published in 2014 on my tumblr
According to my rather modest but usually accurate knowledge of psychology (actually, it’s more like an intuitive grasp), the story goes like this: once you identify that you have been programmed to act, think and feel a certain way through education, and even more, when you recognize when and how it happened, you perceive the mechanisms of your own social conditioning. Then you are actually in a position to consciously distance yourself from that training.
You can knowingly choose to behave otherwise than ingrained. You can trust your reasoning without second-guessing it, dismissing your doubts as acquired belief. You can let go and let your gut feeling guide you towards experiences you find rewarding or satisfying without the hesitation or the pang of guilt you’d normally feel because you’d be aware that your guilt or shame or reluctance is something socially programmed.
To put it in the lingua of self-help books, you could theoretically overcome the anxieties caused by the clash of who you are and who you’re told you should be, in order to be a happier and overall healthier person.
It sounds awfully cheesy. It was almost painful to type. And also, in spite of all the cheap advice of self-help books (I assume, I haven’t really read any), it sounds pretty much like this self-reprogramming thing is bound to meet with only moderate success.
Sure, I can pretty much contol the way I act, unless I am very pissed off, in which case my mouse or my phone or a door handle or a jeans button or the lid of a jar might feel the entire force of my restrained wrath. However, if you’ve managed to reprogram yourself to think and feel differently about big questions of life, the universe and everything, please let me know how. Or write a ‘how-to’ for dummies.
