Consequences (By Reliant K)

I think that people are often surprised when they hear me talk about consequences. I am by no means a subject matter expert in this topic, but I have spent a lot of time working with people and you start to understand we have a problem with learning because we have a problem with  consequences

We are often raised to learn to give ourselves double (sometimes triple) consequences. We don’t complete an assignment in school, we receive a poor grade (or no grade at all), our teacher chastises us, we go home and our parent who has heard from the teacher chastises us. We might adopt the label “lazy,” even somewhere in the mix of those things. 

For many folks, this may also trickle down to the point that a life lived as a lazy person, will result in divine punishment on their soul after they are dead and gone. 

Over time we are supposed to identify with our mistakes, errors, and shortcomings in such a way that we become guilty. 

I always ask people who I work with either in therapy or in general, what is the outcome we desire from these situations? As a teacher, you presumably want your students to turn in your work, but why? The work gets them a grade, which helps them pass the class/year, and the grade is supposed to represent their learning. So then we come back to it, we want students to be learning. 

Similarly, when I speak to parents we have the same conversation. “I want them to learn so that they can be successful in life.” “I don’t want them to end up unable to keep a job, have a family, etc.” 

But what does learning look like? 

We generally assume that learning is supposed to be painful in and of itself. That without pain, did we really even earn it? 

I can’t say that learning is exactly what I would call comfortable, but I often find it less painful than people who use metaphors from lifting weights (although I’d like to argue that there is another place where too much pain is a truly bad sign).

Learning can be deeply simplified into things that help us decrease behavior and things that help us increase behavior. For you other psych nerds this is what we term punishment and reinforcement, respectively. 

The both easier and much more difficult aspect to understand is reinforcement. In the midst of all of our talk of consequences, we forget that some consequences are positive. Maybe I learn that by studying in smaller intervals over time I retain the information better and make a better grade and I’m also less stressed by the day of the exam to boot. Alright, you got me, I’m a professor so I couldn’t help throwing that one in there. More realistically, you make a certain type of joke that makes your crush laugh, you want to make more of those types of jokes!

Sometimes we do indeed learn through means of punishment. Eat enough sweets or drink enough alcohol and you eventually decide that the consequences of that behavior are not worth it. My acid reflux has really taught me that eating at certain times, eating certain things, and a sedentary lifestyle are all not worth the punishment I experience otherwise. It is also important to understand that not everyone deems this a worthy trade off (I’m looking at you lactose intolerant folks)! That is also a meaningful thing to understand about you and your world, not everyone is going to value the same things the same way nor are they going to evaluate the consequences the same (and even more folks may struggle with the impulsivity in the moment).

Finally, it is deeply important that consequences are related, consistent, and follow the behavior almost immediately to increase the chances of learning. I have often had the conversation with parents or teachers about difficulties with children’s behaviors that often result in specific things like taking away “iPad time” or “time-out,” and I don’t want to say that these things are ineffective, but I want to say that these things may be less effective than other types of consequences depending on the behavior. An easy example is if a child draws on the wall, an instinct may be to take away their crayons and/or yell at them, but what is the actual learning you want to happen from that instance? We have to clean up after our messes (the fancy term for this is logical consequences). So even in small kids we can show them what the consequence of their behavior is by having them help us clean up. Even better, if we help them clean it up we also show them a more realistic picture of what happens in life, which is that we more often than not help others with their consequences or are helped with ours (particularly when we are small or do not have the skill-set to complete things on our own). 

I will finish this out by saying that I just had a lovely conversation with someone tonight who reminded me that our minds are incredible things that, as he reminded me, are problem solvers. Our mind wants to solve problems and learn from problems to solve problems better. And if we just push past enough, we will find that our ability to solve the problem will be around the corner. That is to say, sometimes we think previous consequence indicates an outcome that is always bound to happen, and I want to encourage you that sometimes consequences are not the end-all-be-all of learning. In fact, they are just a part of the process for all of us. Our confusion, our failure to understand, is not the end and not worth giving up for. And if it's true for you, it's true for others too.

Stay curious to the painful loving consequences of the world, and keep learning.