The Environment You’re Raised in Has Profound Effects
We often consider ourselves independent actors, making choices based on our inherent personalities and preferences. But the truth is more complex: our early environments shape us in ways so fundamental that they become invisible to us. The family ecosystem we grow up in conditions our perception of the world, affecting everything from processing information to forming relationships.
The Pygmy Perception Phenomenon
Consider this remarkable account from anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s work with the BaMbuti pygmies of the Congo. When a young pygmy named Kenge was taken from his dense forest home to open plains for the first time, he saw buffalo grazing miles away and thought they were insects. As Turnbull drove closer, Kenge was astonished to see these “insects” apparently growing larger. He asked what kind of witchcraft was making this happen.
Why this dramatic misperception? Kenge had spent his entire life in a dense forest where visibility rarely extended beyond 100 yards. Without experience seeing objects at great distances, he never developed the perceptual skill of size constancy—the understanding that objects maintain their actual size even as they appear smaller at a distance.
This isn’t just an interesting anecdote. It’s a powerful metaphor for how environmental conditioning shapes our perception of reality.
The Enneagram and Environmental Conditioning
In “The Enneagram World of the Child,” this concept of environmental conditioning is central to understanding personality development. The book explores how children develop distinct patterns of perception, emotional response, and behavior based on their family ecosystem.
Just as the forest environment shaped Kenge’s visual perception, our family dynamics shape our emotional and psychological perception. A child raised in an environment where emotional expression is discouraged might perceive emotions as dangerous. Another child, raised where achievement is the primary source of love and attention, might perceive the world as a constant performance evaluation.
These perceptions aren’t conscious choices—they’re adaptations to our environment that become so ingrained they feel like objective reality.
The Family Ecosystem as Perceptual Framework
The family ecosystem is our first perceptual framework, teaching us what to prioritize, fear, value, and relate to others. Consider:
- Value Systems: The implicit and explicit values communicated in your household become the lens through which you evaluate yourself and others
- Emotional Climate: The way emotions were expressed, suppressed, or managed in your family becomes your template for emotional processing
- Relational Patterns: The dynamics between family members become your unconscious blueprint for relationships
- Safety and Threat: What felt threatening or safe in your childhood environment programs your nervous system’s baseline responses
These frameworks are established so early that they operate beneath conscious awareness, feeling less like learned frameworks and more like “just how things are.”
Local Social Conditioning
Everyone knows it intuitively: people raised in different parts of the world—or even other parts of the country—don’t see things the same way. It’s not just culture, it’s conditioning. A New Yorker might call it “directness,” while someone from the Midwest might call it “rudeness.” A rural farmer might value self-reliance above all, while someone raised in a collectivist society might see interdependence as maturity. These aren’t random preferences—they’re deeply rooted adaptations to the social environment.
We tend to forget that what feels “normal” or “obvious” is actually local perception masquerading as truth. Your view of emotions, achievement, conflict, gender roles, and authority was shaped by the invisible hand of your early environment. Conditioning isn’t exotic. It’s not something that happened to someone else. It’s what created you.
Breaking Free from Conditioned Perception
Understanding our conditioning is the first step toward freedom. Like Kenge, who quickly adapted to understanding distance perspective once exposed to it, we can learn new ways of perceiving once we recognize our conditioned patterns.
The Enneagram system and Diamond Approach® inquiry provide a map and methodology for this work, helping us identify our specific patterns of conditioned perception. By recognizing these patterns as adaptations rather than immutable truths, we create space for new possibilities.
Beyond Individual Conditioning
This understanding of environmental conditioning extends beyond individual development. Cultural conditioning, educational environments, and socioeconomic circumstances all create frameworks of perception that shape how we see ourselves and the world.
By recognizing these influences, we gain the freedom to question what we’ve taken for granted and create more conscious choices about how we want to live and relate to others.
The next time you find yourself responding automatically to a situation or judging someone’s behavior as “obviously wrong,” pause and consider: might this reaction be a product of your particular conditioning rather than an objective truth? That awareness alone creates the possibility for growth and connection beyond the limitations of our conditioned perceptions.
Just as Kenge could eventually see the buffalo for what they were, we too can expand our perception beyond the limitations of our conditioning—but only if we’re willing to acknowledge that our way of seeing is just one perspective shaped by our unique environmental history.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach teacher, Enneagram guide, and human development student whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.