The title sounds like an obvious tautology, but what I mean is that your behavior in different situations will be limited by what you have accustomed to in other situations. You, that being your personality system, has to be able to function in all of the situations that life has to offer. This concept is similar to what I discuss in the article Sustaining The Mind, where I explain that most of what humans do is just about maintaining their personality system, but I find the concept of this article so important to understanding life that I have dedicated this text to it.
Like in other articles, the foundation here will be my theory of the mind, which states that humans are deterministic machines that always do what makes them feel best in the immediate moment. The sort of limitation that this article is about is obviously in conflict with the idea of free will. If there was free will then the behavior patterns that you have for one situation should not interfere with other situations. You should just be able to do whatever you want, with no limitations. But you are not free in that sort of way, you always have to keep being you. Understanding your own limitations is crucial for doing the most that you can within those limitations.
Let’s consider an area where this limitation of the personality system becomes very apparent: communication, and more specifically, vulnerability in communication. People often wish for others, especially romantic partners, to be more willing to be emotionally vulnerable with them. I have also often seen people dismiss any concerns or difficulties about this as trivial. Why not just talk it out? Why not just explain? Why not just be vulnerable? “Another problem where people should have just talked it out”, and so on. It can be true that sometimes people should have just communicated more, and unwillingness to do that can seem frustrating, but let’s expand our view of the situation here.
Imagine that people have a “vulnerability value” which determines how willing they are to be emotionally vulnerable. This is a simplification to illustrate the situation. Let’s say the value is from 1 to 10, and each person has a a certain number. Then think about all the situations that a person will encounter, and how that vulnerability value will affect those situations. There will be situations where vulnerability is beneficial, such as explaining what you like and dislike, and having others be responsive and accepting of those. There will also be situations where vulnerability is harmful, where others are dismissive and judgemental. The vulnerability value will ideally be such that it maximizes the benefit, and minimizes the harm, but it still won’t be perfect. If a person has a vulnerability value of 7, then some benefit will be left on the table in situations where a value of 10 would’ve been ideal, and some harm will occur in any situation where a lower value would’ve worked better. If the person continually has situations where benefit occurs then naturally the value will drift higher, or if harm continually occurs, then the value drifts lower, until a new equilibrium is found. In reality people are not so simple as to have a single vulnerability value, and will instead have more complicated modifiers for their behavior, but complete modification is never possible. You can imagine that instead of a single value, people have a “vulnerability algorithm” that determines how vulnerable they should in different situations, but that algorithm still has to function in all situations, and that algorithm is continually modified according to feedback. Sometimes the algorithm is really simple, like “don’t trust any man/woman/human beyond their self-interest” and sometimes it is more complex (although determining what is in a person’s self-interest can also be complex). I also assume that humans have different capabilities for how complex their mental algorithms can be.
Considering this, it should make sense that if a person exists in an environment where emotional vulnerability is punished, then the person will be generally unwilling to be vulnerable in other situations as well. A person isn’t going to want to raise their vulnerability value if the harms of the environment outweigh the benefits of the environment. It just wouldn’t make sense. This problem can be mitigated with a more complex mental algorithm for vulnerability that allows exceptions, but if that is missing then creating it can take time and effort. All of the theory in this blog is about how humans are not directly rational beings, we are emotional beings, it is only the calculation of the emotions that can be rational. This means that just telling someone to be more vulnerable is very unlikely to work, instead the person will need emotional support in order to change.
Previously I implied that the vulnerability value would find an equilibrium with a person’s environment, but this is also a simplification. Our minds don’t really know what our environment holds, or what our future situations hold, our minds just know what has happened in the past, and extrapolate from that. The real equilibrium is therefore with our memories, which correlates somewhat with our environment, but this causes trouble when that correlation ends up being very low. Most often this is of course when a person has experienced emotional trauma. We can imagine that a person who grew up in a family where emotional vulnerability was highly discouraged will then have a very low vulnerability value, or more accurately, their mental algorithm for determining when to be emotionally vulnerable will most often return a low value. We are our past. This is inescapable. But every moment is a new addition to that past, every moment is a new building block for who you are. A new past. This way a person can change that mental algorithm as well.
It makes intuitive sense to us that if a person is actively in an environment that discourages vulnerability then of course they wouldn’t be that vulnerable. It just seems sensible. Not as much understanding is usually given to people whose personality systems are attuned to their bad past situations, even though that is how every personality is attuned. In the architecture of the mind that past is all that exists. The person has to keep being themselves.
This concept applies to everything humans do, not just vulnerability. How kind is a person willing to be? It’s a calculation of how much benefits kindness has brought in the past vs how much harm. How self-serving is a person willing to be? Same thing. The calculations can be a bit more complicated than this, they can take into account what others have told the person, what the person has read and seen, but in principle the mind still tries to maximize the benefit and minimize the cost according to its understanding, flaws and all.
Furthermore, this concept can help having the right amount of trust for others. Some people believe that anyone is capable of good and evil, but I have a slightly different view. I believe humans are like computers, and not just in the sense of being machines, but in the sense that a computer can have a multitude of programs uploaded on it, but it doesn’t necessarily contain the programs by default. If the computer has photoshop uploaded on it then you can trust that you can use photoshop on it. If the computer doesn’t have photoshop then it would be silly to think that you can shop photos on it. Similarly with humans, people can learn all sorts of behaviors, but if a person has accustomed to certain behavior patterns, then they will only keep doing those. In good and bad.
This concept also makes clear why you should avoid experiences that might jeopardize your functionality elsewhere, the Sustaining The Mind article is about that. You should try to cultivate a consistent mind through gathering the right experiences. Be the gardener of your mind.
The Theory of the Mechanical Mind 