How to Heal From Behavior Modification
Whether you experienced behavior modification in a drug rehab, an institution for so-called troubled teens, a residential treatment center, or somewhere else, it can be incredibly damaging. If you wish to heal from it and move toward your highest potential, you may not know where to start. In this article, my goal is to help you to navigate this process.
The first major step toward healing from behavior modification is simply to understand our experience of it in a more empowered, clear way, less shaped by the people that forced it on us or advocate for it. It is helpful to begin by asking one simple question: Was it truly intended to help me? Of course, the people who forced it onto us say that it was intended to help us, and possibly believe this themselves. But digging a little deeper, I would argue that behavior modification is not really about helping the individuals undergoing it but is really about serving the needs of the people with power over us and reinforcing this power dynamic. This may sound cynical, but I reluctantly believe it is accurate. Because at the end of the day, behavior modification is the use of coercion to force us to behave according to the wishes of people with power over us. That’s why behavior modification is comprised of threats such as various kinds of punishment, shaming, criticism, etc., as well as bribes such as praise, material rewards, etc.
If you take a glance at our society, it’s clear that behavior modification is an important part of the social order in contemporary America and elsewhere. Clinical psychologist Bruce Levine writes, “Behavior modification has made a profound impact on the classroom, the workplace, and in the ‘treatment’ of every mental illness, disease, and disorder.” It is a key tool for those in charge to engineer the kind of outcomes they want. We can argue about to what degree this is tyrannical. But it is at least problematic if we wish to have a democratic society that’s even remotely egalitarian. In his book, Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn writes that behavior modification is “by its nature inimical to democracy, critical questioning, and the free exchange of ideas among equal participants.”
In our culture, we tend to focus on behavior for a number of reasons. One is that behavior can be easily identified and measured. When we assume that behavior is what really matters, we don’t have to bother dealing with messy issues like the nuances of what somebody is feeling, how pain in their past might be affecting them today, etc. In fact, we have license to forcefully deny these issues of depth because they aren’t what matters - behavior is what matters. Another reason why we focus on behavior is that the control and standardization of behavior are central to the functioning of the vast hierarchical bureaucracies that have sprung up in the last 100-150 years and are now central to our way of life. Given that a focus on behavior is crucial to operating within these institutions, people might naturally feel pressure to extend this approach elsewhere, like to the family. The problem with such a focus on behavior is that it’s severely damaging to our humanity. When we are reduced to behavior, our creativity, authenticity, and uniqueness are marginalized. We may lose what makes life truly worthwhile and our contribution to the world is severely diminished.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of behavior modification is that while we are modifying ourselves to gain the approval of those with power over us, we lose our connection to the whole range of truly worthwhile pursuits. We aren’t connecting with our passions or developing our unique perspective on life. We’re not developing a self, which is, to quote William Deresiewicz, “something there, that when the world pushes on you, is capable of pushing back”. Behavior modification, in my opinion, causes tremendous loss of human potential because, in its quest to breed passive, obedient, and standardized human beings, we crowd out the range of truly worthwhile pursuits.
Many of us stay in the dark about the harm that behavior modification caused us for a number of reasons. One is that we simply haven’t been shown a more accurate way to understand it, as most of our society has bought into the mythology that it’s necessary for all sorts of reasons. Another is that we may be in denial about its harm because there can be tremendous grief and anger in waking up to it. It is, in some ways, much easier to continue to hold onto the narrative of those that once had power over us. It can be easier to believe that it really was in our best interest rather than something that radically altered the course of our life and robbed us of much of our well-being and creativity. Carl Sagan said, “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
As behavior modification is inherently authoritarian, healing from behavior modification is fundamentally about liberating ourselves. A powerful way for a person or system to control a human being is to program them such that they have internalized what the person in control wants and aren’t even aware that this program isn’t their own. This is the reality for so many of us - we still have the authority figures of our youth controlling us, even if they’re no longer physically in our lives. Instead of allowing our authentic selves to flourish and grow, the roots of something else were installed within us.
At its core, healing from behavior modification is about becoming aware of this wounded conditioning and cultivating our own power again. Before we begin this process, it might feel like there is some better life that we’re supposed to be living, that is lost to us, and we don’t know how to get there. This can be very disheartening. Fortunately, there are ways to get there, and the place to begin is to become aware of what’s really going on and examine our conditioning.
When it comes to actually doing the work to heal from behavior modification, there are many aspects to it and it can vary greatly from person to person. Nevertheless, here are some practices to get you started:
As a result of this intervention, we may now have a deeply-ingrained habit of modifying ourselves to appease the people around us. This is because, at its core, behavior modification is about someone with power over us using approval and disapproval to change us to fit their preferences, biases, and constructs. We have lost our own frame and our own power. In order to reclaim our authenticity and reduce dependence on the approval of others, it is crucial for us to return to the feelings in our bodies. This is like our internal compass, always guiding us. Behavior modification teaches us to live from the outside in. We become hyper-focused on the outside in order to avoid pain. Returning to what we feel is the first step towards liberating ourselves and living from the inside out.
We also need to heal our triggers and wounded emotions. What may have happened to us is that we developed problematic behaviors in response to difficult emotions earlier in life that we couldn’t process. Instead of those that we depended on putting a sufficient emphasis on helping us recognize and process these things, the focus was to coerce us to change our behavior and repress the underlying emotions. Such an experience can be very painful. Along with this, we may have been brainwashed into thinking that these triggers and difficult emotions are something wrong with us, that can only be managed with force of one kind or another (which might euphemistically be called “self-regulation”). My view is that these things can be healed. I’ve certainly healed many of these things in myself and know many others that have as well. When we have these difficult emotions and triggers that we don’t know how to process, we can feel powerless. Learning to process them and finding safety within yourself is a huge step towards taking your power back.
Another very important part of healing from behavior modification is for us to reclaim our own sense of what’s true, independent of what we’ve been told by those with power over us. When we are put under the intense, authoritarian pressure of behavior modification, it is easier for our “rulers” to impose their narratives and thinking onto us. For example, we may have lost a sense of our actual needs because the people with power over us defined our needs in a way that served them. They then “helped” us accordingly. These experiences can be very destructive to our self-trust. Little by little, we need to reclaim our reality.
We need to reclaim intrinsic motivation. Behavior modification has a tendency to kill intrinsic motivation. Because we’re forced into a state where we constantly have to modify ourselves to the judgment of people around us, we lose touch with what we really want to do and what we truly value. Therefore, one of the great beauties of doing this work is that we get to reclaim so much of what makes life worthwhile.
A final principle for healing from behavior modification is to process your shame. Behavior modification creates tremendous shame because it’s underwritten by the idea that whatever we would naturally do is wrong, which is why we need an overlord to coerce us. I think that processing shame is, to a large extent, about noticing it and feeling it. When we see that the wounded beliefs behind the shame are really just the result of this barbaric practice, we see that the idea that there’s something wrong with us is genuinely not true.
