Conditioned

Pavlov and his damn dogs!

Part of my ‘well-rounded education’ provided by University included a Psychology class, level 101. Anyone who has ever taken even the minutest level of Psychology has heard of Pavlov and his conditioning experiments on those poor dogs that drove people to animal activism.

For those fortunate enough to not have suffered through a psychology class, the basic premise behind conditioning is a learned, reinforced behavior as a response to some kind of stimuli. It is something that I find I often reference in so many different contexts of my life. As the one lesson that I retained from this intro course, I have thus established my “well-roundedness” by Univeristy standards.

Lately, I have come to associate this experiment with how I react to any intense emotion I find in myself. In the past, the foremost intense emotion I felt was passion. Whether it is towards another person, albeit male, or a hobby/pastime, it is an emotion that has led me on a path which has ended with other, less desirable and equally severe emotions. As a result of this learned behavior, I now try not to get too excited or impassioned about anything in particular. And to further that result, any other strong emotion I feel now makes me equally nervous for fear of finding myself down a road that is most difficult to come back from.

I know this is not good. While it is helpful to be able to detach one self from certain feelings and situations, to become completely devoid of emotion for fear of feeling is also stifling. I am trying to work on this as I try to grow as a person, but it is difficult since this only grows with time, as the behavior is reinforced each time it happens. To undergo so much hurt and pain at a young age helps wizen one quickly, but also tends to jade perceptions and opinions of things, turning cynical and disparaging.

But even with the ‘knowing’ that it is not good, I still find myself cutting things out of my life that cause me to feel too much of anything, whether it is disappointment, jealousy, love, empathy. Positive or negative, it doesn’t seem to matter. I have hope that as I learn more about myself in this time of self-examination I seem to be going through that this will change, but that too frightens me because what if it doesn't change?! Then I have hoped for nothing and will only be let down by myself, the one person I am supposed to be 100% reliant upon. Lately, it seems that I am content to be just that…content. And I wonder if that is so wrong; to want the mediocrity of emotion.