Conditioned responses

I had hoped to be a bit more regular in my posting. But honestly, this chemo/radiation dance with cancer is a new one for me, and Monday and Tuesday of this week saw me at an incredibly low energy level and just couldn’t do it. However, new topics then flooded my mind on Wednesday and Thursday such that I started three or four new pieces, but somehow I couldn’t get the right handle on how to push any of them through to the end.

I’m not even sure why I wandered down this exploration of conditioned response. Perhaps what got me started was thinking about how when I’m driving and my wife says sternly, “Red Light!”. (Unfortunately this actually happens more often than I usually care to confess to later). I now don’t even bother to regain my focus and composure to look for the actual red light, but automatically put my foot on the brake, starting to slow down. And that conditioned response used to be followed by another conditioned response, “Yeah, I saw it.” Now, though, through the behavioral modification mechanism from her of a stern look, that has been re-conditioned to “Thanks. I wasn’t paying enough attention.”

It is said that for most of our day, most of our actions are conditional; responses that have been shaped over time by environment and habit, ones not done by any actual choice. Some are social: red light means stops, green means go. Some are biological: redheads catch the eye more readily than brunettes. Perhaps a certain melody evokes a pleasant memory. Or a certain aroma brings tear. Even concepts and ideas bend to conditional responses.

 Growing up, the only person ever to call me “Scottie” was the family dentist. So you can imagine the conditioned response that name held. It lost its power though when my dear wife started using it as well in a much sweeter voice (although now it seems to be always tied to some household chore…)

In my early years, my father worked for an agriculture bank which made loans to the farming community. Weekends were often spent as a family driving through the countryside of the California’s San Joaquin Valley looking at crops, visiting dairies and cattle ranches, Dad just checking in on clients. I remember when Caesar Chavez arrived in the valley and began organizing the farm workers. Over dinner, I remember my dad and mom sharing stories about this or that incident where the strikers had injured farmers or their property. All I heard was about was what trouble makers those organizers were. In time, whenever the topic of United Farm Workers came up, my response became what I was exposed to in my house and environment, one that sided with the farmers and packing house owners who were antagonized by union thugs. 

It was until many years later, after watching a documentary on the struggle of the workers to unionize and their well deserved right for a safe working environment, that I realized I didn’t have the whole picture. I was responding not out experience but hearsay and impact from my environment. I hadn’t thought things through for myself. The documentary brought up memories of actually seeing the living conditions of the labor camps when I younger on some of those Murray family drives. Hundreds of small cinder block tin-roofed sheds, and a single water faucet serving a single tribe of numerous dwellings. The living conditions were nothing I had ever seen before or could even imagine. Why didn’t that come to mind before?

But I can’t blame my father for my conditioned response. It just was what it was. There can be no blame in any of this. I did the best I could with what I had, and fortunately, in later years, it was easily fixed with a balance of information and a willingness to change. As for him, his own response had surely been shaped by forces unknown to me as well. Doing the best with what had.  

In a strange parallel of early childhood memory not shaping future responses, several years ago I picked up novel by John Grisham, Painted House, one the few of his that was not a legal web of intrigue. It was about dirt scrabble farm family in Texas during the Depression years. Reading that book moved me to tears because Grisham described the same life my father had hinted at when he told us about his life at that time. For him it was Oklahoma, just north of Texas, ten years old picking cotton all day long in order to help the family eat at the end of the day. No doubt he too was living in a similar type of rusty metal shack I saw as a child at the migrant camps. 

The takeaway: perhaps most of us, most of the time, act out in our lives in conditioned response. There is not much you and I can do it about except to be more aware of these responses and their triggers, and even more importantly, more forgiving. Imagine someone standing up and trying to correct us because of some conditioned response of ours in a harsh and unkind manner; or scold us for a conditioned response which over we had little control or didn’t even understand ourself. If we might use our imagination to understand what it is like to be on the receiving end, then perhaps our quickness blame and need to affix responsibility when it is turned back around might give way to understanding and forgiveness.