Understanding Developmental Vs. Behavioral Change

Why are my clients struggling to achieve their goals?

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 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 takes time. It requires an expansion of your client’s relational capacity. It’s an evolution, not a lightswitch.

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. 

So 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. Although you may know intellectually that it’s a good idea to (for instance) not snap at your partner, in the moment, when you’re at your emotional low point, feeling cornered or belittled or incredibly frustrated, it’s not so easy to achieve that aspirational goal. (Frankly, I think we’ve all been there, in one way or another!) 

There’s another reason lasting change is challenging to achieve. It’s not just about going against your ingrained habits, repeatedly, under stress. Lasting change depends on changing the system between partners around the dynamic that you want to shift. 

What do I mean by that? Here’s an outline of the process:

• First, you make a decision that there’s something you want to handle differently in your life, in order to be the kind of person you aspire to be. (For instance, maybe you decide “I want to start telling my partner the truth, even if I think it might freak them out.”)
• You start to do that one thing differently. 
• Then, as you repeat that different choice multiple times, your partner starts to notice.
• At some point along the line, they start to respond differently – for better or worse. (For instance, maybe they are freaked out by the truth-telling; or maybe they come to see you as a more trustworthy person – or maybe a bit of both.)
• Now, with their different responses, there are new things for you to respond to differently. 
• Along the way, there will certainly be moments when you’re cranky, or tired, and fall back on your old habits; these setbacks are pretty much inevitable – but hopefully, you pick yourself up and keep on going.
• This cycle continues for some time, in a variety of types of situations, until you end up in a very different place from where you started (hopefully, one that aligns more with the kind of person and partner you envision yourself becoming!).

To get lasting, durable change you need 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, you will have more capacity to respond in a relational manner under stress (like a disagreement with your partner).

Developmental change is uncomfortable and challenging, but also profound. Facilitating developmental growth is truly what makes therapeutic work worthwhile.