Julian B. Rotter was an American psychologist who developed the Social Learning Theory in 1954 which identified that an individual’s behavior was largely influenced by environmental factors within a social context. This was a departure from earlier theories based on psychoanalysis which identified behaviors as being driven primarily by psychological factors.

Rotter theorized that negative and positive outcomes were largely responsible for determining if an individual was likely to repeat a behavior. As the framework for his Social Learning Theory, he further developed the understanding of Locus of Control which attempted to differentiate between two concepts which he referred to as “achievement motivation” (Internal Locus of Control) and “outer-directedness” (External Locus of Control). He attributed these two different concepts as aspects of the individual’s personality in determining the extent to which people believe they can control events affecting them.  This was measured on a scale which he referred to as a continuum in which individuals either believed outcomes in their lives were attributed to their own abilities (Internal Locus of Control) or to chance, luck, or destiny (External Locus of Control). Rotter’s theories were grounded in the fields of Social and Personality Psychology.

My interpretation and application of Locus of Control is slightly different than I believe Rotter had intended.  How I interpret it applies primarily to the field of Developmental Psychology.

Throughout the stages of childhood development; our behaviors are largely being shaped and determined by outside influences which include our primary caregivers, siblings, teachers, coaches, grandparents, and babysitters. Negative consequences and positive reinforcements are designed to reinforce the behaviors which are considered most acceptable and discourage those that are not. Over time we learn that the most effective way to get our physical and emotional needs met is to behave in ways that elicit the greatest amount of acknowledgement, acceptance, positive regard, and love from others.  The developmental stages of childhood and early adolescence are largely influenced by what Rotter would refer to as “outer-directedness” or External Locus of Control.  Decision-making and behavioral expressions are primarily shaped and determined by the anticipated response the child has learned to expect from those individuals in their environment who have the greatest control and influence on them.

As the child grows into adolescence; a hallmark of this developmental stage is increased differentiation from the very people in their environment who have had the greatest influence in shaping their schemas and subsequent beliefs and behaviors. It is my contention that the adolescent’s ability to successfully navigate from this developmental stage into adulthood is largely determined by their ability to shift from “outer-directedness” or External Locus of Control to “achievement motivation” or Internal Locus of Control.  However, despite this shift being optimal in determining a healthy transition into adulthood; it often puts the adolescent on a collision course with the individuals in their environment which have had the greatest influence on them since they were born.

Increased differentiation from our parents is a requirement for transitioning successfully into adulthood. However, in order for this to happen the parents or primary caregivers need to be fairly healthy, balanced, conscious and aware. If they are not then they will take the child’s attempts to differentiate from them very personally. They experience it as extremely threatening since their influence and control over their child appears to be diminishing. This is evidenced by the fact that the negative consequences and positive reinforcements that they have come to rely on to ensure acceptable behaviors in their child are no longer effective. In response to this unwelcome development, the parent usually ratchets up the control mechanisms and engages in increased power struggles with their child which always fail to satisfy either party’s needs.

Whenever I get the opportunity to work with parents before their child reaches adolescence I make sure I spend a significant amount of time on the subject of “External Locus of Control vs. Internal Locus of Control”.  Locus of Control is as an unconscious mechanism that continues to influence how we attempt to get our physical and emotional needs met throughout our entire lifespan. It is my assertion that being able to shift that mechanism from an external orientation to an internal one during adolescence is critical in ensuring that we mature into healthy, self-reliant, and successful adults.

I do not believe, as Rotter theorized, that the tendency to operate from either Internal or External Locus of Control is a personality trait that is crystallized throughout the individual’s lifespan. Instead, I believe that the pattern of relying on the self or the environment to determine our behaviors is a byproduct of our imprinting and conditioning within our childhood environments as we continued to develop around the need to have our emotional and physical needs met. Once we accept that premise then we can accept that the tendency to be over-reliant on others to reassure us that we are performing and behaving appropriately can shift even in adulthood once we bring conscious awareness to the pattern.

Being in alignment and integrity with the self requires that we mature beyond the External Locus of Control orientation in which the need to conform to others as well as the social conditioning within our environments is the primary motivation for getting our physical and emotional needs met. An overreliance on others to influence our perceptions, beliefs and behaviors well into adulthood suggests chronic imprinting from a controlling and dysfunctional childhood environment largely influenced by fear. In the absence of those controls; we, as adults, are unable to mature into the Internal Locus of Control orientation because we were never able to develop that mechanism before launching ourselves into the world.

So rather than think of Internal and External Locus of Control as the difference between believing whether or not you have control over events in your life; I encourage you to think of it more as the difference between whether or not you rely primarily on yourself or others to determine the choices you make in life including how you attempt to get your physical and emotional needs met.

More on this subject will be explored in the upcoming articles “Parenting the Child” and “Parenting the Adolescence.”
 

Three of the most important things to understand about all behaviors whether they are personal or professional, someone else's or our own, or being demonstrated by a child or adult is that:

1. All behaviors make perfect sense when you understand the underlying schemas and imprints that inform them.
   
   
2. All behaviors are expressions of the individual unconsciously attempting to get their needs met.

     3.   Everyone, at any given moment, is showing up doing their best.

Understanding these three tenets allows us to move beyond the duality of our personal and professional relationships including our own conditioning and subsequent imprinting.

So let’s take a closer look to get a better understanding of what it is I’m referring to:
 
“All behaviors make perfect sense when you understand the underlying schemas and imprints that inform them.”
 
When reviewing the role of schemas from the previous article on this subject, we are reminded that they act as our mental GPS which we unconsciously use to navigate our external world. Schemas develop throughout our most critical stages of development in response to our experiences and act as the interface between our cellular imprints and our perceptions of self, others and our external reality.  We unconsciously rely on our schemas to infer future probabilities both concrete and abstract. In turn, these inferences become the motivation for all of our behaviors.
 
“All behaviors are expressions of the individual unconsciously attempting to get their emotional needs met.”
 
In addition to relying on our schemas to help us successfully navigate our external world at the concrete, rational level; we also rely on them to infer more abstract, future outcomes regarding how we can be reassured that our emotional needs will be met. These inferences are based on our previous relationships and experiences which began at the moment of conception when we were implanted in our first environment and influenced by how securely we were attached to this environment and our primary caregivers.  If our experiences throughout childhood were primarily safe and secure and our primary caregivers were attentive to our needs; then our schemas would have developed in such a way that our behaviors would consistently reflect that level of stability. Dysfunctional, reactive and manipulative behaviors suggest significant trauma imprinting from chronic stressful, chaotic, and unsafe, childhood environments that end up being replicated in our adult relationships and environments. Regardless of whether the behaviors are considered stable or maladaptive, they always reflect our best attempt(s), in the moment, to get our emotional needs met.

“Everyone, at any given moment, is showing up doing their best.”

I have found that this tenet is the hardest one for folks to accept because our schemas formed around extremely different conditioning and subsequent beliefs within the dualistic paradigm.  We grew up with infinite projections that had us believe that we needed to keep trying harder in order to excel beyond our capacity in order to meet the expectations of others. Standardized learning became a big part of this conditioning which often taught us that our best was never good enough as we were being measured against a standard that had very little to do with our own abilities and individual needs. Our best was often, if not always, being measured in relation to a larger collective and always by someone other than ourselves. This conditioning not only occurred within our personal relationships but also from the larger collective of our cultural conditioning which reinforces our belief that in order to be loved and accepted we need to consistently achieve some level of excellence.  This, in turn, guarantees that our emotional needs will be met through projections of positive regard and acceptance by others. In the absence of being able to achieve these external standards of perfection, we learn and embody at the cellular level that we are not enough.

Within the dualistic paradigm, our inability to meet the expectation of others is always evidence of us not doing our best because this is the paradigm in which we are always being reflected back to ourselves by others. However, these projections are also unconscious attempts by others to minimize their own anxiety relative to whatever imprinting and subsequent beliefs they are unconsciously holding onto which constantly identifies that they are not enough; and so on and so on and so on….

Whatever we choose to do at any given moment is what we think is best until we have a different understanding of what that is. Once we have a different understanding of what that is; we choose that instead.  Our degree of mental and emotional stability combined with our level of awareness, at any given moment, will always determine what that looks like.

If we are able to accept the tenet that everyone, at any given moment, is showing up doing their best, then we have allowed ourselves to step beyond the duality of our own conditioning.  The ability to do so dissolves our own imprinting and subsequent self-judgements that has us believing that we are not enough because we are finally able to accept that we have always shown up and done our best, without exception. For those of us who engage in 'life reviews' from time to time and continue to cringe at whatever our version of 'best' was ten years ago, three years ago, or even 6 months ago; it is important to remember that the tendency to cringe is evidence that we continue to grow and develop and increase our awareness which is always a cause for celebration rather than self-recrimination.

Many factors influence what that might look like such as our age/schematic development, our environment, our history of abuse/neglect/trauma and whatever we may have inherited through our respective DNA lineages that makes us vulnerable to manifest some emotional, mental, or physical imbalance or dis-ease expression in response to whatever stressors we’ve experienced throughout the course of our lifetime.

When sitting with clients, I often refer to the extreme as an example to illustrate new concepts within this new paradigm of thinking; beyond the duality of our conditioning:

On July 20, 2012 , James Holmes walked into an Aurora, Colorado movie theatre and using two tear gas grenades, a Smith & Wesson M&P15 rifle, a Remington 870 Express Tactical shotgun, and a Glock 22 handgun, he shot and killed 12 people while injuring 70 others.  In that moment, James Holmes was doing his best. In that moment, his mind was falling apart. His mental constructs had broken down to the extent that this unimaginable, premeditated act of violence made complete sense to him. It had to, otherwise he wouldn’t have done it. Had his mind not been falling apart, his best would have looked remarkably different and there would not have been such unimaginable and unexpected loss of life and trauma in an environment that his victims had every reason to believe was safe.

Having worked with individuals whose mental constructs have broken down, it’s probably much easier for me to accept this tenet. However if you just allow yourself to sit with it for longer than a minute or two, the simple logic of such a concept is self-evident and will begin to make sense. What makes it difficult to accept ‘at first glance’ is our collective conditioning that keeps reinforcing the duality and subsequent belief that we should have the ability to control ‘bad’ things from happening to ‘good’ people in an attempt to reassure ourselves that we and our loved ones will not become victims to such horrific acts of violence or that someone we know and love could actually become the perpetrators of such unimaginable carnage.

Unfortunately there are far too many examples showing up in this country and around the world every day that makes it impossible to guarantee our safety and security from individuals whose ‘best’ can change the course of many lives in a few minutes resulting in unimaginable suffering no matter how hard we try to anticipate and control their behaviors.

All behaviors, including maladaptive behaviors, are outward expressions of our cellular imprinting and subsequent schemas. Therefore, it is ineffective to focus exclusively on the behavior as an intervention in an attempt to influence a different outcome. When we do so, as expressed through the current models of the mental health, academic, political and legal systems, we limit the potential for any significant change to occur. Chemically restraining, physically incarcerating, or putting to death individuals as a means of controlling and containing what it is that makes us feel uncomfortable and unsafe will always ensure that in the absence of the external locus of control; the behaviors will persist. Significant, long-term change for individuals and society as a whole requires a much deeper inquiry at the cellular level. In the absence of such an inquiry we are reminded that, once again, we are taking the batteries out of the smoke alarm in an attempt to extinguish the fire.