the gap might be a circle?

unless we take what we've learned about our pasts and begin to self-condition in preparation for the future. We know how to do what we're told, but maybe we need to learn how to give and take direction from ourselves.

I don't think a physical, natural instinct can be erased. It may react in an unexpected/unwanted way, but I don't think it can go away completely. What you described is not natural to any species on this planet, therefore when it happens, we don't know how we know, but we know it's wrong. Like a flock of birds flying away from a storm twenty miles away.

Ok, I'll play too.

But I can't address the incest part in a meaningful way - will stick to the conditioning versus learning part.

We can become conditioned to accept, or avoid a particular behavior without having any insight in to why. Conditioning involves reinforcements, rewards and punishments. We learn to repeat behaviors because there is a payoff (or avoidance of harm) by our doing so - like rat in a maze trying to avoid electric shock and get the little piece of cheese. Early conditioning may get written into unconscious layers of our awareness- we react based on physical/emotional consequences of past behavior.

This makes conditioning a type of learning. But learning through insight involves understanding, and choosing, and having the option to not choose. It may also involve deliberate practice, or deliberate seeking of knowledge.

Many of us are trying to use LEARNING to DE-CONDITION negative reactions that are embedded in us, and to deliberately replace them with more constructive responses.

Conditioning is natural and part of life, put we are more than just passive reactors to circumstances, we can use cognitive insight based learning to carve pathways through rough terrain.

Or so it seems to me...

Jenfa, I can see where the gap would be a circle in many lives. In my own life, my upbringing and the world I was thrust into had - and still have - very little in common. Incest might have been our most socially acceptable family tradition. My father never even visited the ancestral lands he preached to us. I remain a member of that flock flying away from storms I cannot see. I am not sure I was a better teacher to my children than he was to his. My husband, however, sees a circle in his learning - conditioning. The older he gets, the smarter his parents get. His family is not perfect, either, but they remain close enough to keep working it out.

Yes, Jen, I remember that post. It was a goodie and, yes, this is a walk down that same vein. I think it is important enough for further development. Too important to keep to a single issue. But... I did too ask your opinion on it. I asked everybody's opinion. I love group efforts!

Thank you, letitbe, for moving it beyond the single issue. Great thoughts! High fiber chew food.

Interesting opposition there. My major abusers were religious fanatical parents who took us kids overseas to dangerous mission fields at war so they could be heroes. The gap between what was preached at the pulpit and the violence in the home was dramatic, traumatic, and constant. The latter meaning it became some sort of conditioning.

I think of learning as involving reason, though it is not exclusively rational or logical. I think of conditioning as accessing the subconscious more directly through stimulus-response. What I know is I was constantly with clashes between what I was told and what I felt on my body. Clashes that went far beyond hypocrisy or any theoretical nit-picking to be about actual survival.

I liked, therefore, what 51% said about teaching the cat to take a weekly bath even though it hates it because it's "normal." What was normal in my home in war time was, as with your stories of incest and sexual abuse (which I had in my home, too) was quite far from it. Yet somehow we endured the cognitive dissonance. How'd we do that?

i dont know how to put this in words, but will try, i dont understand well learning vs conditionig and contemplate, and for incest from parents it is far away from natural and there can be internal fight father, mother vs abuser, as much as you can hate them for their wrong doing it is also parents part which makes it even worse with question how could father or mather do so wrong to their kids

when we are kids parents, guardians can teach anything to us, and by their teaching we are doing it, at that time we arent aware what is right, what is wrong, we follow teaching, we might not like it but for reasons of fear when not doing it, or being punished it for not doing it, we continue to follow teaching
at that age it is easy to manipulate and to scare kids
when we are kids, we cant protect ourselves and what our family teach us or do to us we dont think any wrong with it, it is way of our growing, and only one that we might know

when we get our own perspective of right and wrong then we start to realize done wrong to us
realization brings up mixed up emotions, which in teenage we still cant process and cant do much about
there we go between right and wrong, confused and questioning ourselves how something so wrong we accepted and lived by
for trauma in family or any other dont forget we were unable to do anything especialy kids, we didnt ask for it or we havent been able to protect oursleves

here i dont think that we can understand abuser no matter the preaching or in their thinking that it is given them right to do so

my opinion about growing up and realization what was done wrong, and where that wrong brought us

Arfie, I'm game.
In psychology we learned that conditioning is something others do to you. If you use "reverse psychology" on your kids, that is a type of conditioning. If you give a reward for good behavior, you're conditioning your kids. It's really, I think, another word for teaching, but a special form of teaching in which the learner is treated as if unaware of the process. The learner is operated on by the conditioner, you might say, and has no say in anything. Just like Pavlov's dogs, who were conditioned to salivate in response to a bell because they had learned it meant that food was on its way.

Learning, on the other hand, is something that you do yourself. In fact, you can learn independently--what you decide to learn--or you can learn what somebody is conditioning you to learn, what they are teaching you. If you are aware that someone is trying to condition you, and teach you something without your having a say in the process, you can refuse to learn it, in some cases. Not, obviously, all of them.

I could refuse to learn how to change a flat tire even though somebody did their best to teach me (conditioning) because I never want to change a flat tire and believe it's better to stand there and let someone else do it for me. (No, I don't--it's just an example.)

To condition someone, then, to believe something such as that incest is part of an ancestral heritage is . . . treating them not as a person, but as an animal. It takes away their self-will, and dehumanizes them. It makes abuse easier if the victim is not seen as fully human, yes? This is an addition to giving false information to encourage compliance.

Is this reasonable? Does it make sense? Is it a helpful way to look at it?

I didn't know until years later that my father's family for the most part were child molesters. It blew my mind. I called up male friends: Do you want to have sex with bald flat chested girls? (A little crazy, I know, but the craziness in my family that had been going on for generations, unbeknownst to me, came to light, and I was a bit crazy with the knowledg, and I wondered for a second about all men.) Life.

Behaviorists call learning conditioning. That's what I know about your question. I have philosophical questions about the difference, but not today.

letitbe and booklady are technically correct. There is a difference between learning and conditioning.
learning is about facts, 2 +2= 4, in Spanich that would be dos y dos son cuatro; to fry an egg crack it put it in a pan and turn the heat on. We can make choices about what we do with those facts.
Conditioning is a manipulation through propaganda, rewards and punishments to do or avoid something. What we learn is that we will get a reward if we do whatever the conditioning involves. We may realize it on a conscous level or it may be unconscious. That the dog came to salivate upon the ringing of the bell was a manipulation of the dogs behavior, and he was conditioned to do that by the association of the bell with food. what he learned was that food came when they rang the bell.

Your father used propaganda to persuade you that incest is 'normal' and a 'tradition of the family'. If the incestuous acts were pleasurable, as they might have been, then the act was rewarded by the pleasure, and so you were conditioned to accept this behavior. What you learned later was that this behavior is consicered by the rest of society to be child abuse.

*considered

Somehow I think that conditioning and learning are the same thing. When a god person, your parent, tells you something, it seems like truth and "regular" truth. I learn the ABC's. I learn how to be the recipient of crazy person's thoughts, through trust.

A person can condition them self, as well as teach them self or do deliberate intellectual learning.

Every emotion we experience becomes the foundation for us learning something more about life.

Conditioning is just one form of perpetual learning. No need to split hairs.

I am wondering, after these days of meditation, if the difference is awareness. I haven't a clue why neighbors look away when they see me. I only know they do and I respond in kind. I do not know why. I can only speculate and conjecture. Even if I learn why, the urge to do so will remain.

I remember learning that two=dos=zwei=er. It is a conscious knowledge I can build on. I never use the knowledge on reflex without direct, acknowledged interaction.

What's humorous to me is when conditioning and learning contrast ironically. In the military dictatorship in which I grew up in South America, pro military and anti democratic propaganda was constant. We school kids were not allowed to turn in a paper to our teachers for grading unless the military slogan of the day was written across the top of the first page.

Our teachers were not to grade any student paper or test without the propaganda slogan on it. There was a colonel in the principal's office at my school, as at most schools, to make sure, too. Punishments were immediate, arbitrary, and severe, and of the kind that give a person PTSD. Hence, I'm here.

Yet it all backfired. Now the country I grew up in is a liberal democracy. All of that propaganda tried to condition us to surrender our will to the dictator, but instead it made everybody more democratic, not less so. Conditioning sometimes teaches the reverse of what it wants the subject to learn. Happily, in my case.

muji, that is profound. That's what happened in the Soviet Union too, and in Nazi Germany. You can be conditioned to write the slogan on the top of the page, but what you learn from it is that the people making you do it can't control the inmost part of you that somehow knows the Truth. I've met people from Soviet culture who came here, and they are often seen as stubborn people who don't open up to people easily. No wonder why.

Ha!

muji