Meanings Drive Behaviors

The framework that constructed meanings drive behavior is core principle of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and has been a cornerstone of psychotherapy for some time. In essence, if you can change the thought, you can change the behavior. In CBT, change is largely reliant on the client being able to capture and restructure their own thoughts.

Systemic therapists know that people are not linear. Rather, we recognize the impact of relationships and the recursive influence of each person’s felt experiences upon the other. This is called “circular causality” and it plays a significant role in how we feel, interpret our experience, and behave.

Attempting to change our behavior from a strictly intellectual awareness is really hard as it fails to address the implicit affective drivers of our distress. Research has shown how implicit feelings, feelings we are not even aware we are experiencing, influence how we think and behave. A strictly explicit cognitive process fails to access or impact these aspects of neural constructs.

While “meanings drive behaviors” is a core principle of human behavior, it is only one part of a whole. ASR seeks to create change at every level, explicit and implicit. It integrates this principle in Move 2 as constructed narratives often block access to more vulnerable aspects of self. By adapting these constructed, and often false, narratives, we are able to affect deeper and more persistent change in clients.