Natural Human Behavior: 7 Ways Parents, Society, and Schools Condition the Original You Out of Existence

This article examines the biological roots of natural human behavior — the innate instincts and drives that constitute what developmental psychology calls the authentic self — and traces the systematic mechanisms through which parental conditioning, educational structures, and social norms progressively suppress, redirect, and cover these natural tendencies. Drawing on Donald Winnicott's true self/false self distinction, Carl Rogers' theory of conditional positive regard, Albert Bandura's social learning research, B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning, attachment theory (Bowlby), John Holt's research on children's natural learning, and the Indian philosophical concept of Swabhava (innate nature), the article documents what specifically gets conditioned out of human beings, the psychological cost of this conditioning, and what reconnection with the natural self actually involves. The governing argument: conditioning is not a pathology. It's the normal process of becoming a functioning member of a social group. The problem is that most conditioning systems go further than necessary — suppressing not just the antisocial impulses that genuinely need management, but the creative curiosity, authentic emotion, spontaneous play, and genuine self-expression that are the very things that make a human life worth living.