Creating an Environment to Heal Maladaptive Behavioral Conditioning
Romeo Stevens on cultivating patience, equanimity, and internal trust to create an internal environment in which experiments can be run and re-patterning can occur.
Romeo Stevens (blog, twitter) recently expanded my all-time favorite tweet into a 19-minute audio essay on YouTube. With permission, I’m reposting the transcript here, cleaned up by ChatGPT and me.
I want to try walking through something slowly. Many people already know many parts of this, but I think it's valuable to sometimes walk through these things slowly and just see what comes up.
When you were a baby, your needs were provided for unconditionally. Then at some point, your parents wanted to wean you off of breast milk, they wanted to potty train you. And so they began to condition your behavior, they began to shape your behavior, and they did this shaping with the tools that they had available. They might have used positive reinforcement, they might have used negative reinforcement.
When you are a child, and you don't have training, someone suddenly shouting at you, especially your parents, is very dysregulating and threatening to your nervous system. You experience it as aversive. So your parents, having received patterning from their parents and from society, used the building blocks available—praise, reward, punishment—and you, being in a sponge-like state, not knowing how to configure a nervous system, tried to move towards the rewards and away from the aversive stimuli. And you did this by taking on different shapes with your nervous system, vascular system, somatic system, copying or taking on a complementary shape to your parents.
Later, as you were taught to "self-regulate," you took these early building blocks, which are the ways that you learned how to configure this complex nervous system, and you built internal representations of praise and reward linked to your parents, linked to your peers, linked to things you wanted.
Later on, you're an adult, and you see that other people are handling the stressors of life in ways that seem better—they seem less stressed by work, they have better interpersonal relationships. And the material that you encounter—the advice that you encounter, mental models, emotional work—because our society does not have complex language for working with the actual nervous-system / somatic-system shapes that people are making, it is difficult to point you to them as we don't have the vocabulary. We also don't have a pedagogical model, we don't really know how to reliably teach different nervous system shapes, different energetic pattern shapes to adults outside of this early window of patterning. It's like learning a second language.
It seems like we can sometimes expose people to those with better patterns, say Marshall Rosenberg teaching Nonviolent Communication (NVC), and it seems that sometimes, in certain environments, people can reopen into accepting repatterning, ideal parent figure protocol, memory reconsolidation, these sorts of things. And so these breakthroughs, we don't really know how they work. Are they truly all at once a moment of clarity in which the system learns a new thing, or are those moments of insight actually just the capping or final moment of a long process in which lots of subsystems sort of subconsciously reconfigured until finally some sort of global flip occurred? I don't know.
It's difficult to stay motivated in learning many of these skills when the method of learning is so unreliable, and even the breakthroughs that we do have often don't seem to correspond to the sorts of behavioral changes that we would want or expect, at least immediately. One thing that I can say about it that feels useful is that many of the positive qualities that these practices are meant to instill—patience, equanimity, and internal trust—seem to me to be valuable, partially or maybe even largely, because what they are doing is creating an internal environment in which experiments can be run at all.
In the same way that a chemical laboratory needs to create certain conditions in order for its experiments to be valid and gather useful data, there's a certain internal stance, most closely described by equanimity but with many other components, that creates an environment in which that opening can occur, and the system is open to the kind of updates and repatterning that can actually make a difference.
When I say "experiment," I mean making informed guesses, considering both with analytic mind and with intuition what the potential implications are if those guesses were true, and trying things out and seeing if you get surprised. Very often, we're unable to run experiments because we're not open to surprise; we think we already know what we're looking for. And when we already know what we're looking for, well, we have lots of coping strategies; we know how to find the things that have been helpful in the past for helping us gloss past things we don't like and running towards things we do like. And so those pre-existing cached answers have to be set aside.
I think that in many ways, the novelty of various practices is an important component because in the early stages of a new practice, we don't know what we're looking for. We are open to something new happening, and it is that looking—actually looking instead of resorting to a cached answer—that helps create the proper stance. And this also explains why practices that were working well for you stop working sometimes, seemingly mysteriously; we've learned what to expect. The state of expectation is not diametrically opposed but certainly not the stance of open experimentation and curiosity.
So when spiritual teachers talk about "simple presence," I get a little frustrated because I don't think it's simple. I think it seems simple to them because they have cultivated this internal environment, and so what they're calling simple presence is this stance of opening in each moment and not knowing what comes next, actually looking. And so they're getting a lot of really good data, which means that their parts can update again.
The correlates of this are made much of by various practices—quieting of the verbal mind, physical relaxation—sometimes these practices can make it seem as though this is a mechanical process, but your parts are not stupid. They're as alive as you are, and if they have the intimation that these processes are going to pose an existential threat to them, they are going to conceal things, suppress things, do what they need to to keep you operating. My hypothesis is that this is mostly means-ends confusion. What I mean by this is that these parts typically have a single strategy to reach some necessary goal, or seemingly necessary for your continued survival and well-being, and so anything that points out the flawed nature of that strategy implies, or so they think, that this necessary goal is unreachable, which is terrifying and to be avoided.
This creates an internal environment in which parts, by default, are not communicating with one another and so can't update each other on potential alternatives to their current strategies, and in which parts are not open to hearing about the negative externalities for other goals of this particular strategy.
Even as I speak this particular thing, whatever it is, I find I keep jumping to ideas of what it is I'm trying to do, and I have to pause the recording and reopen to whatever arises in the moment. So meditation works when it manages to bring us into contact with what's actually happening, along with a set of clever ideas from people in the past who did the same thing. But those clever ideas do need to be translated to your actual conditions, your actual internal laboratory. And so maybe what I'm advocating for is a little bit less top-down deciding ahead of time what practice it is we're trying to do and what it's trying to accomplish, and setting aside some time to be, or try to be, present, whether that turns into a formal sitting practice, writing something, going for a walk, doing emotional integration, or recording yourself on your phone and reading the transcript and seeing what happens.