Adaptation is ultimately the maintenance of habits, of behaviours that have worked, that are efficient. Establishing healthy habits and eliminating harmful ones has been an educational objective, both in the public sphere (school) and in private life (family).

Generally speaking, habit guides, directs, and makes the individual move. It's habit that preserves countless situations, just as much as it addresses addictions, compulsions, and stereotypes that corrupt contact with the other, with reality, with the new that continually arises. To be habituated is to be on automatic. It's as if we programme everything around us within ourselves, reacting like an artificial and automatic intelligence (AI) that decides by choosing, separating, and including. Living habituated is akin to living prejudiced, in the sense of being guided by a priori, by preconceptions. Habit installs the past as a black box, as a determinant of the present, and prevents the experience of totality, the integration of what happens, of the events of the present. It decodes and organises variables, events, happenings, and in this sense, what would be necessary and facilitating—being accustomed—is nothing more than the action of a robot, a programmed machine that circumscribes and establishes differentiations.

Changing customs means changing the generic fields in which events and perceptions of reality are configured. That's why it's not easy to change them, it involves dispersing references to which everyone is adapted, and creating mismatches, breaking shells, undoing situations that protect people, groups, and societies. The way we nourish ourselves, have fun and relate sexually, for example, can create habits that are veritable caves or burrows that submerge and neutralise individuals. From habit to label is a leap. Instability creates insecurity in everyday life, so creating, extinguishing, or changing habits is impossible when attitudes are not questioned.

Attitude is motivation that enables behaviour. To be motivated is to express being in the world with others. The classic gestaltists said that the motive is not inside, opposing the psychoanalytic idea of an unconscious, internal motive, and thus justifying one of their basic metaphors about totality, the gestalten: ‘the fruit is neither core nor rind, it's everything at the same time’.

I always say that there is no inside and outside, interior and exterior. There is the relational, what is in front of you, and in this sense, motivation and attitude are always what are actualised as a perception of what is happening. Motivation is not the result of primary drives or the unconscious, as proposed by Freud. There is no such thing as the organic or anything that determines motivation beforehand. It's not the straight line—the point of departure and/or arrival—that determines events. In dynamics, in movement, there is what moves. Motivation is an attitude that transforms, creating repetitions (habits), or discontinuities, in other words, new actions. It is through attitude that what is experienced is transformed, just as it is through attitude that motivations are enthroned, devitalised, and immobilised, thus generating automatisms: habits.

In order to transform or maintain, we need relationships that structure dynamics and positions. In this polarisation we maintain certain movements, we create habits, which, the longer they last, the more they become eternal vices. Sequenced evaluative attitudes camouflage situations. These are called positive or negative vices, which are evaluated according to the results they generate. In various social environments, such as the workplace, for example, this is discussed in relation to narcotics, drinks, and various drugs, all of which are considered addictive and bad. Maintaining failed and unpleasant marital relationships because of the supposed wellbeing of the children and the family is also a way of structuring addictions, dependencies, and justifications for not being able to participate in what questions and imposes discoveries and transformations.

In psychotherapy, by identifying problems and questioning them, it is possible, for example, to stop the process of shifting away from non-acceptance, which is a process of looking for points of support so as not to fall and thus survive. Maintaining support is also an addictive habit. This discovery is transformative. Psychotherapeutic questioning acts on the system of habits and can structure new attitudes and motivations resulting from the situational and relational implications of the processes themselves. Breaking habits creates a new attitude—it's a change, it's coming out of the cocoon, it's also starting to perceive events. People, groups, and societies change when there is questioning, and this process is the antithesis of rigid habits. Life is dynamic, full of contradictions and changes. Life is motivation.