If You Love Unconditionally?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Psychologist, CBT approach - Chelyabinsk

Often times in a relationship, love is exchanged. Love is given as a positive reinforcement of desired behavior, as a reward.

In commodity-money relations, goods are exchanged for money, just as love is exchanged for the expected actions of another.

This attitude to the manifestation of love comes from childhood.

How many parents give love to their children? I got an A at school - my mother praised it, cleaned up the room - well done! Showed disobedience - get punished.

I still remember the words of my mother from N. Nosov's story about cucumbers. The essence of the story is that the boys plucked cucumbers in the field without permission. One of the boys brought cucumbers home. His mother started asking where the cucumbers came from. Upon learning that he stole them, she began to shame and blame her son, demanding to return back in the dark and give the cucumbers to the guard. Here is part of the dialogue between son and mother:

- I will not go! Grandpa has a gun. He will shoot and kill me.

- And let him kill! I'd rather not have a son at all than a thief's son.

In response to her son's misconduct, the mother, moreover, puts on him the stigma of a thief, and also threatens to deprive him of love and protection.

However, someone considers such a sadistic upbringing to be reasonable and the only true one.

The same mother will justify her behavior with love, because in this way, in her conviction, she brings up honesty and decency in her son, which in the future will save him from antisocial manifestations.

Therefore, it is often difficult to distinguish violence from love.

In behavioral therapy, there is the concept of operant conditioning. This concept was introduced by B. F. Skinner, who conducted many years of experiments on animals. Certain conditions were created for the animals to shape the desired behavior.

In operant conditioning there are 5 "educational" modes, conditions that can be called simply manipulations:

1.positive reinforcement - a pleasant stimulus follows in response to the desired behavior (if the rat pressed the lever, it received food); 2.negative reinforcement - elimination of the unpleasant stimulus in response to the desired behavior (the unpleasant sound inside the box stopped if the rat pressed the lever); 3.positive punishment - an unpleasant stimulus follows in response to undesirable behavior (the rat is shocked when trying to leave the box); 4.negative punishment - after an undesirable reaction, a positive stimulus is removed; 5.fading - cessation of reinforcement of the reaction until it weakened or disappeared (at first the rat received food for a long time when the lever was pressed, then it stopped receiving it when performing habitual actions, and gradually the need to press the lever disappeared)

In the story about cucumbers, we see an example of negative punishment - rejection, a promise to deprive a child of love for a misdeed.

Unfortunately, in our society, it is more customary to punish unwanted behavior than reinforce good behavior. Although reinforcement is more effective than punishment.

How do these modes manifest in a couple's relationship?

1. Positive reinforcement - the partner washes the dishes and gets something valuable in return, such as sex; 2. negative reinforcement - the wife gets out of depression when the husband invites her to go on a trip; 3. positive punishment - the husband leaves the house whenever the wife insists on a showdown; 4. negative punishment - the wife refuses intimacy and the husband stops giving money for shopping; 5. extinction - the wife stops responding to her husband's departure from home and asking him to return.

An important condition - the presented stimulus must be significant for the person whose behavior you want to change.

With this strategy, you can form a conditioned reflex. The partner will understand that certain of his actions entail a certain reaction of the other (consequences).

If a person needs to get you emotional and you give it to him, he will continue to do so, because you reinforce his behavior with your reaction.