What leads to true and lasting behavior change?

A behavior is how we act and how we do something. Behavior also determines how well we do things, in other words, our level of performance.  Behavior often leads to the creation of our habits, and those habits,  which determine our results, reinforce our identity.  This culminates into our collection of beliefs about ourselves, hence our self-concept.

Behavior, therefore, is extremely significant, and change in behaviors can be rather essential at times, if not always.

Indeed, there has been a series of efforts targeting behavior changes. There are hundreds of techniques, hundreds of interventions and derivative treatment modalities to help individuals make changes in their behaviors, all with varying results, including:

1. The individual makes the change and reverts back to the initial behavior

2. The individual makes the change, the change is maintained, but often at the detriment of other aspects or areas in the individual’s life. This means fulfillment, authentic happiness or complete satisfaction are the cost

3. The individual starts working on making the change, either finds it too hard to keep, or finds that he/she is not getting results fast enough, and he/she then gives up

4. The individual wants to make the change, plans to make the change, but never gets to start

5. The individual wants to change but has no intention of trying “these behavior techniques…” “I’ve tried it all. I need something else, something different. I don’t know what that is, but not this one.”

6. The individual does not believe there is any hope, and “it is not worth trying…”

These are six of the most common scenarios that are found to be the outcome of behavior modifications as we currently know them. Now, does that mean behavior modifications do not work?

No, no, no, a resounding no. This is not what that means. It simply means behavioral modification has its shortcomings, and there have been several attempts to address those.

One of those attempts is CBT. CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy simply states that it is not just about behavior, but also, better yet, and more importantly, it is about the cognition. It is about this CBT Link of Thought-Feeling-Behavior; and it is about this Belief-Behavior/Result Pathway. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has come to the rescue of Behavioral Therapy, and that makes Aaron Beck the father of both Behavioral Therapy and of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. CBT has been very helpful, and yet, while yielding better results than Behavioral Therapy, alone, each one of us, clinicians, can identify at least one patient or client who has “failed to respond,” to all those behavioral modifications, all in the context of CBT. In other words, despite addressing thoughts and feelings; despite looking at belief, attitude and perception; and despite targeting focus, associations, and values, there is a group of patients or clients who remain one of these six groups of individuals mentioned above.

The question is then, why is that? Why would this group of patients fail to respond?

To answer this question, we can easily use the same type of scientific thinking that led to advancing Behavioral Therapy to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. This type of thinking or approach was to look at what was behind behaviors. What is behind behavior is feeling/emotion, which, in turn, is preceded by thought. This led to the Thought-Feeling-Behavior Link. Because when a thought is practiced regularly, frequently and intensely enough, it becomes a belief, which in turn drives all behaviors. The Belief-Behavior Pathway, then has to be taken into account. But there again, that does not solve the whole puzzle. The approach does not stop there. We can ask, what is behind that pathway, and the answer is the normal or created Blueprint.

While that Blueprint is formed by the trifactor or triad phenomenon or Gene-Environment-Epigenetic; there is the functional factor behind it, also known as the fundamentals, and these fundamentals are what need to be fully looked at in order to understand what leads to true and lasting behavior change. These fundamentals are three. There are known as the Fundamental of Mind; the Fundamental of Consciousness; and the Fundamental of Thought.

No understanding of what leads to true and lasting behavior change is possible without the full understanding of these three fundamentals, of how they work, how they relate to us and to our behaviors.

This will be addressed during the first part of our 4th Class in our 16-week CBT Certificate Course, next Wednesday, August 26, 2020 7-9pm Eastern Standard Time. Meanwhile, please review our first three classes, so we better understand these three fundamentals.

SWEET Institute’s vision is to provide the tools that all clinicians need to be that transformative clinician that they can be and that they’ve wanted to be all along.

This CBT Certificate Course is one of the 9 total certificate courses that we will be offering throughout the year, every year. We are thrilled you are on this journey with us.

As Dr. King once said,

“One should do one’s job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.”

As clinicians, we will do so because this is what it takes to elevate our patients and clients, our career satisfaction and self-expression, our field and our agencies.

Let us elevate ourselves to a new way of being in the world, as this is the only way we can truly make a difference in the world.

With Love, and until soon,

Karen and Mardoche