I feel like I’m waiting for something that isn’t going to happen.

How did you learn your mother tongue? How did you learn to ride a bicycle? How did you learn to tie your shoelaces? Can you explain the process of this learning? No, don’t explain to me how you do it; just tell me how you learned to do it! How about walking? How you learned to walk for the first time when you were a child? How did you learn to put one foot ahead of the other, to balance your body and to make the muscles of your feet coordinate in such a way so as to be able to walk and then, later, to run?

How do you know all these? How does it happen to know how to do them without someone explaining them to you in a rational and methodic way?

Yes, you’re going to tell me that someone showed to you how to do this or that. You learned by example. How about speaking your native language? Did someone showed you how to pronounce? Maybe, but most of the time you imitated what you heard. You copied. Same for knowing how to get dressed, brush your teeth or use the WC.

How did you learn to love your parents? How did you learn to like some things and dislike others? How you learned what food you like? How do you know that your family loves you? How can you possibly know?

You see… many of these things you implicitly… know… You learned them tacitly, some of them subliminally, all of them wordlessly…

Welcome to the Unknown!

Welcome to those things you do, but you can’t explain why you do them or how and why you did them in the first place!

The fact that you know how to do things implies that you have a memory of those things, an archive of knowledge. This is often called “implicit knowledge” or “tacit knowledge”. What is specific – and hopeless – is that this type of knowledge is non-verbal: you cannot access it by words because it was built at an age when you were too young to speak or to master the language structures that would have helped you to receive explanations rationally and encode that information in a verbal memory structure. You learned to walk before speaking. An awful lot of behavioral patterns were engrained in you during the first years, a time from which you don’t even have a lot of memories…

My first memories – very partial and shifting – belong to the time when I was 3 years old. There might be people who might remember things from when they were between 2,5 and 3 years old, but people don’t typically remember the period before the age of three. It’s an utter memory void, a period in which we might figuratively say that “we didn’t live at all” since “we don’t have memories from that period”, we were unaware. That time is a mystery.

Take some time to ponder on this…

However, during that mysterious time you learned your native language, walking, the social norms, the hierarchy in the family, how to feel and to express love in its many forms, and you have already decided your life-script (or destiny, according to the transactional analysis school of thought). How comfortable you are with the awareness that you have no idea about why and how you got so much information and developed so many skills? How is it for you to know that you’re doing things and you don’t know how you learned them? Do you count this first period of your life, of roughly 3 years, as part of your life? If yes, how is it for you to know that you lived completely unconscious for about 3 years?

During this time a lot has happened. The fact that you learned to walk and talk is not the main problem; the problem is, for instance, that you learned to love your parents (or any caregivers who happened to play the parental role). And what if your parents were psychopaths? What if they were abandoning you frequently, in more or less subtle ways? What if they were neglectful, abusive? What if they were forgetful about your needs, such as eating or changing your diapers? What if they were busy talking at the phone while you begged for their attention? What if they were stoned (drugged) or intoxicated (drunk) and they didn’t know in which “alternative world” they happened to be? What if they were violent, fighting and screaming at each other while you were crying because of the noise? Obviously, you don’t know all this; you lack memories from that period… and you couldn’t have understood anyway. ..

But you felt…

When you become demented, because of Alzheimer’s disease for instance, you begin to lose memories. But you lose your memories according to the following rule: you lose your recent memory, then you lose the memory of your adulthood, then you lose the memory of your childhood and in the end, you lose the memory of your emotions, of what you felt. The emotions are the last to leave you, and for this reasons some demented patients are agitated, fearful and often violent: the emotions are all that’s left before the “great departure”. The implicit knowledge, the emotions and the basic reflexes, are the strongest part of our memory as a whole, partly because they were coded very early in our life and partly because they belong to very basic (read archaic) structures of our brains. You might not know who you are in the later stages of Alzheimer’s (your identity) but you know quite well what (and how) you feel…

The fact that you “felt your life” during the first years of life is not the only problem. Another problem is that you experienced – some of you – various parents that were “not good enough”. As a child, you cannot afford to choose your parent, have preferences or fill complaints to authorities: you take (you grab) what you can, whom you can, so as to survive. You need a caretaker who must provide food and shelter, so any person around is equally good, no matter if that person is a predator, a sociopath, a criminal and so on. You learn to love the unlovable, accept the unacceptable, and consider as normal the… abnormal.

And this is how you develop what is known as… the attachment…

The attachment is unconscious, it is non-verbal and is established on the basis of the implicit knowledge. For instance, you don’t know why you love abusive partners; you just love them and you get in the next abusive relationship in a long chain of abusive relationships because you are unconsciously attracted by “what you tacitly know, but consciously don’t know”. You are “under the spell” of an “old magic” that happened in a time when you couldn’t speak yet and about what you don’t have any memories.

Good luck working with your therapist on things you can’t remember and can’t be expressed in words!

Actually, there are some techniques of accessing the inaccessible, and of making possible the impossible. You can “guess” what happened during the time of implicit knowledge accumulation. You can also discover the rules of attraction – what turns you on. And you can do re-parenting. And, of course, you can use your explicit memory (the one you remember and is coded verbally) and your conscious will (and discipline) so as to remove some of the power of this early unlucky experiences.

But you will always yearn, crave, ache – you will always have that phantasy or that itch – to break the self-imposed rules and indulge one more time in what is so familiar, yet so unknown… in what is so very much forbidden, yet so exciting…

Poison is always sweet…

The mysterious implicit life of your early childhood is something worth exploring if other psychotherapy methods fail (I’m talking about verbal therapies, that is, almost all forms of therapy). The child does not have language, but can see images, uses the 5 senses, feels emotions (such as love), so everything that uses symbols, dreams, art, body-expressive techniques, hypnosis, etc. can access parts of you that are closed for your rational (verbal) side. You can get clues, or glimpses, into the unknown. But first and foremost, you needed to know about the existence of this part of you.

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Post Scriptum: The quote of the article – I feel like I’m waiting for something that isn’t going to happen – is a good example of the indefinite feelings belonging to our implicit side. It’s a vague feeling (a conviction without basis in reality or an almost mystical intuition) about the futility of doing something (waiting, which, by the way, is a non-action) that is foretold (on what basis and by whom?!) to be useless (how can the future be known?!). From one perspective (the one of transactional analysis), it’s the contamination of the future by the past (a sort of chronicle of an announced/foretold death). From the perspective of this article, it’s the overflow of the implicit realm into the explicit one, or the eruption of unconscious elements into the everyday life.