Conditioned behaviours learned early in life can hold back our chances to form relationships of a healing nature.
There was one principal theme I explored in my adventure video "The books we hardly ever read", and that was the process of meeting new others. In that particular video I paused on the novel opportunities for bonding and intimacy that new encounters offer, and encouraged everyone to ask "what forces in and out of our control, contribute to these new positive experiences?".
Now, at 45 years old I am kind of late to understanding the real pedal-break our early conditioned behaviours put on the expressive self, and how this ultimately impacts on our opportunities for nurturing new relationships, but that’s what I am here to correct, so let’s get into it.
To provide an example of how this learning unfolds let's imagine Stephanie. Stephanie is a parent who goes to the park with her son Sufi to have a stroll and play. Sufi is quite the active child here, and today, as he is kicking the ball around, he happens to kick the ball towards Marlene, a little tenacious girl of his age but who is new to the park, and its social conventions. Now, to Sufi’s surprise, Marlene grabs the ball and takes it to her father as if the ball was hers. Sufi, upset, and ready to recuperate his ball at whatever cost, runs towards her with the characteristic determination of a two years old. Something is about to happen here, but fortunately Stephanie, who knows all too well the drama a two years old can experience and create, speeds up her pace, grabs Sufi by the hand, pulls him slightly down to a halt, and says: "Now Sufi, let's ask the little girl here if we can have the ball back politely, should we?!...(Sufi looks at her mother angry)... Or why not play together? Would you like to play together Sufi?".
The point of this illustration is that whether it was that party you were brought to by your parents, where your disliking of their friend's children was unacceptable, or that doctor you loathed so much that seeing his or her face made you cry, processes of social conditioning are both universal, and unavoidable. These social behavioural interventions, repeated several times a day since you were born, for bad or for good, taught you to keep certain feelings and thoughts in focus at the cost of all the others. Repetition created unconscious automation, so that today they do not necessitate our conscious awareness anymore.
According to Charles Horton, an eccentric sociologist of the beginning of the 20th century, these processes begin to acquire significance around age two, when we start to build autobiographical memories and begin to look out for other people to see how they treat us and how we should treat them in return. As we start to interact with other children, competing and joining groups, we are pushed into solidifying our understanding of who we are. Physical attributes like being a male or female, black or white, meek or strong, as well as character traits like introversion and extraversion and many others, all have a role in our positioning in the group, including that of our own family, and so play an important early role in our socialisation processes. What this implies is that, as famously put by Horton, who we end up thinking we are is not “what I think I am, or what you think I am, but what I think that you think I am”.
Beginning very early in life we use clues from ‘out there’ to tell us who we are ‘inside here’, dreading insult and craving good reputation. We learn, in this way, out to be civilized, and how to get along with others, but throughout this process, we also learn to never be those facets of ourselves that in other group dynamics might well have been regarded as acceptable and normal. I learned how to hug people by being socialized in an Italian context, but for my Japanese friend Yoko, the opposite happened, and hugs never became a part of her accepted behaviors.
The first point I want to address is the way in which many behaviours learned early in childhood affect our feelings and thoughts in adulthood to an extent that is unconscious, and pervasive.
When you account for patterns of socialisation and sum these up to the ongoing ideological messages that exile certain portions of our emotional lives, you have reasons to ask: "Where is my authenticity gone?"
Since our social conditioning is directed at specific group adaptations, today’s social psychologists are interested in how the self warps and morphs depending upon what it believes it’s expected of it. In an interesting experiment led professor Mark Snyder and his team, beliefs about physical beauty, for instance, changed male’s behavior which in turn changed female beliefs about themselves. For his experiment, fifty-one men were asked to speak to fifty-one women through an intercom. Each man was given a Polaroid of a standard good looking woman or, a not-so-standard good looking one, and told, falsely, that the picture they were looking at was the person they were speaking to.After completion of the fifty-one interviews and their analysis, the results showed that men appear to be guided by the old cultural belief that ‘beautiful people are good people’, or to put it more clearly, that standard good-looking women are more friendly, likeable, and sociable. The story, however, doesn’t end there, for what is even more fascinating, is that a significant number of ‘pretty’ women, reacted to the man’s unspoken beliefs by behaving in a way that mirrored these expectations, being more friendly, likeable and sociable than they might have normally been.
According to the researchers therefore, not only did the men built their images of their discussion partners on the basis of stereotyped intuitions about beauty and goodness, but these impressions initiated a chain of reactions that confirmed and reinforced the initially erroneous perceptions handed out by their unknown partners. Perhaps even more interestingly to many others, when researchers replicated this study with false beliefs about a person’s level of social isolation, participants behaved less sociably and with more hostility, changing in turn the behaviour of the lonely person for the worse.
Today, because our material wealth and easy travel have changed dramatically the kind of constraints that operate on us, early social conditioning strategies used or absorbed without a deeper understanding of how they impinge on us across different situations, may result in undesirable effects across several facets of our lives later on. Of course, considerations of this kind are concerns of modern wealthy societies, so while it is true that the global culture of rich countries is devoid of education surrounding the knowledge, vocabulary, and emotional self-awareness that could accompany a more comprehensive socialisation process, it is also true that this very concerns hold true for social milieux that have enough resources to regard the personal self as something substantial and primary.
In other words, while to facilitate Sufi and Marlene’s acquisition of the vocabulary and emotional self-knowledge they will need in life to remain true to their emotional experiences and needs, even in the presence of so called ‘negative’ emotions, negative social pressures, or ongoing group shifts, is a good thing and a wise addition to early growth practices, from a parental point of view these prerogatives may still legitimately sound rather idealistic. Growing healthy and polite children adapted to one particular group of humans is already a challenge in and of itself, let alone growing them wise, self-aware, and widely adaptable to different tribal characteristics.
But wait a minute! Where is this concern with the truthfulness of our Self coming from? Why are we even talking about authenticity in the first place? Read Part 2 to find out how a group of scholars and misfits in the 1960s converged to mould the ideas we have of ourselves today.
Wishing you Well,
Your Shrink in Bansko
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