Neurologically speaking, when learning, human beings progress through several stages. First, you have no idea how to do something, so every step of it is difficult. Then, after you’ve done it several times, your mind begin to remember the process itself and so it becomes easier. Then, at some point, you get to where you can just flat out do the process and you don’t even really have to think about it very much. The reason why it works this way is that your mind functions using subprocesses and processes – in other words, the first time you got on a bicycle, you had to coordinate “don’t fall over” with “push the left pedal down while you let the right one come up” with “hold the handlebars so the bike stays steady”. But after you’ve ridden a bike for a while, you don’t think about it in those terms. You just think “ride the bike”. A collection of subprocesses has now become one process, which can be executed using only a fragment of your conscious awareness.
The tricky thing is that this way of arriving at what feels like a naturally occurring process doesn’t just work for things like riding a bike. It also works for things like having a rigid outlook on life, or desperately clinging to a perspective that may once have been valid and useful as a defense mechanism but is now doing nothing more than causing stress or pain. For example, if you happen to date someone who constantly wears yellow socks, and go through a relationship with that person and then they break your heart, you will wind up with an association that “yellow socks have something to do with heartbreak”. If you happen to date someone else who wears yellow socks and they also break your heart, you’ll really start to associate yellow socks with personal agony instead of just horrible taste.
In some cases associations can be helpful. For example, “Dark alleyway + midnight + inebriated = bad” is, generally speaking, a good set of associations, if for no other reason than that you may wind up face first in a dumpster (depending on how inebriated you are). But in other cases, associations (and their dangerous cousins, assumptions) can be harmful. For example, let’s say that after undergoing the yellow sock agony described above, you meet someone who is actually wonderful and you greatly enjoy everything about them. Yet one day you discover they wear yellow socks.
Just from reading this, you can laugh and say “Oh, I wouldn’t care about that” – and maybe if the situation really did only have to do with literal yellow socks, you might not. But the essential point is that once an association (and its accompanying assumptions, which are usually formed as part of the initial process of associating one experience with another) has been put in place, it does remain (at varying levels of strength, of course, which increase with repeated exposure to the two associated stimuli).
After enough exposure to a negative or painful experience, the mind graduates from having a specific conscious reaction to a given stimulus to constructing defense mechanisms. These are subconscious sets of behaviors which are triggered at the detection of a stimulus that, in past experience, was a precursor to a negative or painful experience. Defense mechanisms are not inherently "evil" or "bad". In fact, their original purpose is to serve as a line of defense - to protect, not harm you - against a perceived incoming danger or source of pain.
The trouble with defense mechanisms arises when the danger itself has passed and you are now placed into a situation in which a stimulus (which in and of itself may be harmless) is presented which previously presaged or was associated with imminent disaster but in this new situation is either entirely benign or even possibly positive. Yet because of the (now deeply ingrained) defense mechanism, your preprogrammed response is to act out the embedded sequence of commands exactly the same way a computer program would. Click GO, execute Steps 1 - 20, so to speak. And the most insidious thing about these mechanisms is that often they assemble and imprint themselves entirely subconsciously. It's also interesting to note that the more painful the experience the person undergoes, the stronger the defense mechanism created as a result is and, crucially important, the wider the "trigger area" of the defense mechanism's initiation becomes. Example: Someone is hurt very badly; instead of only creating an association that "guys with green socks are jerks", they create an association that "all relationships will eventually end in pain" so the resulting defense mechanism is to keep themselves removed from relationships entirely.
Let's use an example to clarify. Meet Jeff. Jeff is a nice and rather shy fellow who, while not originally very self-conscious, is made fun of repeatedly every day in the lunch room in high school for the slightest thing. Jeff drops an apple? Uproarious mocking laughter greets him. Shoelace untied? Merciless bullying ensues. So Jeff learns (as a defense mechanism) that he has to be very self-conscious in order to not give the other kids anything to latch on to in order to make fun of him. So he becomes somewhat stiff and develops a case of social anxiety. And it works for a while because the other kids eventually move on to picking on someone else. (Or it doesn't but Jeff just develops a case of social anxiety anyway as a result of the experience).
Fast-forward ten years. Jeff is now a successful artist and has left high school far behind in the dust of history. Yet the habit he developed as a defense mechanism persists because it became so much a part of his normal routine that he stopped even questioning it and the habit of being socially anxious just feels like part of who he is. So he remains socially anxious in any situation with people, a trace of that nervousness in social situations tingeing everything he does, consciously or unconsciously. For example, he may choose not to go out with friends if there are too many of them going, or may prefer to pursue activities that don't take place in a large public or group setting.
It could be said that who we are is a collection of these self-written programs - a lifetime of experiences, reactions to those experiences, and essentially judgments about them that then influence future behavior. But the problem with assigning value judgments to experiences is that the more you do it (and the more you go through life) you run the risk of continually narrowing your own potential future experiences...in other words, dimming and removing your own capacity for new experiences and new perspectives based solely on your past experiences. Sure, you may have had three failed relationships in a row, but if you just stop trying, you may never meet that fourth person that turns out to be worth going through all of the bad ones just to get to.
After enough exposure to a negative or painful experience, the mind graduates from having a specific conscious reaction to a given stimulus to constructing defense mechanisms. These are subconscious sets of behaviors which are triggered at the detection of a stimulus that, in past experience, was a precursor to a negative or painful experience. Defense mechanisms are not inherently "evil" or "bad". In fact, their original purpose is to serve as a line of defense - to protect, not harm you - against a perceived incoming danger or source of pain.
The trouble with defense mechanisms arises when the danger itself has passed and you are now placed into a situation in which a stimulus (which in and of itself may be harmless) is presented which previously presaged or was associated with imminent disaster but in this new situation is either entirely benign or even possibly positive. Yet because of the (now deeply ingrained) defense mechanism, your preprogrammed response is to act out the embedded sequence of commands exactly the same way a computer program would. Click GO, execute Steps 1 - 20, so to speak. And the most insidious thing about these mechanisms is that often they assemble and imprint themselves entirely subconsciously. It's also interesting to note that the more painful the experience the person undergoes, the stronger the defense mechanism created as a result is and, crucially important, the wider the "trigger area" of the defense mechanism's initiation becomes. Example: Someone is hurt very badly; instead of only creating an association that "guys with green socks are jerks", they create an association that "all relationships will eventually end in pain" so the resulting defense mechanism is to keep themselves removed from relationships entirely.
Let's use an example to clarify. Meet Jeff. Jeff is a nice and rather shy fellow who, while not originally very self-conscious, is made fun of repeatedly every day in the lunch room in high school for the slightest thing. Jeff drops an apple? Uproarious mocking laughter greets him. Shoelace untied? Merciless bullying ensues. So Jeff learns (as a defense mechanism) that he has to be very self-conscious in order to not give the other kids anything to latch on to in order to make fun of him. So he becomes somewhat stiff and develops a case of social anxiety. And it works for a while because the other kids eventually move on to picking on someone else. (Or it doesn't but Jeff just develops a case of social anxiety anyway as a result of the experience).
Fast-forward ten years. Jeff is now a successful artist and has left high school far behind in the dust of history. Yet the habit he developed as a defense mechanism persists because it became so much a part of his normal routine that he stopped even questioning it and the habit of being socially anxious just feels like part of who he is. So he remains socially anxious in any situation with people, a trace of that nervousness in social situations tingeing everything he does, consciously or unconsciously. For example, he may choose not to go out with friends if there are too many of them going, or may prefer to pursue activities that don't take place in a large public or group setting.
It could be said that who we are is a collection of these self-written programs - a lifetime of experiences, reactions to those experiences, and essentially judgments about them that then influence future behavior. But the problem with assigning value judgments to experiences is that the more you do it (and the more you go through life) you run the risk of continually narrowing your own potential future experiences...in other words, dimming and removing your own capacity for new experiences and new perspectives based solely on your past experiences. Sure, you may have had three failed relationships in a row, but if you just stop trying, you may never meet that fourth person that turns out to be worth going through all of the bad ones just to get to.
