Helping People Break Their Negative Behaviours

Every person has the right to live their life working toward their own personal desires and goals. Unfortunately, there are some people who are troubled with mental health conditions that develop problem behaviours. They might be hypersensitive to criticism, viewing even a simple suggestion as a personal attack and verbally retaliate. They might be engaged in self-harm, hurting themselves physically as a way to gain the attention they crave so badly. They might become aggressive and start fights, or engage in the destruction of property, all as a way of unleashing the pent-up bad feelings that they don’t know how to deal with properly. These negative behaviours invariably form barriers to them ever reaching their goals and leading the kind of life they really want to lead.

It’s a pretty bleak picture, but there are a lot of people who care and want to help these troubled individuals lead better lives. They may choose to become a positive behaviour support practitioner trained in helping people break out of their self-destructive negative state and get on track to achieving their life goals. There are a variety of effective treatment practices that can help an individual adopt positive behaviours. If you or someone you care about has been diagnosed with a mental health condition and is exhibiting problem behaviours, talk to a mental health provider about the ways that Positive Behaviour Support, PBS for short, can help them make positive changes in their life.

A PBS intervention is designed to reduce the occurrence of problem behaviours while increasing the number of socially appropriate behaviours over a period of time. These positive outcomes take place through a program of teaching the individual new coping skills and transforming the environments that have been found to trigger their problem behaviour. The goal is to proactively prevent the occurrence of problem behaviours instead of waiting for them to occur, then responding afterwards. The PBS interventions and strategies are appropriate for both children and adults who have been diagnosed with a number of mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, and more.

At its heart Positive Behaviour Support is a philosophy created with the express purpose of helping those individuals whose problem behaviours are placing barriers in the path toward reaching their personal goals. PBS was formulated from the research done on the science of Applied Behaviour Analysis, or ABA. The key is understanding that these negative behaviours always occur for a reason, and that reason can be predicted by becoming aware of the triggering circumstances taking place in the person’s life before the behaviours manifest.

Positive behaviour support practitioners are specially trained to perform behavioural assessments and design individualized PBS interventions. Their assessments are focused on determining when, where, and why the problem behaviours occur. Observations are conducted in different locations and circumstances to determine the triggers. The support practitioner then develops treatments to address the reason that the problem behaviours occur, including strategies to replace them with appropriate behaviours. Learning and utilizing new skills helps the individual stop relying on problem behaviours. The positive behaviour support practitioner will teach them coping skills like journaling, mindfulness, asking for help, muscle relaxation, and deep breathing. This gives them new, more acceptable behaviour options to fall back on when the triggers are happening. The positive behaviour support practitioner suggests the PBS treatments to develop, so the individual can implement them, learning and using their new skills and replacement behaviours. Key people in the individual’s life such as their family, friends, and co-workers can also be taught how to implement the PBS treatments to change the environment in order to support the individual. PBS has been proven to foster very positive results, so if you know someone who is sabotaging their own life with negative behaviours contact a positive behaviour support practitioner today!

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