How Do I Learn?: A Skinnerian Analysis of Systematic Conditioning & Liberation

An essay, presumably from the 84938983rd time I took Psych 101.

Trying to pinpoint a specific learning experience in my life is incredibly difficult. I don’t remember learning how to ride a bike, to read, or to tie my shoes. There are whole chunks of my life that have been lost to the folds of time. What I implicitly remember and am intrinsically aware of is how I learned that the world was a very dangerous and unpredictable place, a thing to be feared; and that I was a powerless and flawed creature upon which the world acted. For me, developing a complex post-traumatic stress response was a process that involved both classical and operant conditioning as well as observational learning. While I cannot hope to cover every aspect of and experience that contributed to the development of such a response, I can offer the basic idea of my acquiring of it.

Though I cannot remember my earliest days on this planet, I can tell you how they set the stage for the psychological difficulties that would dominate my life for thirty-five years. I was born two months premature and, as a result, I spent the first three to four weeks of my life isolated in an incubator. I assume that there were very few stimuli in my tiny, plastic world at the time. Being relegated to a small and predictable environment, however lonely and distressing it may have been, likely caused my entrance into my chaotic home life to be significantly traumatic. In these early days at home with my parents the operant conditioning lending to the beginning of learned helplessness began in the form of severe neglect. I developed the cognitive expectation that no matter how much I engaged in the operant of crying, I would have no effect on my environment or the aversive stimuli and would be left hungry or uncomfortable. In theory, I stopped crying altogether and as I got older, this developed into my never reporting or protesting maltreatment.

Also during my infancy, another form of conditioning was underway. My parents had an incredibly tumultuous relationship in which there was a significant amount of reciprocal domestic violence. By all accounts, when I was an infant and my parents began arguing; my mother would scoop me up from my crib, get my brother out of bed, and run out the door. She would scream in terror as she yelled for my brother to, “Run! He’s going to kill us! Run!” And though these instances are not vividly represented in my memory bank, what followed throughout the rest of my life is a clear representation of these long forgotten moments. The neutral stimulus of sleeping was paired with the unconditioned stimuli of loud noises, being startled awake, and being whisked off into fight or flight resulted in the un_conditioned response_ of fear and panic. Eventually, the idea of going to bed – the conditioned stimulus – itself became frightening. I always had an aversion – the conditioned response – to going to sleep. Coupled with the nightmares and night terrors that would come later, I began to try to avoid sleep at all costs until I would simply pass out from exhaustion. This classical conditioning became much more complicated as operant conditioning was later added to the equation.

These are just two of the earliest, and easiest to discuss, examples of how classical and operant conditioning have figured significantly in my life. Though I was adopted by my father’s parents, I never was able to shake the conditioning that occurred in the earliest years of my life. I had already developed complex post-traumatic stress as I entered toddlerhood. Upon entering school, I struggled with a mix of trauma-related concentration difficulties and memory disruptions. This is quite common in children, even adults, who have experienced trauma. I was also experiencing significant emotional distress due to both past and ongoing traumas. Unfortunately, the trauma remained unspoken as I had fallen silent before I even had the words to speak. This, coupled with my precocity and losing my place while reading far ahead of the class were my pediatric downfall. Though there was evidence to the contrary, I was labeled with Attention Deficit Disorder at seven and a half years old, followed by the tag of Bipolar Disorder at the age of sixteen. I was overmedicated, subjected to iatrogenic psychiatric harm, and further thrust into a state of learned helplessness.

With post-traumatic stress, the word trigger is used frequently. Applicable to all forms of trauma-related distress, triggers are neutral stimuli such as a smell or sound that once preceded a traumatic event, an unconditioned stimulus, that have become conditioned stimuli that precipitate a post-traumatic response, or conditioned reflex. While these survival responses may differ on a cognitive level or be entirely subconscious in nature, the visceral reaction is always the same – the sufferer experiences the emotions of the past as if they were occurring in the present. While the trigger itself is generally a representation of classical conditioning, it is operant conditioning that would dictate the reaction to the emotional response elicited by such a trigger.

The learning, abuse, and revictimization that would contribute to trauma adaptations and survival patterns persisted well into my adult life. I spent the last several years reacting to that learning, living in a sustained state of high-threat vigilance and conditioned learned helplessness. There were many points in my life that observational learning played a significant role in my further developing a fear response to essentially everything in the world and contributed to the complex post-traumatic stress that I have experienced. However, I am thankful that for me, the biggest takeaway from such observational learning was that I did not want to behave in the same manner as those who were responsible for my care. In the end, it is through self-determination alone that I have taken steps toward recovery from lifelong learning and maladaptive behaviors. It was in learning exactly what I had been conditioned to think and feel that allowed me to begin to unlearn these harmful ideas, though this has not been without a degree of instinctive drift, and exert mastery over my life. In essence, my lived experience demonstrates that Skinner was both right and wrong in his ideas regarding human behavior. We are often victims of circumstance and frequently remain as such throughout our lives, however it is precisely when we choose not to be that we start to become autonomous and begin to shift a great deal of control from external factors to the self.