Respondent learning, law of familiarity, creating habits of relationships; you are living a life of your own choices!
Habits are, in my opinion, the most powerful and important part of human behavior. I want you to notice that I wrote -they are the most powerful and important part of human behavior. Psychologists may disagree with me on this statement but when I consider how much of our lives we surrender to habit it is frightening. Almost all of our actions are directed by habit. I call it "living on automatic pilot”.
Habits are a function of the subconscious mind that is called respondent learning or conditioning. Psychologist Dr. Ivan P. Pavlov proved his theory of behavioral conditioning as a learned response when he conditioned a group of dogs to salivate whenever he rang a bell. He always rang a bell just before he fed the group of dogs and after a while the dogs began to associate the ringing of the bell with food. They learned that a ringing bell meant that they would soon be given food and this triggered a reflex action of salivating.
A habit is nothing more than a conditioned response we have developed either consciously or subconsciously. Habits are called habits of adjustment by psychologists and are learned behavior, meaning that we have to learn the behavior before we it becomes a habit.
Instinctive behavior is knowledge an animal or insect already possesses when it is born. Humans do not rely on instinct to any large extent in their behavior. Infants will smile and suck instinctively but as they mature more and more of their behavior is learned.
Children are taught habits of good behavior and these are very important during their development. It is these habits that help a child understand things they should and should not do to cope with their environment safely. As children mature they develop a set of values which allows them to choose the appropriate behavior for any given circumstance.
Adults use learned behavior almost exclusively. A habit is formed by doing something the same way over and over until it becomes automatic. After we have repeated a task or a situation over and over the same way our subconscious mind recognizes that act and takes over the operation. Generally speaking it takes about thirty or forty repetitions of something for it to become a habit.
Not all habits are bad. Think how uncomfortable it would be to have to think of how to walk every time we wanted to take a step. It would be equally difficult to need to plan the route we take to work every day. Habits allow us to be able to do more than one thing at a time and can improve our efficiency in certain tasks.
Habits of good behavior are very useful to us but we all tend to create habits without regard to whether they are good or bad. We develop habits not only in our actions but also in our thinking. Most of our attitudes about racism, politics, religion and much more are done for us automatically by our subconscious mind. Most of these habits were taught to us by our parents and friends. One of the ways I recognize these habits of thought in myself is if I have already made up my mind about something.
Do you know anyone like this; people who have already made up their minds about how they feel about other people, issues or events? The danger here is that people, situations and events are changing constantly. If these changes are in conflict with habits that are deeply set into your way of thinking you could be in conflict with yourself and the rest of society.
While talking to a clinical psychologist one day she demonstrated the effect of these habits in our thinking in a very simple way, it might be useful for you to try this demonstration. Make a fist. Go on, make a fist. What can you do with a fist? You may be able to push some things around or make a lot of noise, but you are really limited in what you can accomplish with a closed fist. Now, open your hand. What can you do with an open hand? The answer is anything you can think of! Your mind works in the same way. If your mind is already made up it is like a closed fist and you cannot do much with it. If you have an open mind, like an open hand, you can do anything you can think of.
There is a thing called the law of familiarity. In relationships it results in the creation of habits in the way we treat others we are in relationships with, especially people we love. When we are first attracted to another person we want this person to be attracted to us too, so we do everything we can think of to please that person and they are doing everything to please us as well. After we have had an opportunity to get to know that person we learn what pleases them and we do those things exclusively. Can you see the habits forming in the way you relate to that person? We do not create habits of relationships only with the people we are in love relationships with. We create habits of relationships with everyone we are in contact with on a regular basis. I am not saying that these habits are bad. These habits were developed to help us deal with society, but we need to be aware of them in case we ever need to change them.
One thing we can be sure of is change. If anyone you are in a relationship with changes in any way the way you relate to that person will need to change in order for you to maintain the relationship. There is an emotional problem known as co-dependency that is clearly the result of habits we develop as the result of our relationships with others, especially people we love. Codependency is a very damaging problem and it should be studied by every thinking person on the planet! Briefly, codependency occurs when one member of a relationship experiences a problem which changes their behavior. Anyone in a relationship with that person will have to adjust their behavior in order to function around them.
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