I looked back at her and said, “I don’t think you’re naive and I don’t think that you’re stupid. The reality is, I know something about your history and I know that some of the time your mom can show up for you, and some of the time she can’t. And I’m guessing it’s those times that she shows up for you that keeps you going back, hoping and wishing you’ll get her support again. Am I right?”
She nodded, vigorously.
“Okay, then,” I’ll say, “We need to talk about Skinner’s rats in the cage experiment.”
Note: This conversation is not a real one with an actual, single client, but it is an amalgamation of conversations I’ve had over the last decade with real clients.
And each time this conversation happens, I share what, to me, is one of the most helpful analogies and psychological studies I know to help illustrate why those of us from dysfunctional families of origin “keep going back for more” in the hopes this can bring some self-compassion, increase understanding, and generate curiosity about what to do to instead.
Do You Feel Shakier Inside Than Your Life Looks on the Outside?
A quiz to help you understand why you might feel less stable beneath the surface despite working so hard to build a good life.
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The Unique Pain Of Random Rewards And Variable Parenting.
B.F. Skinner was a renowned American psychologist and behaviorist.
He made great contributions to the fields of psychology and sociology and one of his most helpful theories was that of operant conditioning – a method of learning that employs rewards and punishments for certain behaviors.
Skinner studied and formulated his ideas about operant conditioning using rats and pigeons in a “Skinner Box” during the mid-twentieth century.
Effectively, Skinner tested patterns of responses by providing or withholding rewards for his test subjects across varying intervals and frequencies.
His work is complex and fascinating but one of the takeaways from his study that strikes me the most is that:
“Skinner found that the type of reinforcement which produces the slowest rate of extinction (i.e., people will go on repeating the behavior for the longest time without reinforcement) is variable-ratio reinforcement.”
Variable ratio reinforcement means, in lay terms, sometimes a reward is provided, and sometimes it isn’t.
To paraphrase Forrest Gump, in these situations: You never know what you’re going to get.
This unpredictability of reward is what keeps the test subject engaged with the behavior the longest, delaying the behavioral “extinction” (eg: stopping the behavior).
Analogously, I think Skinner’s findings can, for some of us, apply to our patterns of engagement with our family of origins.
For those who turn to their families and consistently receive care, love, support, these folks will, of course, learn through this kind of operant conditioning that they can consistently receive this “reward” from their families and will consistently go back for more.
