Relational frames as the building blocks of complex human behavior

*This blog post is based on material in the book Understanding and Applying RFT by Siri Ming, Evelyn Gould, & Julia Fiebig.

Ko tōku reo tōku ohooho, ko tōku reo tōku māpihi maurea.

My language is my awakening, my language is the window to my soul.

—Maori proverb; translated by Sir Tīmoti Kāretu

Understanding RFT and ACT begins with recognizing the power of language as symbolic, as central to cultural and individual identity. Words matter. We must be prepared to understand and influence language (including psychological flexibility) at every level - from self and the individual, up to the groups and systems within which we work and that affect our clients, as well as the cultures that shape us all.  

Behavior analysts view “verbal behavior” as repertoires that include skills commonly referred to as “language” or “cognition” and consider these repertoires to develop in much the same way as any other behavior—through an individual history of interactions with the environment. As with any other behavior, meaning comes through how language functions within a particular context. 

We conceptualize psychological flexibility as a complex, composite languaging repertoire that is shaped through interlocking contingencies promoted from the very beginning of caregiver-infant interactions. Threads of psychological flexibility in early childhood include a whole host of earlier repertoires that can be taught and supported in interactions with caregivers and others, even from infancy—including broad and sensitive attention to the environment (establishing increasing complexity and flexibility of stimulus control), behavioral variability, prerequisite self-ing repertoires like tacting of private events and self-discrimination, on up through the complex languaging repertoires involved in relational framing and rule governance. Caregivers play a critical role in shaping curiosity, creativity, perseverance, and resilience throughout childhood, through interactions that reinforce variability, increase relational flexibility as new relational responding patterns are learned, and teach tolerance of aversive events.

When viewed from this perspective, we can see ACT frameworks as ways of categorizing a variety of tactics, skills, and behavioral processes that generally support psychological flexibility as a complex composite response class. We can view these elements from a constructional standpoint as often promoting generally useful repertoires that are good quite broadly for all humans, and in which there might be deficits hindering our ability to behave in ways that feel healthy and nurturing to ourselves and to others. Since these are repertoires that have earlier forms, and are shaped over time from birth, we need not restrict ourselves to tools like the hexaflex (especially in its adult psychotherapy form) as the only way to promote psychological flexibility—we can start by promoting the many underlying repertoires and general processes that build towards psychological flexibility as defined in terms of a languaging repertoire.

A framework for a multilevel functional analysis must take into account both the interlocking contingencies between children and their caregivers as well as the interlocking contingencies that influence caregiver behavior in all of their social contexts (including at the level of groups, systems, and cultures). 

Check out our free tools that include these conceptualizations, with other tools coming soon.