Kinesiology Goes Deeper: When the Conscious Mind Doesn’t Have the Answer
If you understand your problem but still can’t seem to change it, the answer may lie beyond what you consciously know. Here’s how kinesiology offers another way to explore what may be keeping you stuck.
By Maureen Callister | Kinesiologist & Author, The Gift of Self-Worth
“I don’t know why I do it.”
I have heard some version of those words countless times in my clinic.
I know there’s nothing to be frightened of, but I still feel anxious.
I know I’m capable, but something keeps holding me back.
I know my partner isn’t my father, so why do I react so strongly when he speaks to me like that?
I’ve talked about my childhood. I understand what happened. I’ve dealt with this already! Why does my body still react as though I’m back there?
These are not failures of intelligence, insight or willpower. Let’s be honest – if you knew how to fix the ‘problem’, you would. But most often we don’t understand the deeper problem of our reactions. This then, points towards something fascinating about being human: much of what influences how we feel, behave and react happens outside our conscious awareness.
And this is one of the reasons I find kinesiology such a powerful therapeutic tool. It gives us another way to ask the question when the conscious mind doesn’t have the answer.
For someone who has been searching for answers for a long time, this can be enormously reassuring. You don’t have to know exactly when your problem began, remember every detail of your childhood, or be able to explain why you feel the way you do before you can begin working with it. But often the reason we feel stuck is that we have been searching for the answer only in the part of ourselves we can consciously access.
Your Conscious Mind Isn’t the Whole Story
We tend to think of the mind as the thoughts going through our head. But our conscious thoughts are only one part of our inner world.
It can be helpful to think about the mind as having different layers of awareness: the conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind. These are not necessarily three separate compartments inside the brain, but ways of understanding the different levels at which information, memories, beliefs and automatic responses can influence us.
The conscious mind is the part we know and what we are ‘consciously’ aware of. It allows us to think, reason, make decisions, solve problems and reflect on what is happening.
If I ask you what you had for breakfast, what you think about your job or why you are annoyed with your partner, you can probably give me an answer.
But ask, “Why does criticism make you feel so threatened?” or “Why do you believe you have to keep everyone happy?” and the answer may be much harder to find.
You might know intellectually that you don’t need everyone’s approval and yet feel deeply unsettled when somebody is unhappy with you.
You might know that you are competent and capable, yet become filled with self-doubt when you are asked to step forward.
You might know that a relationship is safe, yet find yourself reacting to a disagreement as though something precious is about to be taken away.
The conscious mind says one thing. Something deeper appears to be saying another.
What Lies Beneath Conscious Awareness?
The subconscious mind, as I use the term in my work, contains much of what sits beneath our everyday awareness: memories, learned beliefs, emotional associations, habits and patterns that have developed throughout our lives. My kinesiology teaching material describes this as the area in which beliefs, values and unresolved feelings may continue to influence us even when we are not consciously thinking about them.
Many of these patterns begin in childhood.
As children, we are constantly learning about ourselves and the world around us. We are discovering whether the world feels safe, whether our needs will be met, what gains approval, what threatens connection and what we need to do to belong.
Without consciously deciding to, we may begin to form conclusions such as:
I need to be good to be loved.
It isn’t safe to disagree.
Other people’s needs come before mine.
I must succeed to be valuable.
If somebody is unhappy, it must be my fault.
A five-year-old doesn’t sit down and logically decide any of these things. They develop through experience, relationship and the meaning the child makes of what is happening around them.
Years later, the adult may have completely different beliefs intellectually, while an old emotional response continues to operate underneath.
And that helps explain one of the great frustrations of healing: knowing something is not always the same as changing it.
And Then There Is the Unconscious
I use unconscious to describe an even deeper level: the automatic, instinctive and very early patterns that may sit entirely outside conscious recall.
Some of our earliest experiences occurred before we had the language or cognitive ability to make sense of what was happening. And throughout life, our nervous system is constantly responding to information without requiring conscious thought.
Your heart beats without you telling it to. Your body continually adjusts your breathing. You can startle at a sudden noise before you have consciously identified what made the sound. These are simple reminders that enormous amounts of processing occur without conscious instruction; something I also explore in my kinesiology work.
In my own therapeutic framework, I also leave room for deeper inherited, energetic and soul-level influences. Some clients experience repeating patterns as connected with their family lineage or intergenerational history; others find spiritual concepts such as soul themes meaningful. These ideas go beyond what conventional science can currently establish, so I regard them as additional therapeutic lenses rather than beliefs that someone needs to accept in order to benefit from kinesiology.
The important point is much simpler:
We can be affected by something without consciously knowing why.
And if we only look for answers in what we consciously know, we may be overlooking an important part of the picture.
Self-Sabotage — Or Self-Protection?
This changes how we look at many of the behaviours we commonly call “self-sabotage.”
Imagine someone desperately wants to build a successful business but repeatedly pulls back whenever they become more visible.
Consciously, this makes no sense.
They want success. They have worked hard for it. They may have invested considerable time and money developing their skills. Why would they sabotage themselves just as opportunities begin to appear?
But what if being visible once meant being criticised?
What if speaking up risked rejection?
What if standing out from the family threatened their sense of belonging?
Suddenly the behaviour looks different.
Perhaps the deeper message isn’t:
I don’t want to succeed.
Perhaps it is:
I don’t feel safe succeeding.
What appears to be self-sabotage may actually be an old form of self-protection.
This is an important shift because it moves us away from judgement and towards compassion. Instead of asking, “What is wrong with me?”, we can begin asking, “What is this response trying to protect me from?”
That is a very different healing conversation.
The Body May Be Part of That Conversation
Our experiences are not confined to thoughts.
Fear can change our breathing. Anxiety can make our heart race. Stress can tighten muscles, disturb sleep and affect digestion. A familiar voice, smell, facial expression or situation can sometimes produce an emotional or physical response before we have consciously worked out why.
The body and emotional life continually influence one another.
This is why someone can say, quite truthfully, “I know I am safe,” while their body appears to be saying something different.
It is also why intellectual insight can be enormously helpful and yet sometimes not be enough.
You may understand exactly why you developed a pattern. You may have talked about it, analysed it and forgiven everyone involved.
And still your body reacts.
So how do we explore something the conscious mind cannot explain?
This Is Where Kinesiology Becomes Interesting
Kinesiology gives us another way of entering the conversation.
In kinesiology, muscle testing is used as biofeedback. Rather than relying only on what someone consciously remembers or believes the problem to be, I use muscle responses to help guide the therapeutic process and identify where stress may be held in the person’s wider mind-body system.
I am not asking the muscle to tell me an objective historical truth.
I am asking questions.
Is there an emotional component to this stress? Does it relate to an earlier experience? Is the nervous system involved? Is there a belief or fear underneath it? Is there something the person needs to understand, acknowledge or release?
Sometimes the direction that emerges is completely unexpected.
A client may arrive wanting help with anxiety and consciously believe the problem began six months ago, while our work leads us towards a much earlier experience of feeling unsafe.
Someone struggling with confidence may discover that underneath the apparent lack of confidence sits a much deeper question of self-worth.
A person who cannot understand why they continually put everyone else first may begin to recognise an old association between pleasing others and remaining loved or accepted.
This is where kinesiology can add something different to the healing conversation.
We don’t necessarily have to begin with, “Tell me why.”
Sometimes we can begin with, “Let’s see what your system is responding to.”
For the client, this can take enormous pressure off. You don’t have to arrive with the answers. You don’t have to tell your life story perfectly or work out which experience caused which problem. We can begin with what you are experiencing today and allow the therapeutic process to guide us towards what may need attention.
This can be particularly valuable when you have already done a great deal of work on yourself but still feel that something isn’t shifting.
Instead of going over the same familiar story again, kinesiology gives us another avenue of enquiry — one that includes the responses of the body as well as the conscious mind.
We Don’t Need to Dig Up the Whole Garden
For many people, the idea of exploring the unconscious mind sounds frightening.
They imagine a dark vault filled with painful memories and things they would rather not uncover.
I prefer to think of it as a garden.
Your inner garden contains everything you have gathered throughout your life: love, joy, creativity, resilience, memories, relationships, skills and wisdom. But like every garden, there may also be weeds.
Some may have taken root a very long time ago.
A frightening experience. A belief that you weren’t good enough. A feeling of being unwanted. A moment when speaking up didn’t feel safe. An old grief that never had an opportunity to be expressed.
Over time, those weeds can take up space that might otherwise be available for something new to grow.
Healing doesn’t mean digging up every inch of the garden looking for everything that has ever gone wrong.
Nor do we need to force ourselves to remember experiences that we cannot consciously recall.
We simply begin with what is happening now.
What is preventing growth? What is asking for attention? What is the system still trying to protect? And perhaps most importantly, what do you need now in order to flourish?
Deep Healing Is Not About Fighting the Past
The subconscious and unconscious mind are not our enemies.
Many of the patterns we struggle with began as attempts to adapt, protect ourselves, preserve connection or simply cope with circumstances we weren’t yet equipped to understand.
They may once have served us remarkably well.
The problem comes when yesterday’s protection continues to run today’s life.
Deep healing, then, isn’t simply about changing what you consciously think. Nor is it about endlessly analysing everything that has happened to you.
It is about bringing awareness and compassion to the deeper patterns that continue to influence you, allowing the emotional charge around them to soften and helping your system recognise that what was once necessary may no longer be needed in the same way.
This is what continues to fascinate me after more than twenty-five years working with kinesiology.
Sometimes the person lying on my table doesn’t consciously know where the problem began.
And that’s okay.
You don’t have to understand everything before you can begin healing. You don’t have to uncover every memory or find the perfect explanation for why you are the way you are.
Sometimes you simply need another way to ask the question.
And for me, that is where kinesiology opens the door — allowing us to listen more deeply to the whole person, uncover what may be keeping an old pattern in place, and create the possibility of responding to life with greater freedom.
Because ultimately, the purpose of going deeper is not to stay immersed in the past.
It is to become freer to live in the present — and to create a different future.
That is the journey from Healing to Wholeness.