What is Behavioral Therapy?

….and why I don’t use it.

Behavioral therapy is often the term used for therapy and counseling in general. Many parents and adults are told to look for behavioral therapy. However, “behavioral therapy” is a bit of an outdated term even though it is still commonly used to refer to the practice of mental health therapy. Behavioralism was popular in 1920s through 1950s. If you have heard about P.F. Skinner’s work, he is often thought of as the founder of behaviorism. While behavioralism is still an important framework in the history of psychology, it is often not the primary approach used by mental health therapists and counselors anymore. I think mental health therapy better describes what people are looking forward when they say “behavioral therapy.”

In modern day uses, behavioral therapy would focus on the specific behaviors that the child or adult is presenting. However, we know that people are more complex than animals, and so we need different forms of therapy. An example of how a behavioral therapist might approach concerns are to focus on the specific problem and the behavior. This may be focusing specifically on lying or hitting. The problem becomes that no one acts in a vacuum. The reality is that people have many underlying reasons for their behaviors. If we were to focus on lying in therapy, we could talk about the problems with lying, the ways it impacts people, and how it can negatively affect relationships. However, that doesn’t address WHY the child is lying. It doesn’t take into account all the other factors that could be going on. What if the child was actually lying to protect a sibling? There are a million reasons that children may be doing the things they do. My approach is to go beyond the behaviors and look and and work with the underlying concerns. Addressing the root of the concern helps the child from a deeper level. It also helps more long term. Another example of what could happen if we only focus on the behavior is that a new behavior pops up in its place. If the need or underlying concern is not addressed, the child will still find a way to meet that need, so a different behavior will surface. This will continue to go on and on and the actually concern is never addressed. Behaviors are often a window into what is happening underneath the surface. Play therapy is one way to understand the deeper feelings happening for a child. Kids deserve to be heard. They deserve to be understood. And their behaviors are not the things that help us understand them.

We often see the ways that adults are impacted when behaviors are the focus - and they are often the focus.

You arrive late to work. Your boss tells you that you can’t be late. You are late everyday next week. Your boss writes you up for being late. You are still late the next day. You are put on a performance improvement plan. You are still late.

Your boss never figured out what the cause of the behavior was. They never looked into how to remove barriers to figure out what the underlying reason was. Come to find out, the door to your building that you were entering from was locked until after you were suppose to be there, so you had to wait everyday for it to automatically unlock before you could come into work. Your “behavior” would never have changed without your boss knowing that.

Now you may be telling yourself that is a very simplicity example of which you would have just told your boss what was going on. Absolutely! That is the problem for kids. Often they may be unable to tell us what is really going on. We have to look deeper because they are still understanding themselves. We have to be sure to ask them in a way that is accessible to them. We have to look at those “why’s” before disciplining to understand what we want to teach them. Sometimes the problems are that simple. Sometimes they are not. But giving them the right tools and access is important to really figuring out how to help them. If we never look at what is underneath, the problem will not get better. Instead sometimes it means kids power through the problem or hide it and manage it internally. Their thoughts may turn negative or anxious. The problem is not actually better. It just is no longer affecting the adult in their life.

Child-centered play therapy is not a behavioral approach, but it does have wide possibilities at helping your child on a deeper level to get to the changes you are hoping to see.