Belonging to Behavior
Belonging, Belief, Attitude, & Behavior — Understanding the Flow
Growing Place Chico does not prescribe diets or medical treatments. This document is offered for educational purposes only.
When a child acts out in class, a teenager shuts down, or an adult finds themselves stuck in the same destructive pattern for the tenth time, the most common instinct is to address the behavior. Change what they’re doing. Correct the surface. Manage the symptom.
This is understandable. Behavior is what we see and experience. It is what disrupts the classroom, strains the relationship, and lands someone in a counselor’s office — or prison. It can also give a hug, perform open heart surgery, and transform a room with contagious joy. Either way, behavior is almost never the beginning of the story.
You can’t sustainably change someone’s actions,
Without understanding where they’re from.
Roots and Flow
Most people approach the following sequence from the tail end. They see a given behavior in need of change and often seek to apply some form of behavior modification. Truth is, the flow actually runs in the other direction entirely. The roots of a person’s behavior are found in their sense of belonging or lack thereof.
The flow moves in one direction only — from root to visible expression (click/tap to enlarge)
A healthy (secure) sense of belonging gives birth to healthy beliefs. These in turn shape a healthy attitude. A healthy attitude then governs healthy behavior. Most of what we call behavioral problems are simply belonging issues that have traveled downstream far enough to become visible.²
Belonging: The Roots
Belonging is not the same as being physically present. A child can be in a room full of people and belong to none of them. An adult can be surrounded by relationships and still be profoundly alone. Both are the effects of an unhealthy or broken sense of belonging.
Belonging, in its fullest sense, is the experience of being genuinely known. Being both fully seen and heard. It’s being valued for who you are rather than for performance or compliance alone. It’s knowing that the relationship is safe enough for you to exist in without pretense.
When someone doesn’t feel that they genuinely belong, they are left in a void. The choices in this void are often to stay, sinking ever deeper, or — to ‘fit in’. Fitting in requires changing who you are. True belonging on the other hand, as Brené Brown writes, “requires nothing of the kind.”³
The tragedy for so many people, especially children, is that they have only ever experienced the dark void and deep cry of not belonging. Knowing deep down that there must be more, they cautiously, diligently and even recklessly pursue fitting in, often at great peril and cost. Desperately seeking to belong, they have concluded from their experience that genuine belonging — that reliable presence of a safe, compassionate other — does not exist.
Healthy belonging is not a luxury in human development. It is, by design, the precondition for virtually everything else: curiosity, exploration, discovery, resilience, identity formation, courage, reciprocating love, and the capacity for healthy relationship and connection.²˙⁴ What a child concludes about belonging in their earliest years, starting at conception, becomes the architecture everything else is built on.⁷
Beliefs: What Belonging Births
Every experience of belonging, including its absence, gives birth to something. An emotion, a picture, a thought, an understanding. Children are extraordinarily good students of this curriculum, even when it’s unintentional. The child who is consistently seen, heard, and valued learns: I matter. I have a purpose. I’m worth knowing. People can be trusted. The world is navigable. There is hope.
On the other hand, the child whose relationships were transactional and the sense of belonging conditional, withheld, or broken learns something very different. They’ve learned in the body, in posture, in the automatic conclusions that form long before conscious, verbal thought arrives.⁶˙⁸ I have no value. I have no purpose. I am too much. I am not enough. I have to earn my place. No one is coming. I am hope-less.
These core beliefs — deeply held, often unconscious convictions about self, others, and the world around us — filter every subsequent experience.¹ They are not chosen. They are formed. They are remarkably durable, some having pre-verbal origins, written early and written deep.⁵˙⁸
Attitude: Belief In Motion
Attitude is the orientation a person carries into every situation, every relationship, and every opportunity. A person who believes they are fundamentally valued approaches difficulty with resilience. If they see themselves as fundamentally insufficient, they approach the same difficulty with defensiveness, withdrawal, or aggression.¹ Not because they have chosen a bad attitude, but because their attitude is the honest expression of what they genuinely believe about their actual place in the world.
This is why attitude correction without belief work is rarely durable. Behavior can be modified through consequence and pressure, but genuine transformation cannot be sustained without addressing the underlying belief(s).¹ The attitude will return, because the root is still there.
Behavior: What We Actually See & Experience
By the time behavior becomes visible, it has already traveled from belonging, through belief and attitude to get there. Behavior is just the signal or message. It is the person and their heart communicating, in the only language currently available. And the message at times may be: something further upstream needs attention.
Treat the behavior and you manage the symptom.
Address the belonging, you change the story, and redirect a legacy.
Practical Implication
This framework does not eliminate the importance of addressing behavior, particularly when it is harmful to the person or others. But it does reframe the question. With adverse behavior, the question is no longer: how do we stop this or change that? Rather, what is this telling us about what they believe? And what is that belief telling us about their sense of belonging?
For parents and teachers, this reframe is both humbling and liberating.
Humbling: because it invites honest reflection on if and how belonging was actually communicated to and experienced by the person in question. Not the intention of the communicator, but how that communication was actually received.
Liberating: because it locates the point of greatest leverage. Not at the behavior, where change is hardest, but at belonging, where a single genuine experience of being seen and valued can begin to rewrite what a person believes is possible.
The nervous system responds to belonging before it responds to anything else.⁶ Tend well the roots of genuine belonging in a language the receiver understands, and the fruit downstream will begin to change.²˙⁷
It’s not about fixing the behavior,
But nurturing the roots.
References
Beck, A.T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. Guilford Press.
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. Basic Books.
Brown, B. (2017). Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging. Random House.
Deci, E.L., & Ryan, R.M. (2000). The ‘what’ and ‘why’ of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.
Felitti, V.J., et al. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258.
Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. Norton.
Siegel, D.J. (2012). The Developing Mind (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.