Personal Growth: Beyond Behavior Management

Changing ourselves is hard. Gym memberships spike in January and taper off as you move toward spring and summer for a good reason. We tend to be pretty challenged in making behavior changes stick. The budget gyms bank on this reality and sell loads of $10/month memberships knowing that only a fraction of the people will visit the gym regularly. People keep their memberships since $10 doesn’t hit their pocketbook too hard — they spend that at the coffee shop several times each month — and they hope that someday they might make exercise a habit.  In this way, a gym can have a facility that is not overcrowded and still has lots of attractive new equipment. It’s a business model that sells change, and banks on us not following through. 

I think part of the difficulty with change is how we view it. So often we set goals to avoid things, to stop eating so terribly, to stop smoking, to not look at porn, to stop my alcohol addiction, to stop being so angry, and so on. Those are good behaviors to avoid for sure but they are only symptoms of deeper issues. As a colleague of mine is apt to say, “The issue on the table, is not the issue on the table.” 

It is important to ask questions that explore what our behavior is responding to. Some questions that might be helpful are:

What created the conditions that set my soul up to be so attracted to this behavior?
How is this behavior a manner of responding to the wounding of life?
What is this behavior keeping me from doing, experiencing, or being?

There are other important questions to ask. They reveal a deeper story. That’s not surprising given that we are wonderfully deep and complex creatures. Part of the joy of being a counselor is getting to explore the wilds of a person’s heart with them.

When we can frame change in terms of what we want to be true rather than what we want to not be true it taps into those deeper places. It might look like that instead of focusing on, “I don’t want to be angry all the time” one focuses on “I want to be truly known by those around me.”  This shift opens up our minds and hearts to an array of possibilities that can be. It sets us up for a true recalibration and healing rather than behavior management. 

In a goal of behavior management progress will be made on a surface level. It might even hold indefinitely. However, the scar tissue of the soul that shaped the maladaptive behavior remains.  In the case of anger the issue truly “on the table” might be something like a level of self-contempt that gets expressed toward other people. Healing this will allow more life giving depth in vulnerability and connection. In the healing, we learn to be more connected to ourselves and others with compassion and kindness. Others experience this as incredibly warm and inviting — the opposite of angry and abrasive.

Reframing change in this sense can make a seismic difference in the motivation to keep up the hard work. The reality is that we usually can only make small consistent changes that add up to big changes over time. It is about the long game. To succeed in the long game you either need to become highly rigid (which is trading one problem for another and a setup for crashes later in life) or do deep work that shifts your experience of yourself and the world. The latter feels more like freedom.