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Stickiness
3 min read · 571 words
Stickiness is what persists in the system after the conditions that produced it have passed — and the operator’s relationship with stickiness affects much of what they carry across time.
The system encodes inputs with varying stickiness. Some experiences are processed and largely released; the operator has them but they don’t dominate operation afterward. Some experiences become sticky — they remain accessible, produce continued effects, surface periodically across the operator’s life. The stickiness is partly determined by the original intensity of the input, partly by what was happening in the operator at the time, partly by what processing has or has not occurred since.
The categories of sticky material. The traumatic input that the system has not fully processed, surfacing across years. The intense positive experience that produces ongoing motivation or expectation. The relationship that ended but continues to affect the operator’s responses to similar relationships. The early conditioning that runs as default despite later evidence that the patterns no longer fit. The shame moment that surfaces continuously despite intervening time. Each is sticky in its own way, with different mechanisms and different work to address.
The mistake operators make: assuming stickiness will resolve through time alone. Some sticky material does fade — the system processes it gradually across years, with the stickiness diminishing as the processing completes. Some doesn’t. The traumatic material that has not received adequate processing remains sticky, sometimes for decades, until the conditions for actual processing arrive. The expectation that time alone will resolve stickiness produces operators who continue carrying material indefinitely while waiting for it to fade on its own.
From the chair: identify what is sticky in the operator’s current operation. The events that surface repeatedly. The patterns that fire automatically despite the operator’s intention. The responses that don’t match current conditions but match earlier conditions. Each is sticky material the operator is carrying, often without recognizing it as such.
The interventions vary by material. Some sticky material responds to processing — actually engaging with it, often with appropriate support, often across substantial time. The Trauma entry’s territory for the more intense versions. Some responds to deliberate counter-conditioning — running new patterns repeatedly until they have weight comparable to the sticky version. Some responds to changes in environmental conditions — the sticky pattern that fires in response to specific cues can be reduced by reducing exposure to those cues.
The other application: the operator can also choose what to make sticky. The deliberate practice of attending to certain experiences makes them more sticky than they would have been otherwise. The choice of what to consume, what to engage with, what to process carefully — affects what becomes part of the operator’s sticky material. The operator who attends to positive material with the same intensity they involuntarily attend to negative material accumulates a different stack of sticky content than the one whose attention defaults entirely to the negative.
The other discipline: not all stickiness warrants intervention. Some sticky material is functional — the lessons that need to remain accessible, the experiences that shape the operator’s values, the connections that give continuity. The work is selective — intervening on the sticky material that’s producing dysfunction, while leaving the sticky material that supports operation. The diagnostic: is this sticky material producing more cost than benefit, or is it part of what makes the operator who they are.