The Roots of Emotional Illness: Emotional Conditioning

Emotional illnesses are mainly depressions, anxieties, substance abuse, and over- and under eating. They cause emotional distress. This distress comes from conflicts and support imbalances in relationships. Such illnesses commonly arise in our closest family relationships. The support imbalance comes about because one person gives too much emotional support to another while the other person demands and receives too much emotional support.

The National Institutes for Mental Health find a 21.4% lifetime prevalence for emotional illnesses, about one-fifth of the population.

Influence of Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist and physician. He received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1904. Pavlov wanted to discover how the human mind worked but he had no way to do this in the late 1890s. He decided instead to study behavior in dogs. This would help him figure out how the minds of dogs worked. Then, maybe he could better understand something about people and how their minds worked.

Pavlov studied dogs’ digestion. He observed that his dogs made mental associations between the people who fed them and their being hungry and producing saliva. When dog feeders came into the dogs’ room without food, the dogs still produced saliva, as if food was present. Pavlov called this a “conditional reflex.” It was an association between two events taking place closely in time—the feeders coming into the room and the dogs’ getting fed.

Emotional Conditioning    

Homer B. Martin, MD and I, two psychiatrists, worked in psychotherapy with thousands of people of all ages over a combined 80-year period. We discovered emotional dysfunctions and interpersonal support imbalances arise from an emotional conditioning process in early childhood. This process is similar to the physiologic conditioning discovered in dogs by Ivan Pavlov.

Children learn how to relate with others by age three, Dr. Martin and I discovered. Children learn emotional relationship patterns from parents or early caregivers by way of their parents’ emotional affections. These emotional affections are the emotions parents show when they interact with their children Each child discovers his own emotional reactions as well as experiencing how his parents emotionally interact with him. Children never erase this early learning. It teaches them how relationships work.

Parents can teach only what they know. The source of their knowledge is what they learned in their own childhoods from their parents. This knowledge came unconsciously without awareness. Each parent conveys unconscious emotional messages simultaneously with direct, conscious instruction. Often, this is teaching to be well-behaved, kind, trustworthy or self-reliant. But some children receive messages to be inconsiderate, demanding, or helpless acting.

The emotionally unconscious and conscious messages can contradict one another. A parent may out loud tell his child not to fight with a sibling, yet physically hit his child for misbehaving. Children learn to ignore the conscious, verbal instruction not to fight because the unspoken and unconscious emotional message of being physically hit is a more powerful message.

Dr. Martin and I discovered children are emotionally conditioned into roles in their relationships. Children fulfill these roles without awareness throughout their lives as they become adults. These roles become their personalities.

We call these roles the “omnipotent” or overly strong personalities and “impotent” or overly weak and helpless personalities. We found these two roles are continually reinforced throughout childhood and adult life. This causes a hardening of the personality with increasing age. We also discovered the emotionally conditioned roles can be mild, moderate, or severe depending on the dose of emotional conditioning in childhood.

In the overly strong omnipotent role, a person unconsciously believes, and acts as if, she or he is incredibly strong and can tackle any problem or achieve any task without help from others. In the impotent role a person unconsciously sees himself as weak or helpless. He or she requires help in many areas of life.

Because of our emotional conditioning, we manage our relationships automatically without thinking and with knee-jerk emotional reactions. This causes us trouble in our relationships because we don’t think about what we’re doing. We just react in a conditioned way, just like Pavlov’s dogs did when they saw their feeders enter their room.

Symptoms

In emotional illness people may have depression, anxiety, headaches, stomach aches, lose or gain weight, have insomnia, gastrointestinal reflux and substance use or abuse. The reason for the emotional distress lies in faulty coping abilities in relationships learned long ago in childhood. Contrary to popular thinking, emotional illnesses do not lead to mental illnesses. Emotional illnesses are highly treatable. Emotionally conditioned personalities can change for the better.

There are many examples of emotional illnesses. There is the child who cannot make friends easily or adjust to school. A teenager may be rebellious or an obsessive academic or sports overachiever. A young adult who cannot hold a job or who cannot adjust to marriage may have emotional illness. A middle-aged person may have marital conflict or infidelity. An older adult may be unable to adjust to aging and health problems. At any age, suicidal thoughts or actions may indicate emotional illness. Substance abuse can show up in teens and adults who suffer with emotional illnesses.

Any time a person cannot fulfill his or her emotionally conditioned role, emotional illness may result. If a super strong omnipotent personality cannot satisfy a helpless, demanding impotent spouse, emotional illness will result. If a helpless impotent cannot get an overwhelmed strong spouse to cater to and do for him, he or she will fail in his helpless role and develop symptoms of emotional illness.

Treatment

What types of treatment help with these emotionally conditioned ways of behaving in relationships? Dr. Martin and I found psychodynamic psychotherapy works to get at the root cause of the emotional distress that comes about from a person’s emotional conditioning in childhood. Such treatment can prevent recurrence of emotional illnesses later in life.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a talk therapy. It helps you discover the type of emotional conditioning you learned as a child.

The goal of psychodynamic treatment is to uncover the conflicts and unbalanced emotional support, usually within your family, that account for the high anxiety and emotional overload you feel. Since this emotional overload cannot be managed and you become emotionally ill. You develop upsetting symptoms.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy traces back to childhood the emotionally conditioned role or pattern that was learned to manage your relationships. The role must be “deconditioned,” or lessened for you to get better from an emotional illness. This deconditioning process takes place in dynamic psychotherapy.

Dr. Martin and I found that medications may not be helpful for treating emotional illnesses. The side effects of many antidepressant and anxiolytic medications may make people feel “numb” to their emotions. People need to fully experience their emotions and explore them during psychodynamic psychotherapy treatment for the treatment to benefit them. They cannot do this if they feel numb or blah from medication effects.