What is conditioning? How do we become conditioned, and can we avoid it?
When we talk about personal development, often the term conditioning comes up.
It’s how our environment conditions us to adopt certain thoughts, beliefs, ideologies, and ways to operate as our own. We are all molded, one way or another, by our family and our life experience so far. These adopted ways come through when we are on autopilot, i.e., responding to our environment unconsciously.
Many times, conditioned responses are considered undesirable or bad. They are seen as something that we want to free ourselves from. I started wondering if we could avoid this involuntary adaptation to our environment altogether, and is there a way to know when we are the ones conditioning others?
As a mother, I wonder what my impact on my kids is. How am I shaping their unconscious responses?
Two of my oldest ones are now teenagers. The lash-backs from these Scorpio boys when trying to instill some discipline, are, to say the least, fierce. I witness the fury and intense emotional outbursts. Accompanied by banging of doors and throwing items. I hear threats, contemptuous laughter, insults hissed between teeth, pleading and begging, rebellion, insolence, crying, wailing, and exclaims: “No one cares!”, mixed with “I don’t care!” and the occasional “I hate you all!”. These scenes are sometimes comical and sometimes downright scary with the kids running around the house equipped with swords and other sharp objects threatening to kill their siblings. Phew! Talk about the depth of Scorpio emotional body!
While I’m trying to allow my kids to have the freedom of their personal expression, I still feel somewhat obligated to show them how we should treat each other within the family unit. I want to give them a framework of what the societally and culturally acceptable ways of dealing with their emotions could look like. And even though I can expect some intensity in their responses just by looking at their astrology charts and I know that having two Scorpios in the mix, pumped up with hormones at that, can lead to some power struggles, I can’t let the kids break the house, damage themselves, or allow them to hurt each other. Not with words, nor swords. I really hate to be the discipliner but when my boys get into these crazy outbursts, I do have to intervene with some more oomph in my messaging (read: I need to yell, and maybe add some threats of my own).
After these moments, I think to myself: “Well, didn’t that go well… what a text-book example of wonderful, compassionate parenting I just displayed there”, and feel terrible for losing my cool and getting onto the emotional roller-coaster with teenagers.
So, what exactly is the example that I am setting for my kids? When does the discipline become controlling and suffocating, turning eventually to that bad conditioning that we want to avoid? And on the other hand, when does allowing and understanding your kids’ unique personalities and growth pains result in chaos that doesn’t provide them enough structure to have a safe container for these tumultuous years? How am I conditioning my kids, and how do I know where the balance tips from empowering to disempowering? Can I harm their worldview by emphasizing and preaching about the things that I believe in?
Since I have done some work on my own conditioning, I can recognize, and sometimes even joke about it, when I see myself embodying my mom or dad. And not all of it is necessarily bad.
When the other day I caught myself behaving exactly like my mom used to, I started wondering that maybe this so-called conditioning will be the only true legacy that we leave behind. Maybe it is the way we leave our mark in the world after our time here is over. What if some of my mannerism and behavior will be embodied by my children when I’m gone? Then in some ways, a part of me would keep on living… Our only legacy just may be someone adopting the ways we interact with others and the world around us.
Since I’m aware of the negative impacts of conditioning, I tell my kids to not take anything I say for granted. I encourage them to be responsible for creating their own worldviews and do their own self-discovery, hopefully eradicating some of the negative influence that us parents instill on them. So, instead of telling them to fix the mess that I may make, I was wondering if there is a way to parent without the conditioning? How can we parent without feeding our personal stories to our kids, who then in turn need to go pay money for coaches and therapists to get rid of these parental hang-ups from their lives later? In other words, can I save money, time, and effort for my kids by not conditioning them?
I recently started reading a book called The Radical Awakening by Dr. Shefali after seeing her speak at Tony Robbins’ Unstoppable Women Summit. She was passionate about eradicating the labels and the roles that we put on ourselves. The need to belong to our family, tribe, and our collective environment is part of our survival mechanism and leads us to constantly look for validation, acceptance, and praise from our surroundings. This plays a huge part in our conditioning process.
As humans, one of our first and foremost needs is to be loved by our caretakers. We rely on our parents, or some other adult in our immediate vicinity to love us enough not to abandon us, and to keep us alive. The acceptance and love from our environment are directly tied to our survival. When we grow, we seek the same displays of affection from our friends, our relatives, and our siblings. As social animals, the acceptance of the group we identify with impacts our wellbeing.
In the process of wanting to be accepted by our environment, we adopt the ways of our environment. It doesn’t matter what those ways are. As small children, we don’t want to rock the boat of our foundational safety by outright rebelling against the people that we rely on for our survival. At least, until we are teenagers, like my Scorpio boys.
We learn from a very young age that the behaviors our parents consider good will give us positive attention, i.e., validation for our worthiness, and the bad behaviors will get us into trouble. The negative response from our parents or caregivers makes us feel vulnerable and shakes our feeling of safety. We shy away from bad behavior for fear of abandonment and learn to modify our ways accordingly to keep our environment happy. Later in life, we crave for validation from other authority figures, such us teachers. The consequences for not following the rules in school will get us bad grades, and our parents may get upset, once again shaking our foundational safety. When we enter the workforce, praise from our superiors impacts our chances for promotions, raises, and opportunities.
In any situation, we are dancing the balance of good behavior vs. bad behavior, so in my mind, there is no way to not be conditioned! Even if your parents didn’t condition you, per se, your environment will.
Moving from Finland to the United States was an interesting experience for me, since the norms of accepted things vary from one culture and country to another. I was talking to my colleagues at a happy hour about how the cultural differences show up in our everyday behavior. One of my coworkers was planning on moving to the Netherlands, and I mentioned how in my experience everyone over there seemed to have great English skills. Someone asked me about the English skills of the Finnish population. I brought up the fact that movies and TV-series in Finland are all shown in their original language, not dubbed, like customary in some European countries. This is both great and not so great when it comes to adopting spoken English.
I always considered myself to have good English skills until I moved to the United States. Many times, when I said something, people would give me a sideways glance and I knew something was probably slightly incorrect. I started realizing that it’s a different thing to know what the words are, than to use them correctly in context of everyday speech.
I told my friends the story about me moving to San Diego and going to the 24-Hour Fitness to sign my gym membership. I went to talk to a person, and we sat down to sign the contract. He was asking me what my goal for the membership was and I said with a straight face, “I want to get my ass tight.” The guy almost choked, cleared his throat, and asked me from under a not-so-well-hidden smile, “Did you mean that you want to get your abs tight?”, to which I replied, “No. My ass. I want my ass to be tight.” And from his demeanor, I figured that what I had said was probably not quite the correct way to express what I meant… Naturally, it didn’t take me too long to live in the United States to figure out that ass is not considered a nice word. Nor shit, nor the f-bomb.
I met my American husband in San Diego and we moved to Finland when our first-born was 5 months old. In the coming seven years that we lived in Finland, we would be invited to kids’ and toddlers’ birthday parties. What always made us flinch a bit, was when people would come talk to us and to our kids, naturally in English, and throw the f-bomb here and there, totally nonchalantly. I realized that when one is consuming a lot of American TV-series, movies, and popular culture, they might get an impression that everyone speaks that way in the United States. Throwing fucks and shits and asses all over the place. There was no societal conditioning in Finland to know any better.
So, from this point of view, conditioning may not always be bad or undesired. It does make us more aligned with the expectations of our environment. So, let’s not hate all the moms and dads and people outside of us for giving us some of those guidelines.
While I don’t see how anyone could avoid being conditioned by their environment, I do see that we can learn to choose the things that help us, and drop the things that don’t feel right. I don’t necessarily swear like a sailor anymore but may still say the weirdest things. I have learned not to let that bother me too much. Maybe it adds a little pizzazz or a bit of quirky charisma to my communication, who knows…
So, I will keep on conditioning my kids just by being their mom. I choose to release some of the burden of guilt for that because I know that the environment, the school system, their friends, their experiences and interactions with the world around them will condition them to respond a certain way anyway. I can’t save them from being conditioned. All I can do is to try to condition them in a way that allows them to understand that they can eventually choose their own truths. I can show them that they don’t always have to fit in, but that understanding the societal and situational expectations can help them feel more comfortable and safe in that said environment. And a little bit of conformity can also be seen as a polite way to show that you accept others around you. It can make us experience belonging and camaraderie, so it’s ok to be a little bit conditioned too!!
But boy, is it hard to be understanding when it feels like I’m fighting a losing battle with these two super-smart, communicative, witty, and strong-willed Scorpios!? I can forget all my life coaching skills when it comes to trying to get these guys to pick up dirty underwear from the bathroom floor. And in these moments, I’m questioning my storylines to my kids. What if I didn’t encourage them to question, to rebel, to push back, and not just take someone’s word for it? Would parenting be easier for me? Maybe I should try to condition them to do what they’re told. Or, more specifically, to just do what I am telling them to do. Oh, the dilemma of walking your talk. Easier said than done…
