What Really Drives Us: Conditioning, Choice, and the Grace We Can’t Earn
Every day, you repeat hundreds of actions you never really chose. The way you respond in conflict. The foods you reach for when you’re stressed. The spiral your mind takes when you’re alone. Most of it happens before you even think about it. Which raises a deeper question: What’s the line between conditioned behavior and true choice, or even grace?
This is the question I asked Hollie Stepien, a Clinical Therapist and ABA Clinical Director who has dedicated her career to advancing autism support and behavioral health. Hollie leads with both science and compassion, guiding children, families, and entire clinical teams toward breakthroughs in healing and human development. Her perspective carries weight not just because of her credentials, but because her daily work is at the intersection of behavior, choice, and the grace it takes to grow. Her answer stopped me in my tracks.
“Conditioned behaviors are when we’re running on patterns, like habits that got built through reinforcement and repetition and those strong pairings. It’s kind of like autopilot, because that’s how we’ve been conditioned. But even if you’ve been conditioned a certain way, you still have the innate choice to choose differently. I’ve been conditioned to look both ways when I cross the street, but I don’t have to.
I think true choice is when you bring awareness to it. A pause where I’m not just reacting out of what I’ve been trained to do, but I’m actually weighing my values and what’s important to me.
Grace is when even after all the conditioning and all my best attempts at choosing well, there’s still room for love, forgiveness, and freedom. It’s the gift that meets me where my patterns and my choices fall short. So the line is that conditioning explains why I do what I do, choice is me stepping into awareness, and grace is what carries me further because perfection doesn’t exist.” — Hollie Stepien
Living on Autopilot
Science tells us that as much as ninety-five percent of our daily behavior is unconscious, driven by automatic patterns and conditioned responses (PMID: 25643235). This means most of the time, we’re not actually choosing, we’re running scripts laid down by reinforcement, trauma, or environment.
Much of this is governed by the Default Mode Network (DMN), a set of brain regions that switches on when we’re not actively focused. It’s why you can drive home and not remember the last ten minutes, why your mind replays old arguments in the shower, or why you catch yourself scrolling without deciding to. The medial prefrontal cortex, which processes thoughts about ourselves, and the posterior cingulate cortex, which ties our present moment back to memories, recycle stories and keep us on autopilot (PMID: 24505938).
Layered on top of that is the amygdala, the brain’s built-in alarm system. It’s designed to detect threat, but when trauma or stress patterns get conditioned, it often hijacks the system. That’s why an email from your boss can spike your heart rate before you even open it, or why arguments with loved ones can trigger fight-or-flight reactions that feel way out of proportion.
These are survival-mode behaviors: shutting down in silence, lashing out defensively, people-pleasing to avoid conflict, or over-checking for danger even when you’re safe. The amygdala isn’t trying to sabotage you, it’s trying to keep you alive based on the old rules it learned.
The Science of Choice
The turning point comes when awareness interrupts these loops. This isn’t abstract, it’s measurable. When you pause before reacting, you recruit the Executive Control Network. Anchored in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex, this network gives you the ability to weigh values, goals, and long-term outcomes instead of just reacting to the moment (PMID: 28541342).
You’ve felt this at work when you stop yourself mid-argument, take a breath, and choose a different response. Or when you notice the urge to check your phone but stay present with the person across from you. Or when you push yourself to move even though your body wants to stay slumped. In those moments, the DMN and amygdala are not steering, you are.
But here’s the key: this isn’t a one-time event, it’s repetition that rewires the brain. Hollie gave a simple example: we’re conditioned to look both ways before crossing the street, but technically, we don’t have to. That behavior was repeated so often that the brain reinforced those neural connections until it became automatic.
It’s the same with a puppy. At first, it has accidents. But every time it’s guided to the right spot, a new association forms. Over time, scratching at the back door replaces mistakes in the house.
This is how the brain works: neurons that fire together wire together. Imagine carving a trail through the woods. At first, it’s tangled and exhausting. But walk it enough, and it becomes the clear, obvious path. Meanwhile, the unused paths grow over. In neuroscience, this is called synaptic pruning: unused connections fade, while stronger ones branch and deepen. “Every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (John 15:2).
This is why early change feels exhausting. Pausing instead of exploding, staying instead of fleeing, is like cutting through tangled brush. But eventually, that path smooths out until it becomes your new autopilot.
I’ve lived this. For years, I reacted with silence whenever conflict rose. My body would shut down before I even decided to. That was my amygdala doing its job, protecting me with the only pattern it knew. But the first time I noticed it, took a breath, and chose to stay instead of retreating, that moment was clumsy, awkward, and terrifying. Still, it was real. And over time, repeating that choice carved a new path. What once took all my strength eventually became natural.
Awareness opens the door, but repetition builds the road. And with every step, the brain reshapes itself to make your chosen path the one you naturally walk. You become something new, or maybe simply a more attuned version of who you truly are, outside of the world’s idea of who they thought you had to always be. This is where neuroscience meets God’s design: the reminder that we were never meant to stay trapped in old patterns, but to grow into the image of the One who made us.
The Gift of Grace
This is where grace enters. Because even with all our science, all our awareness, and all our repetition, we still stumble back into the old path. Grace is the gift that catches us when the machete falls from our hand and the thorns close in again. It is the bridge across the gap, and the reason we are not reduced to our worst days or even our best efforts.“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
Grace is not just spiritual, it is God’s design written into your very biology. Compassion and forgiveness have been shown to calm the amygdala, restore balance to the prefrontal cortex, and lower cortisol, the stress hormone that keeps trauma wired into the body (PMID: 18215635). It is as if God knew we would fail and, in His mercy, gave us a reset button that science is only beginning to glimpse.
So if you’ve ever felt like you’re on autopilot, like your choices keep slipping through your fingers, or like you’ve tried and failed too many times, hear this: you are not broken. You are human. And grace was made for exactly this space.
Thank you for giving your time to walk this road with me today. My hope is that this doesn’t just give you knowledge, but a mirror, so you can see your own life in the science, and God’s fingerprints in your story.
And here’s your one nugget to carry forward: you are not just the sum of your conditioning. You are not only your choices. You are carried by a grace that says, “even here, you are seen, loved, and free.”
This is just the beginning. Truthly exists to walk this path week by week, question by question, until the truth is no longer hidden but lived. If this met you, come back. Bring your questions, your doubts, your failures. They belong here.