conditioned reflex

"You would then associate any gay, homosexual feelings with something unpleasant - a conditioned reflex really."

And Charlotte, being Charlotte, feels an urge — as inescapable as a conditioned reflex — to clean up the incalculable mess that’s been left behind.

As Alice and Edgar have at each other, with nasty recriminations that infect the initially conciliatory Kurt, they are clearly acting out a pattern so familiar it has become a conditioned reflex.

I should have said nothing, but it was a conditioned reflex.

Each of these characters delivers a soliloquy in which they describe their exploitative relationships with Hester, for whom passivity is a conditioned reflex.