Mad River Behavioral Health

You can't. Don't do it. Ok, so we can a little bit, to a point. Some behavioral gestures are so common, like smiling, laughing, etc., that we can safely infer meaning. But, if we go past the basic observation, we can also get our selves into some pretty deep trouble ... pretty quickly ... by over reaching - interpreting more complex behaviors, one's that matter a bit more. We can see that a client is angry, but we cannot know what specifically she is angry about -- even if we observe a conflict in action. The client may have been angry about something that happened early in the day, last week, a few years ago, and / she may be trauma reactive (more on this another time), and then brought her pre-existing condition into a current situation. Note: We all bring our pre-existing condition into current situations. The problem with interpreting behavior is ... it requires us to become psychics, to read minds. We can observe a behavior, but we cannot know what it m...