Korea Institute of Psycho-education: The underlying cause of surface phenomena in human psychology

Any surface phenomenon results from the underlying cause. If a woman falls in love with a man, it may be because she finds him charming, humorous, or warm-hearted. If you fail in a business, it may be because you miscalculated the prospect of the market, or expanded the business beyond your capability. The result or the surface phenomenon tells where you are now, and there is always the root cause that brought about the current situation.

Human mind is designed to pursue happiness. Your psychological pain and difficulties indicate that your mind is operating to find the cause of misfortune and restore healthy psychology and happiness. The first and foremost thing to do to restore happiness is self-reflection. When we live in comfort and pleasure, we hardly self-reflect and just think that this state will last forever. Life without self-reflection is susceptible to developing into problems and conflicts.

The surface phenomena can be of two types with respect to human happiness. One is when you have positive moods and feelings and the other is when you have negative moods and feelings. Moods and feelings are viewed as surface phenomena that are sensed in the conscious. Positivity or negativity sensed in the conscious does not necessarily directly reflect the underlying cause or mechanism of mind and psychology.

All humans are born with mind and psychology. Mind simply operates following the operational mechanism and never stops or changes its operation from birth till death. Mind protects psychology and psychology manifests the operation of mind in the conscious. Knowledge and past experiences are accumulated to be activated onto the operation of perception, memory, and expression. That is, psychology is the end result of the operation of mind based on all the past experiences from birth to the present. You recognize positive or negative moods or feelings at present by the operation of the conscious, and the unconscious is operating to activate the memory from the past experiences to allow the conscious to operate.

It does not imply that specific facts that happened in the past are directly relevant to the present psychological condition. It is rather the current operation of the unconscious and the conscious that is manifested as psychology and directly affects the current psychological condition. Many people including so-called psychology experts depend on the operation of the conscious to analyze the current manifestation of psychology neglecting the operation of the unconscious as the underlying cause of the surface phenomena. Solutions to the current issues cannot be found without understanding the underlying cause of the problem.

People who experience both positive and negative emotions must reflect upon their psychological conditions and exactly how their life is going. Unfortunately, the current trend is that people with negative emotions keep clinging to the negative surface phenomena and aggravate stress and wounds, and people with positive emotions are busy getting immersed into positive emotions and hardly reflect upon their current condition. Not many people reflect upon the underlying cause of their psychological condition asking where such excruciating pain or such exciting sensation comes from in the first place and why their life is unfolding the way it is. Analyses and actions taken based on the surface phenomena necessarily lead to the aggravation of matters in psychological and practical perspectives.

You may feel comfortable temporarily when you address surface phenomena, but the condition actually gets aggravated growing the underlying problem. You must address the underlying cause in order to completely break free from pain and difficulties. You must restore healthy psychology instead of resorting to diversion to feel better every time you experience stress and wounds from relational conflicts. You need to accurately understand how the unconscious and the conscious work in mind to be manifested in psychology.

People who are satisfied with the current life hardly try to find out how they have reached the current condition of satisfaction. They must look around to judge whether they are inflicting any damage onto other people in pursuing their own fun and pleasure. When you form habits of pursuing fun and pleasure at the expense of others' pain and damage, you will never adopt self-reflection to maneuver your life for true happiness. People who pursue fun and pleasure are considered to have more severe psychological problems than people in pain and difficulties. People in pain and difficulties tend to adopt self-reflection in pursuit of recovery and happiness. People in fun and pleasure hardly think that they have problems and fall for fun and pleasure more and more. They will follow the conscious and positive sensory stimulations by all means making it almost impossible to restore normal psychology. When people in negative emotions suddenly seek diversion and pursue fun and pleasure, it indicates that their psychology has been aggravated even more.

The most common measures people take to address surface phenomena are self-blame, other-blame, and dependency. They self-justify and give up restoring healthy psychology and happiness by adopting one of the above measures. Such measures also aggravate the condition and deprive them of opportunities to resolve the issue in the right way.

You must adopt self-reflection whether you are in positive or negative emotions to restore or maintain healthy psychology. If you find that problems in your life tend to repeat, it is also an indicator that you need to actively look for the root cause of the problem through self-reflection. When you cannot find the underlying cause of the surface phenomena through self-reflection, you can seek professional help with the matter. We must always reflect on our psychological conditions and bear in mind that surface phenomena are only the manifestation of the underlying operation of mind and psychology.