my talking to you. I can subtly “get my anger out” toward that “bad” part in a way that’s not usually recognized if I don’t have a lot of stored anger. Where I might not have been able in the past to express the anger about that something that recognizably, or unrecognizably, frustrated my basic emotional need at the time the frustration occurred, I now can. I’ll do it unconsciously in the talking I’m doing with you now. It’s the predicate-equating, on an unrecognized “part”-oriented basis, that allows me to do that. My being able to do this can prevent me from accumulating a lot of stored anger in my unconscious, which, we will later see, can be a major, but hidden, cause of our emotional problems.
As an example of this predicate-based equating that our unconscious might be doing whenever we are engaged in any extended talking with a listener that can get rid of any stored anger from the past, suppose you feel, “my boss doesn’t understand me,” which you don’t like, and in your talking to me, you unconsciously perceive a very small “bad” part of me that you don’t like. “Not being liked” is the predicate commonly shared between your boss and that unconsciously perceived very small “bad” part of me. Because they each are perceived as sharing that same predicate, the two entities become identical in your unconscious thinking. One entity is a “whole” entity from your recent past, and the other entity is a “part” entity in the very immediate present, which is that unconsciously perceived “bad” part in me as we talk. You can now make angry unconscious communications about that small “bad” part that you unconsciously perceive in me that is equated with your boss. Where you couldn’t express your anger to your boss, you can now. It’s all done illogically, and unconsciously. It’s accomplished by unconscious “part”-oriented predicate-equating! The anger that you had from your feeling that your boss doesn’t understand you, that you didn’t express to your boss, but stored in your unconscious, can now be expressed to that unconsciously perceived “bad” part of me, that’s equated with your boss. You could unknowingly express that anger to that unconsciously perceived part of me in a very subtle way in your angrily talking about your boss, where it won’t be recognized by either you or me. When you talk angrily about your boss, you might simultaneously be angrily talking about that unconsciously perceived “bad” part of me that’s equated with your boss! Since your conscious thinking is logical thinking, you don’t see that your expressing anger about your boss has anything to do with me, and I, as your listener, don’t either. Illogically it does, but only on an unconscious “part”-oriented basis, made possible by predicate-equating.
If you had a lot of recently stored anger that arose not only from your relationship with your boss, but from other origins where your basic emotional need was recently frustrated, all those different origins could now be equated with that “bad” or “disliked” part that you unconsciously perceive in me. What could result is that small equated part that you unconsciously perceive in me could become a much larger perceived “bad” or “disliked” part, just like a “good” or “liked” part, unconsciously perceived in me, can become larger with your having a greater unmet basic emotional need. That “bad” or “disliked” part becomes larger because you have more stored anger, and there is more predicate-equating involved. The anger that you now might express to that unconsciously perceived part in me, could become more recognizable to me, because of the size of the stored anger you had that is presently being expressed. I might then accuse you of inappropriately expressing anger to me. You might deny that there was any reference to me in what you were angrily telling me. You might tell me that I’m getting a little paranoid to be thinking I was talking about you. Because of your recognizable anger to me, I might not want to talk any more with you. If I didn’t recognize that anger as having an illogical personal reference to me, I might want to continue talking with you, because if I was unrecognizably doing the same as what you are unrecognizably doing with me, we’d both be reducing the amount of stored anger we have. We’d be doing this while simultaneously reducing our unmet basic emotional need from unconsciously perceived “good” parts. With less stored anger, and a better met basic emotional need, we’d become more emotionally comfortable.
If you didn’t have that much anger stored in your unconscious, and you expressed that anger subtly, and I didn’t recognize there was any anger being expressed toward me in anything about which you might be talking to me that has made you angry in the past, I wouldn’t feel that any of your expressed anger had a personal reference to me. By talking to more people than only me, where you might unconsciously find a small “bad” or “disliked” part in each of those other people that could be equated with your boss, or equated with those other origins of your stored anger, any anger subtly expressed to a single “bad” or “disliked” part in any one listener would now be in a lessened amount. There wouldn’t be any large “bad” part unconsciously perceived in any one person. You’d be subtly “spreading your anger around.” You could get rid of all the anger that was associated with your boss that might have been recently stored to an uncomfortable level in your unconscious, and getting rid of any other stored anger from your past, by spreading out that anger expression with your talking with your friends. You could express it very subtly to unconsciously perceived small “bad” parts of those friends with whom you are involved in talking, that share a common predicate like, “frustrates my basic emotional need.” Additionally, you could get rid of any stored anger by utilizing other predicates such as, “doesn’t treat me right,” or “disagrees with me,” or “makes me angry,” or anything else that essentially is a frustration of your basic emotional need, and as such, is disliked. In our talking with friends, we could be unconsciously spreading our anger around like we unconsciously spread the meeting of our basic emotional need around. What this means is that we don’t store up anger from the past. We can too easily get rid of it in our talking with others, who are probably doing the same.
If we understand this predicate-equating that our unconscious can do, we might now come to the realization that our unconscious can equate any two or more very different entities in reality, or any two parts of two very different entities. There are no two different entities in the entire world that can’t be equated by our unconscious! Our unconscious can even do it when the commonly shared predicate involves a mutually shared lack of a characteristic, or attribute. For instance, an experience from my past, and a part I am unconsciously perceiving in you right now, as you listen to me talk, can be made identical in my unconscious if they share in common the predicate “doesn’t make me angry,” or “doesn’t give me pleasure.” Those parts wouldn’t unconsciously meet what might be unmet of my basic emotional need, nor would they unconsciously allow me to get rid of any recently stored anger, but those equated parts may “set the stage” for unconsciously perceiving other parts that would. Our recognizing that our unconscious can equate anything, with anything else, by predicate-equating, is the “Rosetta stone” to our understanding how, in our extended talking with others, about anything at all, our unconscious can meet what might be uncomfortably unmet of our basic emotional need, and can get rid of any stored anger from any previous frustrations of that need, at the very same time!
An unmarried chemist, whose work was her life, came to see me when she became depressed. She was a person who met little of her basic emotional need from talking with people. Instead, she was a person who met a predominance of her basic emotional need pleasurably working alone in a laboratory where she had become quite successful. In one of her later sessions of talking with me, she told me how she very much disliked social events but was recently obligated to attend a work-related social function where she stood alone, feeling very much “out-of-place” and “unwanted.” She told me another woman at the social function, in seeing my patient standing alone, came up to her all “bubbly” and said, “I’m a housewife and a mother. Do we have something in common?” Feeling now even more uncomfortable, my patient told the woman she wasn’t a housewife and wasn’t a mother. When the resulting conversation didn’t go well, the woman left my patient and became involved with someone else in conversation. It was then that a young man came up to my patient and said, “I couldn’t help but overhear what you just said to that woman and I believe we both have a lot very much in common. I’m not a housewife, and I’m not a mother either.” My patient told me the remark “broke the ice.” Both he and she
