The Programming We Can't Escape
"Real maturity isn't transcending your conditioning - it's recognizing it while it's happening."
“Maturity is when you no longer blame anyone. You don’t blame others; you don’t blame yourself. You see what’s wrong, and you set about remedying it … Maturity is to understand that no one is to blame, or better still more accurately put, not to give yourself the childish emotional outlet of blaming others or yourself but rather seeing what went wrong and setting about remedying it. They’re not to blame, you’re not to blame; it’s the programming that’s doing this to you.” — Anthony de Mello
We've all been programmed. From the moment we enter this world, we're encrypted by the circumstances we've been placed into. Everywhere and everyone we encounter has also been programmed. There is no escape.
We grow up watching, learning, seeing what the world tells us to see. We act on what we saw and what we've been told. Even when we believe we've made the choice to restrain and rise above the societal guardrails of our cultural programming, the truth is we've merely happened onto another code.
And inside those programs, we've learned to blame others, to blame ourselves. Now more than ever, we've laid our blame onto the voices and choices of others. We've attached and left unattended our emotional well-being to the unaware.
We allow the words and decisions of others to create unaccounted-for fear and confusion inside ourselves. We let their conditioning impact the way we feel. Then we turn around and wonder, "Why are they the way they are?"
When the real question is, "Why do I allow myself to be controlled one way or another?"
I write all this knowing how easily I'm swayed. How I watch one video or another and a belief rises in me, only to be met by my pre-existing programming that pushes me one way or another. On and on this goes until I'm essentially carried away by a current of thoughts that I'm unknowingly cornered into. This continues until I'm landing in a pattern of blame, often pointed back at myself.
This isn't growth.
It isn't maturity.
As much as I'd like to see myself as evolved, I'm often left to the programming I've built up over the years.
I am this way. I've always been this way. This is why I'm this way.
A gift we can give ourselves is the gift of honesty. The reality of truth is not a game of good or bad. It's the transparency of awareness in the face of our prior programming. It's bumping up against the existence of the patterns we've blamed but now extracted and examined without judgment.
Real maturity isn't transcending our programming—it's recognizing it while it's happening. It's catching ourselves mid-blame and asking, "What's really going on here?" It's understanding that the person who triggered us is running their own code, just as we are running ours.
The freedom doesn't come from eliminating our programming. It comes from developing the space between the trigger and our response. That millisecond of awareness where we can choose: Do I react from my conditioning, or do I respond from my consciousness?
This is where true power lives. Not in blaming the program, not in blaming ourselves for having it, but in the simple recognition that we are not our programming. We are the awareness that can observe it.
And in that observation, something shifts. We stop being victims of our conditioning and become conscious participants in our own lives. We stop asking "Why is this happening to me?" and start asking "What is this here to teach me?"
The programming will always be there. But maturity is learning to dance with it rather than being danced by it. It's the difference between being unconsciously run by our patterns and consciously working with them.
That's the real work. Not perfection. Not elimination. Just awareness, acceptance, and the courage to choose differently in each moment we remember we have a choice.