Have you ever felt “bad energy”? You might believe that some people create bad vibes and feel particularly uncomfortable with them. Some places give you chills. It feels as if you were absorbing something bad, something that invades your mind and body and that should simply not be there. What if the explanation of your experiences had more to do with classical conditioning than with exposure to bad energy?
During the late nineteen century, a Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov was conducting researching salivation in dogs. Not surprisingly, the animals were salivating when presented with a bowl of food. Then he presented the animals with an empty bowl and observed that the dogs were salivating at the sight of the empty bowl after having been fed from a similarly looking bowl in the past. In fact, he was able to make dogs salivate in response to a sound by using a metronome while the animals were eating and hence creating an association between the sound and food. Hence classical conditioning was born. Dogs produced physiological response associated with feeding in response to something that, in dogs’ world, has very little to do with food.
We humans are subjected to multiple conditioning processes throughout our lives. We learn to expect hugs from our loved ones and might almost taste a tinge of wine when listening to jazz. If we go to the same place often enough and experience a warm welcome, we come to expect just that. On the other hand, if we have been exposed to multiple rejections or traumas, our expectations shift. In other words, the gathering of four around a table for some of us might bring memories of cheerful family dinners while others recall derision and neglect. Heck, some might not even have any memories of sitting around a table and conclude that such activity is not for them. Our past experiences tint the interactions with our present reality. Whether is salivation or nausea and restlessness associated with anxiety, our mind translates information into physical sensations far faster than into coherent strings of thoughts that we can later examine. It is primed to recognize the familiar. It is especially primed to recognize the familiarly dangerous.
Classical conditioning affects us in more ways than we can ever be aware of. If you have a particularly strained relationship with someone, you are primed to expect even more strain despite all your efforts at improving the relationship. This expectation leads to emotional reasoning and even a neutral facial expression might be interpreted as an indication of disapproval. If you try to start a new relationship after a major disappointment, you might expect disappointment with your new partner. If you have been belittled in response to even minor setbacks, you will expect public humiliation whenever given an opportunity for advancement. If the humiliation occurred in a room with blue walls and abstract paintings, the new coffee shop that everyone is raving about might not feel particularly welcoming to you. Our gut reaction is a visceral short-cut of the information that your brain has gathered about your current circumstances as compared to and contrasted with similar circumstances that you have experienced in the past. The cafe is not toxic but it might remind you of a setting in which a particularly painful event has taken place. The “bad energy” is not confined within certain four walls or to certain people. The bad energy is felt within our body and mind as it is created within our body and mind.
If we play with the example of feeling uncomfortable in a blue-walled café, it is easy to imagine that such a feeling of discomfort will make you want to leave. You might end up by acting harsher than usual, you might avoid eye contact with the barista and then need to repeat your order. Your mind is cataloguing these experiences to further support your initial expectations. Eventually, you promise yourself not to come back there ever again and get irate with the place’s positive reviews.
Just try to remember 3 things.
We react to memory associations we form as strongly as we react to the situations at hand.
Vibes are not absorbed from people or the environment. That uneasy energy is a response generated within ourselves in response to a combination of memory associations and current circumstances.
We can change our memory associations. If you go to the blue café several times and manage to have fun conversations, you will start associating the café with fun conversations. It is an equivalent of generating memories of positive interactions when working on a relationship. Working too hard on fixing a relationship creates an association between an idea of a relationship and psychoanalysis. There is a difference between being together and rehashing past pains. If you want things to change, you need to leave room for the change to happen.
Now, imagine that your stay at the blue-walled café turns bad. The barista ignores you. Coffee, when finally served, is cold and overpriced. You and your companion are told to hush it while staff are busy yapping… Yes, these things happen. You would likely feel uncomfortable and irritated (feel bad energy) but know fully well that it is an understandable reaction to annoying circumstances. The trick is not to feel annoyed in advance.
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