Keeping Passion Alive: The Lesson of the Flea and the Elephant

By Jed Diamond, PhD, LCSW

Editor’s note: This post is the fourth in Jed’s series about keeping passion alive in your relationship. Click here to read the previous posts.  

Our conscious mind wants love, but our unconscious mind is driven by fear. When we are looking for a loving partner, we often have a clear sense of the qualities we are looking for. Before I met Carlin, I wrote out a list. Among the things I projected for were these: “I want someone who is loving, kind, intelligent, witty, adventurous, loyal, trustworthy, and sexy.” Early on in our relationship, I was sure I had made the right choice, but over time the stresses of life triggered old fears and there were times I felt I was living with someone who was “withdrawn, disinterested, hurtful, scared, and judgmental.”

I know Carlin had her own list describing the “good guy” she fell in love with, who later turned into a guy who was nearly impossible to live with. We hung in there, worked through our issues, and came to realize that a lot of our unconscious, fearful, programming was the real culprit sapping the energy of our love.

Most of us don’t think much about the power of our unconscious in shaping our lives. Either we don’t believe the unconscious is real or we don’t believe it really influences our day-to-day lives. When I was in graduate school in the 1960s, the views of Sigmund Freud were still in vogue, but were being replaced by more “modern” ways of understanding our inner world. Although Freudians still believed in the unconscious, research scientists thought the idea of an unconscious world that influenced our behavior was pop psychology.

The latest science demonstrates conclusively that our unconscious mind has a huge influence on all aspects of our lives, including our love lives. In his recent book, Subliminal:  How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, Leonard Mlodinow, who holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, says, “Though psychological science has now come to recognize the importance of the unconscious, the internal forces of the new unconscious have little to do with the innate drives described by Freud.”

The unconscious envisioned by Freud was, in the words of a group of neuroscientists, “hot and wet; it seethed with lust and anger, it was hallucinatory, primitive, and irrational.” No wonder we tended to ignore it. Who would want to go there? But the more scientific view of the unconscious the scientists tell us is “kinder and gentler than that and more reality bound.”

Without a well-functioning unconscious mind, we wouldn’t have survived as a species. “The unconscious mind,” says Mlodinow, “is a gift of evolution that is crucial to our survival as a species. Conscious thought is a great aid in designing a car or deciphering the mathematical laws of nature, but for avoiding snake bites or cars that swerve into your path or people who may mean to harm you, only the speed and efficiency of the unconscious mind can save you.”

Also, conscious thought is helpful in thinking about the kind of partner we want, but it’s our unconscious mind that takes over once we’re together. Past hurts and early programming that was meant to protect us from harm, often works against us to make us distrust our partners. Like an autoimmune disease that attacks the body, fear attacks the loving bond of our partnerships and can pull us apart if we don’t learn to understand it.

The Power of the Unconscious Mind

Before examining how we can best understand our unconscious mind and work with it to enhance our love lives, let’s look a little more deeply into the power of the unconscious mind. According to Dr. Leonard Mlodinow and other scientists, “the human sensory system sends the brain about eleven million bits of information each second.” The amount of information that our conscious mind can handle is estimated to be between sixteen and fifty bits per second.

Think about it. At most the conscious mind is handling 50 bits each second while the unconscious mind is handling 11,000,000.

According to George Miller, Ph.D., one of the founding fathers of modern cognitive psychology, the conscious mind puts out an average of between 20 and 40 neuron firings per second while the unconscious mind puts out between 20 and 40 million firings per second. So when we’re talking about the activity of the unconscious mind vs. the conscious mind, we’re looking at a difference of 1,000,000 to 1, which is about the difference in weight between an elephant and a flea.

Here’s a story from the book, Code to Joy, by George Pratt, PhD and Peter Lambrou, PhD, two clinical scientists at the Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, California. It clearly illustrates the power of the unconscious mind and gives us some clues about how to work with it.

Once upon a time there was a flea who believed that he was king of the world.   One day he decided he wanted to go to the beach for a swim. But the western shore was many miles away, and on his own, the flea could travel only inches at a time. If he was going to reach the shore during his lifetime, he would need transportation.

So he called out to his elephant. “Ho there, Elephant, let’s go.” The flea’s elephant came to his side and kneeled down.  he flea hopped up and, pointing to the west, said, “That way—to the beach.”

But the elephant did not go west. Rather, he rather felt like taking a stroll in the forest to the east, and that is what he did. The flea, much to his dismay, could do nothing but go along for the ride, and spent the day being smacked in the face by leaves and branches.

The next day, the flea tried to get the elephant to take him to the store to buy salve for his face. Instead, the elephant took a long romp in the northern mountains, terrifying the poor flea so badly that he could not sleep that night.

The flea stayed in his bed for days, beset by nightmares of thundering along mountain roads, certain he would fall to his death, and awoke each morning in a cold sweat.

After a week, finally feeling well enough to rise from his bed, the flea beckoned the elephant to his side, clambered up, and said, “I’m not well. Please, take me to the doctor.”

But the elephant merrily trundled off to the western seashore, where he spent the day swimming. The flea nearly drowned.

That night, sitting by the fireplace and trying to warm himself, the flea had a thought. He turned to the elephant and said. “About tomorrow…um, what are your plans?”

Moral:  If you’re a flea riding on an elephant, before you make any plans, you might want to check out what your elephant has in mind.

Why is this important? Because we can’t understand why we do what we do or feel how we feel if we don’t understand the flea and the elephant.

The flea of the story represents our conscious mind, which includes our intellect and power of reason, our ambitions and aspiration, our ideas, thoughts, hopes, and plans. In short, everything we think of as me. 

The elephant is our subconscious mind, which includes all the elements of our physiological metabolism including such things as balance, breathing, blinking, and old experiences that influence our love lives. While the conscious mind is making decisions, the unconscious is running in the background looking for past experiences that resonate with it or are in some way similar.

But this refer-and-alert strategy is not so helpful if the original information was distorted. If we experienced some kind of traumatic experiences growing up, which most of us have, then our unconscious “love maps” will be inaccurate.  We’ll get drawn to people who are not good for us or fall out of love with a partner if old traumas are triggered and we come to distrust our partner and the emotional bond becomes weakened.

Jed Diamond, PhD, MCSW, is the Founder and Director of the MenAlive, a health program that helps men live long and well. Though focused on men’s health, MenAliveis also for women who care about the health of the men in their lives. Diamond’s book, MenAlive: Stop Killer Stress with Simple Energy Healing Tools, brings together the wisdom accumulated in 40 years helping more than 20,000 men, women, and children.