A friend of mine graduated end of last year. She is no longer fresh out of school and this is not her first degree either. In fact she has quite a bit of work experience. She received an offer from a practice that was very keen to employ her yet the salary they offered was in line with what they would have offered any new graduate.

This upset my friend a lot and she made the remark along the lines of that they obviously did not value her potential contribution in the same way as she did. Otherwise they would have made a better offer. I had to think a little and then disagreed. We are a dichotomy of note. There is our conscious mental side that evaluates a particular situation and applies some logic. Then there is our mainly unconscious irrational part that evaluates the same situation and comes up with an entirely different answer. The problem is that the former is the proverbial tip of the iceberg (the conscious logical part) and the latter the iceberg. Guess who wins.

The little theory related above has two implications. Sometimes we logically know that we should do something and yet we do the opposite or we think we should feel in a particular way and yet we feel the opposite. The second implication is a little more difficult to grasp. In dealing with other people we *pick up* on what they feel - mostly unconscious - and react it.

In this particular example cited my friend’s irrational unconscious part retains all her childhood experiences. These include the prominent figure of her mother (as for most children) that could never acknowledge a single accomplishment of her child and mainly picked out what was negative. The result was a child that grew up without any concept of personal value. This is what she is now communicating unconsciously - despite her rational reassesment of herself - to the employing party. They make an offer based on this resulting in total disappointment.