What are Unconscious Contracts?
I haven’t found any other process that allows us to so thoroughly disentangle the deeply patterned emotional responses and sabotage we enact on ourselves.
Untangling unconscious contracts is deeply powerful work, and is the focus of the Your Resonant Self Workbook. Download the book’s free meditations here!
What are Unconscious Contracts?
In this video, I explore the contracts we unconsciously make with ourselves, often when we are very young, that end up becoming self-destructive behaviors, which I call Unconscious Contracts. Through acknowledging the truth of what these contracts are trying to serve, while also holding that they are coming at a cost to our well-being, we can begin to transform the self-defeating patterns.
In order to address and overcome traumas, we first have to understand and name them. By four months old, we learn to restrict our emotional expression to only the faces that our primary caregiver can accurately reflect back to us. In other words: we learn to make ourselves fit into a box that is determined by our primacy caregiver.
Understanding this piece of relational neuroscience helps us begin to have compassion as we encounter the roots of our unconscious contracts. You can watch more videos about unconscious contracts here, or in my upcoming online course exploring this work through my new book.
Dive into a year-long exploration of unconscious contracts live with Sarah starting October 2021!
What do we do when we realize that the meaning we have made and the promises we have made ourselves are not actually helping us, but are harming us? When we have painful or difficult experiences, we can make unconscious contracts with ourselves to try to keep ourselves safe and from ever experiencing the harm or challenge again. We may say to ourselves “I will never trust again” or “I will never forgive myself for that” or “I will never show my true feelings again.” But these agreements often result in harmful and rigid behaviors.
In this 26-week book course, we will look at the different kinds of unconscious contracts we make in an attempt to keep ourselves safe, keep our sense of belonging, and save those we love the most. Participants will have opportunities to work as a group and in smaller breakout groups to begin to name, disentangle and release the unknown agreements we have with ourselves which keep us from being our fullest, most liberated, selves.
Sign up for each chapter individually (2 classes), or sign up for all 26 sessions for a discount. Plus get access to the bonus Q&A session and other course bonuses!
$700.00
From the Blog
The Surprising Root of Self-Sabotage: Unconscious Contracts
What needs are you meeting by remaining small? Surprisingly, most often those needs are survival and integrity. How do you then transcend these self-made limitations? I was teaching a multi-day training in Europe two years ago, and one of the participants, a man in...
Why Joy and Play are Hard to Access (and What To Do About It)
Joy and the PLAY circuit are the most vulnerable emotional circuitry we have as humans. Our capacity to experience joy is especially vulnerable to the ways in which we have experienced feeling unsafe, unaccompanied, or not having a sense of mattering to those around...
The Unconscious Contract that Makes for Bad (or No) Sex
Ronnie, I’d like to talk with you about our sexual experience.” “Okay, Jan,” says Ronnie. Ronnie says this even though, inside, Ronnie is quaking. This is not good news for Ronnie’s nervous system. Conversations about sex are painful and never end well for Ronnie....
How to Work With Unconscious Contracts
When I was walking my dog last night I ran into a rigid place inside myself. For any of you who've worked with me for a while, you know that a felt sense of rigidity is a cue, a way of knowing there's something going on under the surface. This rigidity provides an...
Healing Addiction With Unconscious Contract Work
Substance use is often an attempt to sooth our lonely parts As I was doing a sand tray constellations process yesterday, my attention was drawn to a small figure with huge, ghost-like eyes and no arms or legs, and then to a large black hollow log with holes in it....
Free Resources
FREE GUIDED MEDITATIONS
Listen to the Guided Meditations from Sarah's book, Your Resonant Self
About Sarah
Sarah Peyton
Sarah Peyton, international speaker and facilitator, has a passion for weaving together neuroscience knowledge and experiences of healing that unify people with their brains and bodies.
