Behavior is a Declaration of Value and a Desired Future
Part three of exploring Relational-ACT, a model of human psychology.
This is the third of a three-part series looking into the essential characteristics of what I call Relational-ACT, comprised of Values, Narrative, and Behavior. This forms the cornerstone of a broader psychological and therapeutic model that I’ve developed over the course of the last twenty years.
Based fundamentally on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), created by Steven Hayes, Relational-ACT takes those principles, coupled with insights from Relational Frame Theory (RFT), Personal Construct Theory as initially developed by George R. Kelly, behaviorism, and evolutionary psychology, and emphasizes relationship, in all its many forms, as existentially basic to humanity.
We have so far considered the role Values play in decision-making and the conceptual structuring of how people assign meaning and purpose to their actions. The larger explanation can be found in Part 1:
Then, in Part 2, we looked at Narrative as the means through which we construct perspectives, with ourselves at the seeming center of our conscious experience, giving definition to our Values, and guiding the path for Behavior expression.
Now, we turn to Behavior, the last part of the Relational-ACT model. I've created the image below to help visualize the process.
ACT primarily considers behavior as an indication of the direction or Value that one's life is heading towards. As such, behavior is a source for constant appraisal of one's consistency in pursuing a particular Value. The phrase “value-directed behavior” is often used because Value identification comes first, followed by the Behavior in service of it.
Relational-ACT is founded upon a relationship model where behavior is not an indication of moving towards a Value but exists as a pointer directing attention back to a, or set of, Value(s) it is supporting. We exist in what the modern phrase of “lived experience” brings attention to, as an inevitable trajectory of intentional energy starting with Value, moving through Narrative, resulting in Behavior.
A small but significant caveat needs to be explained here. We do not typically consciously engage in this structure of Value-Narrative-Behavior. What Relational-ACT is, is a model for understanding and analyzing how people’s Behavior arises in order to, with the help of mindful critical reflection, expand our flexibility in future behavioral expression. Related to this is the principle from behaviorism that everything we do is a behavior, including the so-called “internal” actions of thoughts and emotions.
Why is it essential to consider the last paragraph?
Because we do not actively select, in the sense of directly control through some form of disconnected soul or dualistic (non-material) consciousness, our Behavior, not the internal or external kind. We simply are. Thoughts and emotions arise from mechanisms none of us has direct access to. When you have a thought or feeling, you do not sit there actively selecting from a smorgasbord of options, as even that thought experiment is itself a thought you didn’t choose to have. A similar situation exists for our “external” Behavior, where the options available are almost never deliberately considered, and even the options that appear as thoughts to reflect on are not chosen by you; they’re simply offered up on the silver plate of consciousness.
What Relational-ACT is attempting to provide, and the work I do with clients and patients, is a means to understand the Behavior we have and expand the possibilities in the future. There’s nothing to be done about what has come before, no judgment or shame to be felt for any thoughts or emotions that arise, and the responsibility we have for the external behavior that affects others is pursued through ethical reflection as we step into the world we’re helping create through everything we do.
Ethics is fundamentally based on interaction, or the reciprocal relationships we have with every object and subject we engage with. Behavior, both internal and external, is our humanity interacting within the relational reality in which we all reside. Existing within that established social space, behavior does not so much create a new experience as it discovers the potential residing within each situational context. This is the limit of the concept of “lived experience,” where it is not, as often used, a means of creating or supporting knowledge claims, so much as manifesting the claims that one already believes, including all the biases and lack of critical reflection that is the mainstay of being human. As well, this is why we cannot simply do anything we want, whenever we want, since our behavior must manifest within the layered context of each personal Vision and social possibility.
Vision By Flashlight Not By Lantern
Suspenseful scenes in television shows and movies are often built around using light. A character will enter a dark room and pull out the tiniest flashlight you've ever seen, not bothering to flip switches or find out they don't work. An inevitable consequence is that the villain will pop out of the darkness and surprise both the character and the audience, or a key piece for their journey will be missed. While it's a useful prop for entertainment value, the image is not altogether different from real life, with our perspective being that of the tiniest of flashlights rather than a lantern or overhead light.
We enter the world, each of us, through the birth canal of our species, limited in the ways that are specific to our existence as human beings. We cannot run as fast as the cheetah, we do not possess the claws and teeth of a lion, and we cannot swim underwater like a fish. From this starting point, what is possible for us is not at all infinite, and is further constrained by the genetic, familial, and societal conditions that encapsulate our lives.
This Vision of Personal Expression encompasses all of our Behavior, not just our outward physical reactions, but our mental and emotional behavior, and the triggers within us waiting to be clicked by circumstance. We cannot see ways of behaving that do not lie within that possibility, though thankfully our Vision can move, as it does each time we react in ways that we wish we hadn't, or, more positively, engage with new people and environments that inspire different actions, providing an influence for different ways of behaving in the future.
The flow of time is expansive. Judgment of wanting to have acted differently in the past can only happen because we are now in a different context, with a moved Vision of what is possible. Judgment does not mean accuracy; rather, it's a recognition of our desire to become better or different versions of ourselves.
Relational-ACT
What, then, is Behavior about? What is it concerned with?
We are, as Kelly noted in his Personal Construct Theory, practical scientists. No, we don’t all have PhDs. Instead, we’re hypothesis testers, with varying levels of evidence to support them. What our body/brain system is attempting to do is test the waters, so to speak, concerning what it believes the world, in all its potential variability, to be like. If A-behavior, internal or external, results in a continuity of or predicted B-outcome, then C-confirmation has been felt, and we have the experience of being “correct” or “right” about our world.
The “evidence” that is brought forward to start the prediction is from the unconscious analysis of all that has come before, including the various predictions that have or have not come to pass, in order to build a picture of the present to step into the imagined future we hope to contribute to in a way that makes sense to us.
As I often tell clients, the future is the present collapsing in on itself.
Consider, for example, the experience of depression as destructive confirmation bias, where we, because of a situation that violated one or more of our Values, resulted in the construction of a Narrative to make sense of it, with the resulting Behavior, internal as emotion and external as isolation and poor sleep, “supporting” that hypothesis. I put “suppporting” in quotes because it’s not meant to be seen as positive. Perhaps “affirming” would work, in the sense that our Behavior affirms the constructed sense we have about our world in all its perceived layers.
Our body/brain system isn’t interested in accuracy, but in consistency. That the latter is often accurate enough is mainly due to the limitations of being physical beings in a natural existence, but it’s still not the central point. Consistency can be facilitated by social and environmental isolation, hence knowledge silos like we have increasingly in our online worlds and our social relationships. Our body/brain system, being biological, is focused on one primary result: procreation or continuity (of various kinds). If particular behavioral content is ultimately destructive, so long as before that end the piece (genes and/or ideas) to be put into the future is completed, it doesn’t matter to the organism.
Behavior provides insight into our inner lives since we act based on how the Narratives of the world, which include ourselves, create boundaries for what we believe ourselves capable of. Behavior is also an indicator of what we care about since we are triggered by what we find important and meaningful. Thirdly, by reflecting on the consequences of our Behavior, we can, through critical thinking and dialogue in supportive relationships, identify how our perception or self-narrative has limited us, and seek new ways of interacting within the world.
Relational-ACT seeks to shift the focus on individual acts that lead to debilitating judgment of the whole person by, instead, exploring each response within the context of the person's life and their framing of it. This doesn't remove responsibility so much as it allows the relationships of our lives to show us new ways of reaching for the best version of who we know ourselves to be.