The incredible habit of being a care taker
The lung doctor told me that patients who come into the hospital with living wills asking not to be resuscitated seem to have a propensity once they have a vent down their throat and are given a choice that when it is pulled out they will die, all decline to die. The stubborn clinging to life.
I watched T taking care of her 78 year old mother and I see the same thing I recognize in me – caretaker – and I know where my habit came from as the daughter of my parents. But I don’t know where her’s comes from except that she was left alone most of her growing up because her parents worked and she watched herself. Her mother tells the funny story of when T was six years old and put the key to the house under the mat for her mother and left a big note with arrows pointing down towards the mat saying THE KEY IS UNDER THE MAT.
One of the email updates that came across my screen this morning had to do with media, a guy was describing his father’s plunge into long-term care via a stroke but he was working his way to the point that people do things out of habit and even after severe damage to the brain, his dad was able to recall his social security number without flinching. He quotes Neale Martin who wrote a book about this phenomenon:
“When we repeat a behavior,” he explains, “even one that involves many independent steps, it is etched into the basal ganglia, ready to be activated whenever a cue is encountered.” The more a behavior is repeated, the deeper it gets etched in, until it’s so deep there’s no getting rid of it.