What Is the Unconscious

Take our Can You Spot Defense Mechanisms?

Find a therapist near me

You are not failing when your mind goes blank after destructive behavior.

Your psyche may be protecting you from truths too painful to face all at once.

"I don't know" is not a dead end but a threshold.

The psyche reveals itself in its own time, once you create enough safety to let the unconscious speak.

Many of us have moments in our lives where we lashed out at someone, withdrew into isolation when connection was what we craved, or sabotaged something good just as it was becoming real. In moments like these, you may hear your inner voice screaming with impatience or even panic: Why did I do that?

On hearing "why?" your mind may go blank immediately. Perhaps you try to search for a logical reason, some malicious intent, some evidence that you are somehow an underdeveloped or less-than person, yet you find nothing where an answer should be. You may then feel small, ashamed of your inability to explain yourself. All you can feel and hear is a painful inner knot: I don't know, I really don't know why I did that.

If you have found yourself here repeatedly, you may want to pause that chain of self-blame. What you are experiencing is not a failure of the mind, of integrity, or you trying to evade responsibility. The deeper truth may be that the body remembers what our mind cannot speak.

You might find yourself staring at your own behavior as though watching a stranger perform actions that make no sense, feeling genuinely confused about how you could have done something so unlike who you would like yourself to be. But when you say "I don't know" from this dissociated state, you are honoring a protective barrier your psyche erected for good reason. Your internal system is communicating, though not in words you can easily hear: I am not yet strong enough, or safe enough, to touch the hidden memories or emotions without being destroyed by them.

In essence, when your mind goes blank, you are having a moment of internal cut-off. Dissociation usually carries negative connotations in clinical psychology, but the mechanism itself holds a certain wisdom. Sometimes the truth behind your behavior is too hot to hold without risking immediate collapse. Your body knows how to protect you. If acknowledging the real reason you reacted the way you did would mean confronting unbearable pain, profound grief, or a terror of abandonment so intense that your psyche would rather destroy the relationship preemptively than risk the abandonment, then your mind deploys dissociation to save you.

Protecting the attachment

Sometimes the real "why" behind destructive behavior involves feelings toward someone we care about that we cannot afford to consciously acknowledge. Admitting the truth, stating plainly "I did this because I am furious with you" or "I did this because in that moment I actually wanted to hurt you" or "I did this because I resent you for not being what I needed you to be," can feel catastrophic when the relationship itself means life or death to the younger, more vulnerable parts of your psyche.

Many toxic patterns that play out in adult relationships are preverbal in origin, meaning they stem from times in our infancy or very early childhood before we had developed language. If as a child you were soothed only when you remained quiet and compliant, if you were ignored when you cried or expressed needs, if you learned that your emotional reality had to be suppressed in order to maintain connection with caregivers, then these lessons got encoded not as explicit memories or beliefs you can articulate, but as patterns of relating that exist purely as feeling states floating in your deeper psyche.

We fear, often with good reason based on past experience, that if we voice the shadow material, if we allow the anger or envy or neediness or disappointment to become explicit, we will be rejected or abandoned. So our survival instincts gag us before we can speak dangerous truth. However dysfunctional in the long run, what your survival needs scream is that it is "safer" to be the confused person who does not know than the person with dark thoughts. If we go one layer deeper, we may find the truth: I am afraid that if I show you every part of me, every thought and feeling, you will leave.

How to hold your "I don't know"

If you find yourself repeatedly arriving at the frustrating inner knot that screams "I don't know why I did that," the work asked of you here may involve shifting your relationship to the blankness itself rather than trying to blame yourself or force your way through it. The invitation here is to stop treating "I don't know" as a dead end or a failure and begin recognizing it as a threshold, a doorway that requires a different kind of attention than the analytical, problem-solving mind knows how to provide.

What Is the Unconscious

Take our Can You Spot Defense Mechanisms?

Find a therapist near me

Here, the ancient Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi offers unexpected wisdom. In his writings, he repeatedly celebrated a particular kind of not-knowing. Not-knowing is not "bad." It can be seen as an openness to what cannot yet be grasped by the intellectual mind that is busy categorizing things into right or wrong, good or bad. He spoke of the "fasting of the mind," a practice of emptying oneself of preconceptions and fixed ideas in order to perceive what is actually present. If you approach it differently, your "I don't know" need not be a gap to be filled as quickly as possible, but a kind of necessary emptiness that creates space for genuine understanding to emerge in its own time.

Instead of demanding immediate answers from yourself or accepting the conclusion that you are simply broken, you might try offering yourself different kinds of inquiry. Moving from asking "why did I do that?" to asking "what was happening in my body just before I did that?" can be a good start. Was your chest tight, your stomach churning, your jaw clenched, your breathing shallow?

Maybe honor, with gentleness and even gratitude, that the defense that is keeping the full truth hidden is really wisely keeping you safe from something you are not yet ready to face. If there are no words available, ask whether there are images or metaphors or sensations that come when you sit with the question. Does the feeling that drove the behavior have a color, a texture, a shape, or an associated memory, even if the memory is fragmentary and makes no logical sense?

Most importantly, learn to wait at the threshold without rushing to fill the silence. It is precisely in this liminal space, this uncomfortable foggy gap between behavior and understanding, that the unconscious eventually feels safe enough to send messages up to the surface in forms you can begin to work with. The discomfort of not knowing, of sitting with the blankness without immediately resolving it into false clarity, creates the conditions under which genuine insight can emerge.

You are not broken for not knowing why you do what you do. The understanding will come, but only when you stop blocking it with self-blame or demanding that answers and solutions arrive on a timeline that serves your shame rather than your psyche's needs.

Bollas, C. (2017). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. Routledge.

Bowins, B. (2004). Psychological defense mechanisms: A new perspective. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 64(1), 1-26.

Thomas, M. (2006). Absence and absent-mindedness. In Aggression and Destructiveness (pp. 221-236). Routledge.

Van Der Kolk, B. (2003). The body keeps the score. Trauma, 2(50), 1-21.

Wong, D. B. (2005). Zhuangzi and the obsession with being right. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 22(2), 91-107.

© Psychology Today