Are So-Called Behavior Problems Even Real?
The desire to control behavior is so central to how we deal with young people that it is virtually invisible to us. We simply take it for granted that if you want to help young people, you need to focus on controlling their behavior. This drives many endeavors in the United States including the vast dystopian experiment in the drugging of children, the school system, and the large industry of totalitarian institutions that disobedient young people are transported to against their will.
Only when the intention to control behavior is our starting point does the notion of “behavior problems” become a relevant construct. “Behavior problems”, then, refers to deviation from required behavior. But should this be our default approach for dealing with young people?
As Alfie Kohn points out, behavior doesn’t come from nowhere. It is driven by that which is below the surface - feelings, values, attitudes, and goals. It seems to me that when we coerce people into behaving the way we want, what we’re really doing is causing things below the surface like fear, shame, or some other discomfort. We may be successful in shaping behavior because the child wants to avoid those feelings, and we may even manipulate them into being grateful for it, but we’re not dealing with the true sources of behavior.
Various experts and mental health professionals that use this approach may convince themselves and others that they are looking at the underlying issue, when they are really just concerned with controlling behavior. The problem is, you can’t both help people with what’s going on at depth and adjust their behavior to consolidate power over them. The reason for this is that, as you try to control their behavior, you are causing wounded emotions. This precludes the possibility of helping them become conscious of these feelings and draw boundaries around them. No amount of pseudo-empathy or pseudo-attunement can change that.
Because who we truly are is denied, this approach ultimately produces human beings that are incomplete, lost, empty, and wounded. Many people are unable to recognize this because their own depth was denied when they were conditioned this way as children. In other words, they never got to find their true selves and probably lack the resources for inquiring into their own conditioning. All that they know to understand another human being is observations of behavior - of what is on the surface that can be seen, categorized, and placed into a standardized box. Thus, if a young person is damaged because of this approach, it will likely be misinterpreted as an inherent defect in them. Therefore, for those of us that were wounded this way during childhood that are now waking up out of it as adults, we probably cannot look to those that conditioned us, such as our parents or other authority figures, for validation or healing.
So what are the real reasons for so-called behavior problems (that is, deviation from required behavior)? Ultimately, there are as many reasons as there are situations and people - that’s the point. To be less glib about it, an important reason for young people might be that they can sense the dehumanization and objectification of being treated this way. Therefore, they disobey to maintain some degree of personal integrity and autonomy. Many kids know intuitively that there is something wrong with making approval dependent on jumping through the adult’s hoops. Therefore, they might simply rebel against the control. I suspect this is the case for a lot of the kids that we stigmatize as “bad” or “failures”.
Whether a kid is rebelling because they don’t like being subjected to “behavior planning” or a kid is obeying because they are driven by fear and shame, it isn’t the behavior that really matters - their behavior isn’t who they really are. Nor is it for anyone.
Now, this isn’t to say that there can’t be behaviors that are genuinely problematic, that call for some degree of external control. Of course, there are. But only trying to control the behavior and inculcate obedience, which is our default approach, is incredibly dehumanizing and destructive. Even if one makes the determination that some external control needs to be a part of the answer, dealing with the underlying issue is paramount if you care about the well-being of the young person.
Many people, however, don’t want to deal with the underlying dynamic because it would disrupt the status quo of the environment. When the focus is on controlling behavior, we are individualizing a problem that is likely a systemic one. If we recognized that people’s behavior is informed by their response to the situation in which they find themselves, people would actually have to look at what aspects of the environment are contributing to the behavior. It takes a lot less courage to scapegoat the individual with the problematic behavior. So the behavioral approach has a powerful status-quo maintenance function.
Here again, we need to be aware of propaganda that might confuse us. Many mental health professionals and institutions will say that they deal with the systemic issue when they really don’t. They may use language like “identified patient” even when they are really just focused on forcing the individual that is surfacing the larger issue to adjust to the group dysfunction. There are a few ‘tells’ that indicate that mental health professionals or institutions will do this. One of them is if the intervention primarily involves one individual - such as a child being sent away to a program (even ones that say they look at the family dynamic). Another tell is if they simply focus overwhelmingly on behavior. Ultimately, such propaganda causes further harm for the individual because it isolates them even more and makes it harder for them to own their reality. It’s a way to consolidate the scapegoating of the individual that is pointing out the problem. What’s more, these mental health professionals hold authority and badges recognized by society while the scapegoat is stigmatized and marginalized. This all compounds the misery and damage to the person being scapegoated and behaviorally modified.
With our society’s default approach of controlling behavior and inculcating obedience, there’s a kind of perverse selection process taking place. We are approving of young people that fit into this paradigm, that exhibit the behavior required of them by people with more power. To gain this approval, they have to abandon their inner compass, internalize the voices of external authority, and accept a destiny in which they never realize their true potential.
On the other hand, we stigmatize the young people who resist this very bad deal handed to them as having behavioral problems. We drug, coerce, shame, stigmatize, label, and brainwash them until they obey. Some of them are so injured by this that they die young.
If we want to create a totalitarian society with no evolution or creativity, that cements the power of those that already have it, this approach would make perfect sense. If on the other hand, we want a society composed of high-agency individuals with minds of their own, who can sustain a vibrant democracy and a dynamic, innovative economy, this approach is extremely counterproductive.
We are training for obedience and deference to the status quo. The young people that resist the status quo of authoritarian control of their behavior may have a stronger connection to their creativity, passions, and primal inclinations. When obedience is demanded, anything that comes from a person’s inner authority inherently gets devalued. The people with a strong connection to their creativity and strong wills (again, things that don’t fit into this system) are those that will invent new industries, create groundbreaking cultural phenomena, and make scientific breakthroughs.
One reason why our awareness of this is obscured is that we are often given bastardized versions of ideals that we know are important, but we undermine by the way we condition our population. Things like creativity, critical thinking, personal empowerment, integrity, and choice can be operationalized as particular actions or efforts that fit within this paradigm of behavioral control. This is part of why people may not see the folly of what we’re doing.
On this, psychologist Bruce Levine said, “An especially insidious kind of lie that breaks a population or an individual is ‘co-opting and bastardization’. Specifically, this means labeling an institution with a positive ideal or goal but ensuring that the institution actually promotes the opposite. Remember 1984’s ‘Ministry of Peace,’ which was, in reality, the War Department?”
In some behavioral modification facilities, when young people’s wills are broken and they are successfully coerced into obedience, the staff in charge tell them that they are being “empowered”. As another example from these facilities, “personal integrity” is defined as obedience to the whims of the staff. After enough of this, you won’t know what empowerment or integrity really are because those in charge have created an alternate reality that they define and control. Due to this kind of propaganda, we have trouble seeing what is really lost when we prioritize the control of young people’s behavior.
In summary, the notion of “behavior problems” is embedded in a larger set of deeply problematic assumptions. If we want healthy, complete, high-agency individuals that fulfill their potential, we should rethink them. We need to get better at looking at our own emotional depth and conditioning so we can understand other people for who they truly are, not just for their behavior.
