Your Mom and the Language Barrier
This concept is basically an in depth look and description of the human mind's tendency to fall into patterns of behavior, habitual methods of response and reaction to familiar stimuli. Specifically, the way I'm going to deal with it is unique to long term relationships, such as between a parent and a child, although to a lesser extent it can apply to siblings and occasionally to long term friends.
This dynamic is the source of constant and continued frustration between long-time acquaintances, and is essentially a problem with communication. When two people (for the sake of simplicity, we'll use the example of a mother and a son,) know each other from the time that one of them is a young child, certain deeply rooted habits make themselves part of the foundation of the relationship itself. Everyone hatches these types of expectations, but the longer the relationship exists, the more deeply ingrained (and often more inaccurate) these traits become. You form a certain view of the other person, and future interactions are weighed in your mind against this view.
In the case of the mother, she sees her son grow from a wrinkled little poop machine into a toddler with a personality, and then a child with a more clearly defined personality, and so on. She knows academically that her son is growing as a person, that the way he thinks changes and matures as he experiences new things, but her behavior towards him, her interaction with him is still being compared on a deeper emotional level with that little wrinkled poop machine. By the same token, the boy will always have, clinging relentlessly to his subconscious, an expectation of the person his mother is as he learned about her while he grew. It may occur to him eventually that as he grew up, his mother also changed and grew as a human being, but nearly 100% of the time, he's going to see her (and more importantly, react to her,) as if she were that same person he got to know years ago. The nature of their relationship at that point serves as the foundation and the most influential aspect of any future interaction.
This quirk of human nature manifests itself in a way that is normally invisible to the ones it's affecting, while it can be painfully obvious to objective observers. Basically, what happens is one participant speaks, the words swim through the air and into the ear canal of the other, and in between there and the brain, the meaning gets shifted around and jumbled in such a way that the listener can't hear anything but the same things they've heard their entire lives. They know each other so well, that instead of actually hearing the words themselves, they've already anticipated the point of view of the other, and ignore the actual meaning of the words altogether. They have a set image of each other, their thoughts and opinions, and have already mentally reacted to that image, normally even before anything is spoken at all.
The result of this behavior is the degradation of any argument, regardless of how superficial or important it may be, into one version or another of arguments they've already had in the past. Obviously, this applies to some degree to any long standing relationship, but as I've said, it is most pronounced in family members. This is why every Thanksgiving dinner eventually becomes an argument about how little Bobby (now a 34 year old single barely employed interpretive dancer,) always gets special treatment from Mom and Dad while they continue to be so hard on Betty (a happily married 42 year old accountant with two kids of her own in college). To one on the outside looking in, it's clear that Mom and Dad are so hard on Betty because they've always known she was the responsible one and so seemingly lenient on Bobby, who by the grace of God isn't in prison or a gutter and has therefore already surpassed their expectations. Mom and Dad can't break a lifetime of habitual behavior anymore than Betty can understand why, even in a happy marriage and a stable job, they still want to bitch about the kind of car she drives and whether or not she's paying too much for insurance.
Even recognizing this pattern of behavior does little to alter it in most circumstances. At the 20 year reunion for Anywhere High School, the entrepreneurial software designer pulling six figures gross income with a supermodel wife still adopts the half-beaten, wedgie induced posture from his nerdy school days when confronted by the old star quarterback, who still wears his letter jacket because with his crappy job as a greasy auto mechanic and beer gut and three ex-wives, those were the best days of his life.
Obviously, this is an extreme example (most jocks end up as drag queens or guests at the state pen) but there's a kernel of truth to it nonetheless. Old habits die hard, and the older the habit, the tighter that little bastard clings to your behavior. So the next time your mom starts to gripe about your nose ring and you want to tell her to stop treating you like a kid, remember, she's really saying “You used to wake me up in the middle of the night so you could throw up on me after you shit your pants,” and she hears you saying “I'm old enough to take care of a puppy! I'll walk him every day!”
This dynamic is the source of constant and continued frustration between long-time acquaintances, and is essentially a problem with communication. When two people (for the sake of simplicity, we'll use the example of a mother and a son,) know each other from the time that one of them is a young child, certain deeply rooted habits make themselves part of the foundation of the relationship itself. Everyone hatches these types of expectations, but the longer the relationship exists, the more deeply ingrained (and often more inaccurate) these traits become. You form a certain view of the other person, and future interactions are weighed in your mind against this view.
In the case of the mother, she sees her son grow from a wrinkled little poop machine into a toddler with a personality, and then a child with a more clearly defined personality, and so on. She knows academically that her son is growing as a person, that the way he thinks changes and matures as he experiences new things, but her behavior towards him, her interaction with him is still being compared on a deeper emotional level with that little wrinkled poop machine. By the same token, the boy will always have, clinging relentlessly to his subconscious, an expectation of the person his mother is as he learned about her while he grew. It may occur to him eventually that as he grew up, his mother also changed and grew as a human being, but nearly 100% of the time, he's going to see her (and more importantly, react to her,) as if she were that same person he got to know years ago. The nature of their relationship at that point serves as the foundation and the most influential aspect of any future interaction.
This quirk of human nature manifests itself in a way that is normally invisible to the ones it's affecting, while it can be painfully obvious to objective observers. Basically, what happens is one participant speaks, the words swim through the air and into the ear canal of the other, and in between there and the brain, the meaning gets shifted around and jumbled in such a way that the listener can't hear anything but the same things they've heard their entire lives. They know each other so well, that instead of actually hearing the words themselves, they've already anticipated the point of view of the other, and ignore the actual meaning of the words altogether. They have a set image of each other, their thoughts and opinions, and have already mentally reacted to that image, normally even before anything is spoken at all.
The result of this behavior is the degradation of any argument, regardless of how superficial or important it may be, into one version or another of arguments they've already had in the past. Obviously, this applies to some degree to any long standing relationship, but as I've said, it is most pronounced in family members. This is why every Thanksgiving dinner eventually becomes an argument about how little Bobby (now a 34 year old single barely employed interpretive dancer,) always gets special treatment from Mom and Dad while they continue to be so hard on Betty (a happily married 42 year old accountant with two kids of her own in college). To one on the outside looking in, it's clear that Mom and Dad are so hard on Betty because they've always known she was the responsible one and so seemingly lenient on Bobby, who by the grace of God isn't in prison or a gutter and has therefore already surpassed their expectations. Mom and Dad can't break a lifetime of habitual behavior anymore than Betty can understand why, even in a happy marriage and a stable job, they still want to bitch about the kind of car she drives and whether or not she's paying too much for insurance.
Even recognizing this pattern of behavior does little to alter it in most circumstances. At the 20 year reunion for Anywhere High School, the entrepreneurial software designer pulling six figures gross income with a supermodel wife still adopts the half-beaten, wedgie induced posture from his nerdy school days when confronted by the old star quarterback, who still wears his letter jacket because with his crappy job as a greasy auto mechanic and beer gut and three ex-wives, those were the best days of his life.
Obviously, this is an extreme example (most jocks end up as drag queens or guests at the state pen) but there's a kernel of truth to it nonetheless. Old habits die hard, and the older the habit, the tighter that little bastard clings to your behavior. So the next time your mom starts to gripe about your nose ring and you want to tell her to stop treating you like a kid, remember, she's really saying “You used to wake me up in the middle of the night so you could throw up on me after you shit your pants,” and she hears you saying “I'm old enough to take care of a puppy! I'll walk him every day!”