conditioning & your coding.
seeing this script stops you from responding to it...
I’ve been thinking about why people stay in situations that are clearly destroying them
I watched a friend stay in a relationship for 2 years where the girl was systematically dismantling his confidence. telling him his ambitions were unrealistic. making fun of his appearance in front of friends. withholding affection as punishment whenever he did something she didn’t approve of
from the outside it was obvious
from the inside he was trapped in a feedback loop
every time she withdrew affection :
> his brain interpreted it as a threat to the attachment bond
> the distress from the potential loss spiked his cortisol
> the cortisol made him anxious
> the anxiety made him chase her approval
> the chasing reinforced her power position
> she’d give a crumb of affection
> the relief from the crumb felt like love because the contrast between distress then relief is chemically similar to the pleasure response
he wasn’t in love. more like a junky in a withdrawal
the crumb of affection after a period of deprivation triggers a dopamine spike that’s proportional to the length of the deprivation
same mechanism as intermittent reinforcement which is the most addictive reward schedule known to behavioral science
slot machines use it. that’s why they’re addictive. you lose lose lose lose then you win small. the win feels enormous relative to the losses. you keep pulling
she was a slot machine
every 2 weeks she’d be sweet for a night. that night felt like heaven compared to the 13 days of coldness before it. his brain coded the sweetness as intensely pleasurable because it was measured against the pain baseline
I tried to explain this to him once
he said “you don’t understand. when it’s good it’s really good”
yeah that’s literally the mechanism
the “really good” is manufactured by the “really bad” that preceded it
without the bad the good would feel average. he was addicted to the contrast. the swing. the rollercoaster that his brain was interpreting as “passion”
“passion” in relationships is usually just instability being processed by a nervous system that mistakes chaos for what?
exactly
for depth
stable love doesn’t feel like “passion” because there’s no contrast. it feels like calm. safety. like nothing is happening
which gets coded as boring by brains that were brought up in chaotic households to associate love with unpredictability
he grew up with an alcoholic father
unpredictable affection followed by unpredictable rage followed by unpredictable affection
his nervous system was formatted in childhood to recognize that pattern as love
the girl was activating the exact same script his father activated
he didn’t choose her but the coding chose her
...he’s still with her
I stopped trying to help
if I’m being honest some people’s coding is their cage. they can’t see the bars because the bars are made of the same material as their sense of self
you can’t free someone who thinks the cage is home
the disturbing thing is that this pattern is self replicating as well
the kid who grew up in chaos will seek chaos in relationships. will raise kids in a household with emotional chaos. those kids will grow up to seek the same. the pattern passes from generation to generation through nothing more than nervous system formatting in the first 5 years of life
and the interesting thing is that nobody is choosing this consciously. it’s running in the base system. below the level of decision making and the level of awareness
the girl who treats my friend like shit probably watched her mother do the same thing to her father. then she absorbed the dynamic before she could speak. then just internalized it as “this is how relationships work”
she’s not evil in a sense of entitlement to certain things
she’s a copy of a copy of a copy. executing a code that was installed before she had a real say in it
understanding this makes it hard to hate anyone
I still cut people off when they’re toxic to me
I don’t tolerate it
but I stopped hating them for it
hating someone for doing their predetermined task is like hating a calculator for doing math
it’s what it was built to do
we’re offshoring.
korbin.
a friend asked me “how do you actually do this” last month
I wrote him a proper answer instead of texting back something vague
it’s better than anything I’ve posted
