constantly exposed through their environment.

And not so surprisingly, most children with hidden childhood trauma, later in life, describe the period around their age of 25, as their darker moments in their lives; at which time they leave their families and get out to the real world where for the first time they realize that the fantasy and the promise of a normal life that they were aspiring simply wasn't there like it was in the movies. Coincidentally this is usually the same time that they recollect their hidden memories from their childhood and either start to drown in it with recurring bad patterns or start to dive with it and begin the process of healing.

This is the story of a hidden childhood trauma survivor who, one day out of nowhere, witness his life unraveling after recalling the worst memory from if its childhood. Suddenly he realizes that everything he believed in for his entire life and the hole inside of him that he was trying to fulfill all along was simply an unreachable, imaginary and brilliantly crafted marketing strategy created by the commercial film industry and television.

This is the grounding efforts of a dreamer… An attempt to find one’s true self and re-learn how to live with as an adult with new ground rules. This is a journey of healing the pains of a trauma, cleaning the subconscious mind and creating a road-map on how to reverse engineer the obnoxious behavioral patterns that the commercial film industry carved into our minds.

personal works: http://boraomeroglu.com/

CHAPTER 5 - The Journey Begins

A grown-up who, one day out of the blue, uncovers the worst possible memory from if its childhood, realizes that the hole that he was trying to fill all along with his ambitions, awards and achievements; was simply an unreachable and brilliantly crafted marketing strategy created by the commercial film industry and television.

Let's start from the beginning...

“Children with hidden childhood traumas tend to generate a very particular type of behavioral pattern since they’re very little; and instead of living their life fully, they tend to perceive life as something to survive in it.” Middelton-Moz MS, Jane - Author (Children of Trauma).

Hence the children with hidden childhood trauma usually have a hard time establishing a base of normality in their lives. They unconsciously define their environment as hostile and grow a tendency to escape from it with every chance they get by the help of books, films and television. This ‘unknown’ pain that they feel inside, also keeps them from connecting with others and give them the constant feeling like they’re missing something in their lives.

“People don't just buy products, they buy feelings! They buy identities! All humans at some level want to feel significant in their lives.” Lee Clow

Also this hidden blueprint that they carry around makes them extremely vulnerable to the commercial film industry when they're grow up. For instance a formulated and idealized fictional relationship of a father/son in a television show, written deliberately to sell more ice-creams to 6-12-year-olds; can become more appealing for the child than the reality itself and establish a new aspiration for his life... Same example applies in various other life situations with tempting distorted facts, unrealistic goals and fairy-tale conclusions.

“Most children with hidden childhood trauma, later in life, describe the period around their age of 25-30, as their darker moments in their lives; at which time they leave their families and get out to the real world where for the first time they realize that the fantasy and the promise of a normal life that they were aspiring simply wasn't there like it was in the movies.”  Lorie Dwinell - Author (After the Tears).

This is also the same period in their lives that they develop addictions, experience constant problems at work, repeat dysfunctional relationships, and face similar patterns in their lives by simply focusing on the stuck past rather than being able to live on with their lives.

“By tapping into our emotions, the commercial industry uses ‘nostalgia’ to encourage us to buy a piece of a memory; a moment in time when things seemed simpler and we thought we were happier. So the care-free, naive, innocent parts of our childhoods are always there for us to fix.” Ben Ho - Associate Professor of Behavioral Economics, Vassar College.

But the past can never be changed or fixed… only can be forgiven and healed. And it is at this moment that I want to dive into a journey following my dreams/subconscious where the two piles of years of bad coding; the ones from the hidden trauma and the ones of years of messaging from commercial film industry have been clashing all along.

And its worth mentioning that this journey does not intend to conclude or claim anything in psychology’s field… This is a journey of healing! It is a journey of revolt against the industry that I’ve been a part of for all these years! A journey of rebooting the subconscious mind; healing the pains of the trauma and reverse engineering the obnoxious behavioral patterns that the commercial film industry carved into our minds for all these years.


TED TALKS:

Lucid Dreaming | Healing of the subconscious mind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK3SfNxbK3Y

Is There a Buy Button Inside the Brain | Patrick Renvoise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rKceOe-Jr0

How movies teach manhood | Colin Stokes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueOqYebVhtc

CHAPTER 4 - Aspirations and Reality

This work will try to answer how hidden childhood traumas, and the generated behavioral patterns that comes out of it, create a giant discrepancy between one’s actual life and the life that one aspires through messaging from television, commercials and the film industry.

A child, during a time of high emotion, makes a subconscious decision to dismiss to deal with the trauma in order to preserve the normality... This decision though, ultimately creates a pattern of a hidden blueprint, which later in life, gets constantly triggered by being exposed to the distorted facts, unrealistic goals, idealized relationship patterns and the wishful fairy-tale conclusions of commercial film industry.

This process, at the same time, is giving the growing child the subtle feeling of something is missing from its life and the illusion of an opportunity to fix the misfortunes of the past.

But the fact is until this hidden blueprint is recognized and addressed on a subconscious level, the child keeps attracting the same circumstances and the same patterns that simply repeat the original trauma on a symbolic level.

So…it is at this point that I want to dive into a journey, to one’s inner self, to the subconscious mind, where the two realities (the codes of a hidden childhood trauma and the formulated messaging of commercial film industry) meet and I want to visualize this fascinating relationship in this unknown territory.

And its worth mentioning that this journey does not intend to conclude or claim anything in psychology’s field but rather to document a three layered case study of:

The actual life struggle of a hidden childhood trauma victim, in parallel with a pre-formulated Hollywood fiction; using subconscious as a narrator and mediator between the two...

CHAPTER 3 - Concealed Memories

I want to focus on hidden childhood traumas that are sealed in our subconscious and the behavioral patterns that it creates throughout our lives.

I want to discover the role of these traumas in our day to day behavior and explore the reasons as well as the journey of how they are processed, dealt with and ultimately hidden from our conscious mind.

Keywords: childhood trauma. behavioral patterns. visualization. subconscious. abuse.

After doing my research, my initial notes start like this:

First of all, it is mind bending to find out how COMMON and yet TABOO this subject of childhood trauma is and the most common one out-there is child abuse...

Here are just 3 statistics that blew my mind:

%60 of every children in the US experience physical abuse before even age 4;
%22 experience sexual abuse before age 11, this number is %26 in the UK…

Hidden trauma, as a definition, is any experience that presents the mind with a stimulus too powerful to be assimilated in a normal way. This stimulus results in the child experiencing a state of helplessness and subconscious blocking the event from processing as a normal memory.

This word ‘helplessness’ is very important, considering the fact that most of our beliefs about the world are formed between the ages of 2 and 7 when learning is almost fully subconscious. And with an experience like a hidden childhood trauma, the perception of the world is being formed by wiring the brain with fear without being able to recognize its roots.

Below I have laid out in length, the process of how a hidden trauma of a child becomes the behavior pattern of an adult but, to sum up, after my research I realize more clearly the complete different style of communication and languages between the conscious and subconscious mind.

Conscious mind work on observations, tangible information and words. The language of the subconscious is on the other hand is not verbal at all. It’s merely visual and sensual.

Moving forward, I want to focus on and further investigate two things:

• I am blown away by finding out how wide-spread and how 'hush-hush' this issue of child abuse is in our culture… I am fascinated by this and definitely want to examine this further.
• I want to try to translate this communication between our conscious and subconscious mind to a visualized narrative.

( Some other findings: AYAHUASCA, Doors Of Perception, Jan Kounen, Jeffrey Eipstein)

CHAPTER 2 - Not Hiding Anymore

It’s this feeling inside of me that I had to live with my entire life; a gap that's never filled, a hole that never went away, and, it took me this long to finally identify exactly what it was.

It’s very interesting to see how our mind deal with our memories, especially the ones that are hard to deal with…

So what happens when one day, out of nowhere, if you just remember the worst possible memory that your five year old mind had locked down for all these years. 

Something opens up inside of you and somehow everything clicks. You just realize every fear, every concern, every doubt that you had, it all comes down to this one single moment:

This feeling of one day being exposed to this memory… 

This feeling of being afraid all the time… 

This constant alertness…

But among all this, besides the sheer shock and the memory itself, something else managed to catch my attention. I happened to notice one giant silver-lining that would completely change my entire perception of my life.

Somehow the idea that my five year old subconscious-self, made a ‘conscious’ decision to hide this memory from me for all these years, fascinated me.

It almost felt like I had someone inside of my brain, acting as a gatekeeper, protecting me from coping with the pain of real life.

So I wondered…

Who was this guy, who was my protector? Was he in charge of my entire subconscious? If so, what kind of a place would that look like? What would it smell like… And how do I get there?

So I began imagining… 

Visualizing and going there everyday with no expectations, no idea of where or how to find him and definitely with no idea of what to do if I find him… 

Only thing I knew was that, the more I’ve imagined, the more everything made sense. 

So…

I want to create a narrative and visualize this relationship. I want to show how my life has transformed by simply imagining building a connection between my conscious and subconscious mind. And by displaying how this structure operates, in parallel, I want to expose all the invisible codes, generated from the commercial art industry that fuels our brain with constant fear, doubt and anxiety.

CHAPTER 1 - What am I interested in, really?

There are lots of different ways to think about this question… Over the years I’ve been interested in several different subjects, and recently what fascinates me the most in life, and for me the most captivating subject of all; is the human mind and the invisible effects of our subconscious that shape our behavior.

So yes… Right this moment in my life I am interested in; the invisible, the myth, the prophecy and the way of living that we used to know but have chosen to forget, but mostly, I am interested in using design, as a tool to help humanity remember its own memory. I want to explore how narrative can be used to change the behavior patterns of its audience…

When I talk about the invisible, the myth, the prophecy I mostly talk about the structure of patterns that connects everything together from our tiny cells to the giant space outside of our solar system. And even though this sounds like a too big of a subject for our conscious mind to grasp on its own, I genuinely believe that in our subconscious level, we are fully aware that we are the product of this giant structure that connects us all. And I believe the next phase of our evolution will be by re-uniting of our conscious and subconscious levels of our mind, to one. And I want to explore designing a structure that helps to create that bridge...

Even though I know that it sounds ambitious, I truly think it is entirely possible to create a completely sustainable narrative that can help people generate the necessary behaviors that will eventually change their behavioral patterns hence the outcome of their entire lives. And even the tiny possibility of this immense transformation fascinates me enough that I want to focus entirely on this issue.

Can narrative or design be used to bring our subconscious mind to the physical world and how would this transformation occur?

First of all, this badly needed transformation is already happening as we speak… All over the world people are more and more aware that even though we, as humans, have conquered everything that there is to conquer out-there, there is still something missing from our lives. The 600 hundred year old promise that our conscious mind is the answer to our salvation have failed miserably and in the meantime the civilization that we’ve created with our super developed science and technology is literary about to destroy itself and the entire world that we’re living in.

Therefore the change that is about to happen and the methodology required for it, simply becomes a question of awareness and design. That’s where the behavioral design comes in to play.

Behavioral design is focused on how design can shape, or be used to influence human behavior. It is not a technique of coercion but persuasion. It is not a technology of force, but a technology of behavior. To that extent, the techniques of behavioral design respect the individual’s inherent right to freedom of choice, autonomy, and most of all its dignity.

At this point I like to explore to create a narrative, using behavioral psychology, turning into ideas and then design a structure that will help create the necessary behavioral patterns that will require for all of us to move forward.

Thank you for your time and as always like Canadians say: Peace uut!