Implicit Guidebook
Children implicitly absorb language from those around them, but they also absorb culture, beliefs and what it takes to make it in the world. They soak up what helps them get their needs met and prevents them from experiencing pain. They observe others’ experiences and learn vicariously. All of this flows in unconsciously and uncritically. These implicit learnings form the basis of our personality and our subjective perspective, and they write the initial chapters of our “implicit guidebook.” The implicit guidebook is a term I use for our underlying sense of what is right and wrong, how we are to live and our basic construction of how things are. It is our working hypotheses for ourselves and the world. While this sounds cognitive it is really at the essence of our emotional experiences. Because this “book” is implicit, we can’t sit down and read it, show it to others or fully know what has been written on its pages. This guidebook acts as a lens or filter that is as invisible to us as contact lenses can be to the wearer. It both shapes our perception and proves itself true in that shaping.
Yet … the implicit can partially be made explicit. Ironically, understanding that our experience is subjective allows that subjectivity to become an object of our awareness. As we start to notice our inner dialogue, beliefs, rules, assumptions, expectations, etc., we are noticing our guidebook. The challenge is to get just enough space to notice it so we can make it an object of inspection. This happens with dialogue, with meditation, with writing, with contrasting our reality from those close to us and at a distance and in many other unexpected ways. As we engage in this process we may want to pull out our editing tools. We will see much that we want to strike through, many parts to rewrite and some which we will want to highlight or underline.
If only editing was this easy. It is not. This is the mind’s effort to reprogram itself. This is using the minuscule programer that is our conscious self to edit the code within the massive super-computer that is our unconscious. The programer is always vulnerable to being swallowed up by the program before the changes can be saved.
And yet … it can be done.
John R. Lucy, Ph.D. is a psychologist in private practice at Decatur Psychology, LLC.
