By the time I graduated from high school, I had so many things buried and tucked away, so much anger, rage, hatred, fear, sorrow, grief, and pain, that I could not dare to get close to anyone, including myself, as I could not tap into my emotional and intellectual potential. As the years went on, I had to build armor plating around these feelings as if they ever got out, I would be overwhelmed, and I do not know what would have happened to me. So they stayed buried, but that doesn’t mean they did not influence my behavior. These feelings produced some completely unconscious motivations that affected my decision-making, if you can call it that, regarding career and marriage. The problem was that I kept making decisions and pursuing fantasies that did not work in my best interests and thus I was mired in a life that had reached its end when I was almost 40 years old.Something had to change, and I eventually sought out psychotherapy that brought those feelings to the surface and the unconscious motivations that went with them, and only then did I have the capacity to make decisions about a career that I made something of a success of and married a person for love rather than some other neurotic reason. It took three years of therapy on two different occasions to get this all out and deal with those feelings that I thought I had buried but in reality were determining the decisions I was making. The power of the unconscious is real and is not something to be ignored. This this book is my story of how I came to have all these buried feelings and fantasies and how eventually I was able to bring them to the surface and lead something of a normal life. Hopefully, this story might inspire others who feel they are at a dead end in their lives and can’t seem to make decisions that work for them. While I am not a professional in the area and thus can’t give a professional opinion about people’s psychological health, it also is hard for me to believe that my experience can be all that unique. It may be that others to are under the power of the unconscious and have buried feelings that therapy can help uncover and give them greater degrees of freedom over their lives. If this book can help even one person to experience a more fulfilled and rewarding life it will have been worth writing.
