There are times when it feels like the world is conspiring against you. Everything’s going wrong. Every to-do is so difficult. You shake your fist at the sky and ask Why can’t things just be easy? You look for something to blame: Mercury retrograde, perhaps? Annoying colleagues? That ex who just couldn’t get it together?

Often there will be external factors at play (we are living in political and economic turmoil, after all), but the harsh truth is that sometimes the call is coming from inside the house. No one likes the accusation of self-sabotage, but we very often do get in our own way. And the reason we do this – and why we find it so difficult to acknowledge the source of our sabotage – is that it’s not the conscious part of us causing havoc, but the unconscious.

That’s a concept that therapist Dr Courtney Tracy, who you might also know as The Truth Doctor on Instagram, is keen to unpick in her new book, Your Unconscious Is Showing, which draws on her decade of experience as a psychotherapist specialising in what it means to be human. “There are parts of us we aren’t aware of influencing the decisions we make or the behaviours we enact on any given day,” she tells Stylist. Our unconscious, says Dr Tracy, is one of those powerful forces. It sits “outside our awareness” – and yet “it’s controlling us”.

Put simply, the unconscious is “the way our brain automatically works”, Dr Tracy explains. That includes everything from how it assesses situations and people to its implicit biases. In trying to keep us safe, our unconscious mind makes quick-fire judgments about what’s a threat and what isn’t, jumping into gear when it believes we’re in danger (ie our fight-or-flight response).

This is just how we experience cognition as a human, says Dr Tracy, “regardless of whether we’ve [experienced] trauma or not, regardless of whether we’ve had bad things happen to us”. But often, unconscious thought patterns can shape or even sabotage our lives in less-than-ideal ways.

Here are some examples…

Your unconscious is sabotaging you – here’s what to do about it