As therapists, our work involves supporting a change process for our clients. I’ve written a lot about the essential foundation of that work—goals and motivation—but today I’d like to zoom in on a very subtle but essential distinction, one that I think even highly-skilled therapists tend to miss: the difference between behavioral and developmental change.
Behavioral Change vs. Developmental Change
Behavioral change is swift. It’s as easy as deciding to make a different choice. Behavioral change applies to situations in which your client maybe just hasn’t thought about their other options, but putting a different choice into practice is easy to implement, as soon as they’re aware of the possibility.
Developmental change, on the other hand, takes time. It requires an expansion of your client’s relational capacity. It’s an evolution, not a light switch.
Very often, the change our clients need is developmental. After all, if it was as easy as just implementing the idea, they probably wouldn’t need our help—at least not in the long term.
Why Is Developmental Change So Challenging?
Usually, it involves developing skills and ways of being that go against deeply ingrained automatic reactions, and the automatic reactions pop up when they’re at their most stressed out or threatened.
Doing something differently right when you’re most stressed is not an easy ask for anyone—even therapists. Although you may know intellectually that it’s a good idea to, for instance, not snap at your partner, when you’re at an emotional low point—feeling cornered, belittled, or incredibly frustrated—it’s not so easy to achieve that aspirational goal in the moment. (Frankly, I think we’ve all been there, in one way or another!)
How We Make Changes That Last
There’s another reason lasting change is challenging to achieve. It’s not just about going against the individual’s ingrained habits, repeatedly, under stress. Lasting change depends on changing the system between parties around the dynamic that they want to shift.
What do I mean by that? Here’s an outline of the process:
- First, let’s say your client makes a decision that there’s something she wants to handle differently in her life, in order to be the kind of person she aspires to be. (For instance, maybe she decides “I want to start telling my partner the truth, even if I think it might freak them out.”)
- She starts to do that one thing differently.
- Then, as she repeats that different choice multiple times, her partner starts to notice.
- At some point along the line, her partner starts to respond differently—for better or worse. (For instance, maybe they are freaked out by the truth-telling; or maybe they come to see your client as a more trustworthy person—or maybe a bit of both.)
- Now, with her partner’s different responses, there are new things for your client to respond to differently.
- Along the way, there will certainly be moments when your client is cranky or tired and falls back on her old habits; these setbacks are pretty much inevitable—but hopefully, she picks herself up and keeps on going.
- This cycle continues for some time, in a variety of types of situations, until your client ends up in a very different place from where she started (hopefully, one that aligns more with the kind of person and partner she envisioned herself becoming!).
To get lasting, durable change, then, your client needs to become a person who responds quite differently in a host of different situations and moods. This is what I refer to as developing new capacity. Ultimately, with your guidance, your client will have more capacity to respond in a relational manner under stress (like, say, a disagreement with her partner.
Developmental change is uncomfortable and challenging, but also profound. Facilitating developmental growth is truly what makes therapeutic work worthwhile.
