I used to have a friend, who had a quite challenging life, abusive household, emotionally absent father, manipulative mother, she hadn’t gotten dealt with the best cards when it came to relationships. She was more or less always crying, and we all felt sorry for her. We tried our best to be available to her whenever she needed to vent, which was — quite more than often.
We figured that since there was not much else we could have done to help her situation, the least we could do in order to be good friends, would be to listen to her and sympathise. And so we did.
Soon, however, it started getting old and tedious. Always the same problems, same complaints about life — her constant belly aching started to drive us away we started to become less and less available to her. It seemed very selfish excluding her from our group like that and after every hang out without her, our guilty conscience wouldn’t let us rest until the next hang out, again to which we would mutually not invite her.
She tried reaching out to us, making fatal attempts to save our friendship, and burdened with our guilt, we each did try our best to be there for her individually, but it was only a matter of time before we fell off, the thought of her still continuing to fill us with guilt but we continued to not invite her to hang outs and shindigs.
She presumably got all alone with no friends left. Now, before you start thinking of us as horrible creatures, which perhaps we were. Being deserted had quite a positive impact on her.
She started getting good grades, and it was not entirely because now she had nothing else to do, she also started to improve in other areas of life. She seemed happier, healthier, and much to our horrified surprise, much more content with her life.
The shift in her was impossible to miss, and the timing was too simultaneous to be a coincidence, however, the strange occurrence of events left us quite discombobulated. All we did was be a good friend to her individually, then how come a little distance from us changed her for the better?
This was a mystery to me until last month I came across an experimental research on operant conditioning by Bert Lenaert, Rebecca Jansen, Caroline M van Heugten about the role of interpersonal operant conditioning in fatigue.
At the risk of making it tedious, getting into the necessary details of the experiment; in this experiment, individuals repeatedly rated their currently experienced fatigue while engaging in cognitive effort (working memory task). Subtle social reward (words of appraisal or encouragement) was given when fatigue increased relative to the previous rating; or disapproval when fatigue decreased — this was in the case of experimental condition. In the control condition, only neutral feedback was given.
Interestingly, the results showed that although all participants became more fatigued during cognitive effort, the ones that were rewarded (the experimental condition) reported increased fatigue relative to neutral feedback. The results were not only confined to the subjective reporting of fatigue. They also discovered that the experimental condition also performed worse on the working memory task.
Their experiment suggests that fatigue complaints (and cognitive performance) may become controlled by their consequences such as social reward, and not exclusively by their antecedents such as effort or illness.
Personally, it was an astonishing discovery for me, but as I tried to imply it in real life settings, it began to make more and more sense.
It may also be an important research regarding child rearing techniques — sometimes, by attending to the child only after it cries may actually strengthen the tantrum-throwing behaviour as the child starts relating tantrums and the resulting attention.
However, noteworthily, this effect occurred independently of conscious awareness, both in children and adults alike. Our mind just relates the two events occurring closely together in time, for the latter to be a consequence of the preceding one, and whenever it craves the response, it just makes sense for it to carry out the behaviour that had elicited that response the first time — that’s how behaviours get reinforced.
In the case of my friend, she kept playing the damsel in distress as long as it continued to work for her, and gained her attention and care from her friends. Again, she did not do it on purpose, she genuinely believed that there was not a soul with a life worse than hers.
In reality, however, as she herself came to realise later that most of her problems were not even real. As she ran out of real problems, she began to make up imaginary ones; that girl did not wave back at me so she must hate me, omg I’m unworthy of love, everyone hates me. While poor Delphine had just forgot her glasses at home and had not even seen the wave.
Again, unbelievable as it is, this process of conjuring up imaginary problems occurred beyond her conscious awareness as well. Moreover, it continuously kept her mind engaged in the thoughts of just how pathetic her life was, so much, that a pointless fable turned into a deep-rooted belief.
As soon as she figured that it was no longer working for her to get her the attention she desired, she stopped indulging in the self-pitying thought patterns, and consequently allowed herself to think of other things for a change, resulting in an overall improvement in her life.
The most horrifying part for me was that this entire process of conditioning occurs independently of both: the one doing the conditioning and the victim’s consciousness.
There may be so many unhealthy behaviours that we may be subconsciously encouraging in our loved ones, and the worst part? While we’re actually strengthening self-sabotaging behaviours for them, we may just be deluding ourselves into thinking that we are actually doing them a favour.
Of course, it’s the mark of a sympathetic heart to be a good listener, but its not always the time to be a listener, sometimes one should put listening aside and be a good talker. Sometimes that’s what it takes to be a good friend.
