**🔼 Up:** [[Organisation of Experience]] **⏺️ With:** [[Object Relations]], [[Parts#Hurt Parts|Hurt Parts]], [[Mindfulness]] **\#️⃣ Tags:** #Psychology #Healing #Wholeness > **🌱 Planted:** Thu 26 June 2025 --- You know how we find ourselves acting, reacting and behaving in certain ways and in certain situations, and sometimes no matter how hard we try to change our behaviour, we don't seem to have control over it? We might be conscious of the patterns in our lives we don't like, but we're unconscious to the deeper psychological and emotional material which drives those patterns. That's what core material is: the deep, a lot of the time unconscious psychological and emotional structures (beliefs, memories, images and emotional templates) that formed in our early relational experiences (see [[Object Relations]] for an understanding of how that works), which now shapes the way we see and experience ourselves, others and the world. Core material creates and maintains our self-images, including that of our culturally acquired world. It directs our perceptions and actions, and it expresses itself through all the habits and attitudes which make us separate individuals. It also continually influences our feelings, actions and perceptions and shapes our expectations around major themes like safety, belonging, love, appreciation, freedom, responsibility, openness, honesty, control, power and more. It is originally a [[Hakomi Method|Hakomi]] term, and I quite like because it refers to all the 'stuff' that comes together to make someone, or even a [[Parts|Part]] of them, entirely unique. The child within us is what holds onto these beliefs, self-images and hurt. When we're working with our core material, we are essentially working with child states of consciousness ([[Parts#Hurt Parts|Hurt Parts]]). Core material isn't an abstract concept either, our material is encoded in the neural networks of our brains, within our implicit memory systems, and in our nervous systems. If we truly want to heal and transform, we must work directly with our core material, because it is what runs the show. We can't simply use the intellect to reason our way out of these patterns, nor can we use sheer willpower to push through them. Core material lies deep within us, and for many of us (perhaps everyone), it's inaccessible in normal waking consciousness. That's why we need to use [[Mindfulness]] so we can study how we [[Organisation of Experience|organise our experience]].