Insights from clinical relational frame theory
The search for meaning and purpose is often central to psychological intervention. For humans, meaning takes on myriad forms, is everywhere and central to our experience. We would argue that an essential skill for all psychologists, wherever they practice, is to understand how people create and connect with what matters. Similarly, it is also crucial to be able to identify when this goes amiss, so we can positively influence things. This article provides insight into how connection to meaning and purpose is understood from a contemporary behavioural psychology perspective – a science centrally interested in how our actions are shaped by the environments, systems and cultures we live in.
Psychologists and helpers work with meaning across many contexts: from guiding children in ways to make sense of the world and learning how to cooperate with others, to helping young people find autonomy and develop personal identity, to supporting adults in approaching feared situations and becoming more engaged and active in their lives. Our efforts at promoting learning and change occur on the backdrop of meaning and purpose. These are so fundamental to the enterprise of psychologists that they are givens.
Our behaviour is shaped by consequences – something we share with all living things on earth (operant learning). Meaning and purpose is a special type of consequence for humans, available because of our sophisticated behaviour of language. Our ability to create abstract, intangible rewards (through combining symbols, sounds and gestures) emerges from our language abilities. It provides sources of influence that other species have not yet demonstrated (or not to the degree humans display). It is because language allows us to communicate with sophistication and precision that we can share information about what influences our behaviour, and find ways to harness these influences. We think it is important for the practising psychologist to be familiar with how language works to help people respond flexibly when meaning is missing, causes distress or limits effective action.
Take an example: a 30-year-old father, employed in a technology field, attends a psychology practice asking for help with depressive symptoms. He is no longer experiencing pleasure, is pessimistic, and struggles with low motivation and feeling connected to what matters. Through his work with a psychologist, he identifies key areas of importance (related to his personal values) and starts actively and mindfully engaging in values-based behaviour day-to-day. He connects differently with activities he was already doing (such as really ‘showing up’ when spending time with his kids) and makes deliberate changes to what he does, engaging increasingly in activities that reflect who he wants to be, e.g. asking to be put onto a not-for-profit account at work. Over time, he experiences an increase in his sense of ‘meaning’, greater connection with a range of feelings and a reduction in his depressive symptoms.
Creating and finding meaning through language
This simple vignette highlights the remarkable ability humans have to create meaning and use this to guide our behaviour in connecting with what is rewarding to us. At its core, this meaning-creation involves choosing what matters and how we want to be with personal agency and autonomy. This process, sometimes called ‘valuing’ (Plumb, Stewart, Dahl and Lundgren, 2009), relies on our ability to use language to reflect on our behaviours and life events. Like the example above, valuing can provide meaning and guide our behaviour, in turn, helping our actions to be more fulfilling and sustainable over time. Many psychological interventions harness this, either overtly or in an implied way, e.g. acceptance and commitment therapy overtly promotes the process of valuing. However, like two sides of a coin, these processes can also be a source of our suffering. What causes us the most pain may also be linked to what matters most.
Many common problems targeted in psychological interventions may be the result of diminished meaning. Lack of meaning can be a risk for people who are extensively motivated by the approval of others, or overly focused on external rewards. Often, there is limited clarity around personal life directions (Törneke, Luciano and Salas, 2008). In addition to associated distress, behaviour primarily guided by extrinsic goals or lacking an overarching direction can be ineffective in supporting long-term desired changes.
For example, the person in the above vignette, despite the external reward of being paid, was struggling to find the intrinsic motivation to attend work every day. Contrast this with the process of valuing, enabling connection with a chosen direction (in the vignette, working on an account that connected him with a direction of ‘community building’), leading to longer-term behaviour changes. This can provide a sustainable and inexhaustible source of motivation.
While goals and other forms of theoretically ‘achievable’ extrinsic motivators will ultimately ‘run out’ (be completed), valuing in contrast can provide an effectively limitless source of rewarding consequences. That is to say, once a person has identified and connected with personally chosen values, there can be an ever-present, flexible source of intrinsic motivation in any given circumstance. Regardless of what has happened, there is always a potential to act in line with one’s values, and by extension, find meaning.
Valuing as a core process
Assisting people to build their sense of meaning is at least implicit in many psychological interventions. Ultimately, regardless of therapeutic modality employed, it is likely psychologists will need to address the issue of meaning regularly in their practice. Thus, an in-depth understanding of the valuing process, and how to strengthen it, can enhance the practice of any psychologist. How language can influence meaning has been a focus of relational frame theory research (RFT; Barnes-Holmes, Hayes and Roche, 2001), the contextual behavioural science effort to understanding the processes of language. Contextual behavioural science is a contemporary form of behaviour analysis. It is a form of psychology with the goal of understanding and influencing people’s behaviour in context (situational, historical) so we can improve our ability to address the challenges of the human condition (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes and Wilson, 2012). Meaning and purpose is central to contextual behavioural science as it is crucial to guiding and finding ways to positively influence human behaviour.
Relational frame theory describes how language enables humans to have vastly expanded sources of influence over their behaviour (Barnes-Holmes, Hayes and Roche, 2001). Language allows us to relate things together, in ways beyond their physical or sensory properties, so that, in essence, we can relate anything to anything (Dymond and Roche, 2013). We can have something arbitrary like a sound (a spoken word), symbol (a written word) or a gesture be responded to as if it were the thing it refers to.
We can also combine these ways of relating language, creating networks of relations. This means that a lot of our learning is done indirectly. We can influence each other across time and space by using symbols, sounds and gestures in place of the things we are referring to. We can also store and retrieve this verbal behaviour, such as through songs, books and recordings. Being able to learn indirectly allows us to learn from others, without the inefficient, and sometimes painful or dangerous consequences of learning from direct experience. We can learn from previous generations even when these people are long dead. All of this is terrifically adaptive, enabling our species to exert planetary-level influence. This has allowed us to solve many practical problems and become the dominant species, while also creating more complicated problems, like the danger of nuclear annihilation and our contribution to the causes of climate change.
Relational frame theory describes the features of language that enable these abilities (see Blackledge, 2003 for an introduction), and how they can be influenced to change how we understand things and respond to our environments and psychology, i.e. how we relate to our own feelings, sensations and thoughts. This is of particular interest to psychologists, as understanding how language works enables us to more effectively in help others.
A key aspect of language is how instructions (rules) influence our behaviour (Zettle, 1990). Rules allow us to know how to do things, including how to relate to others and respond to problems. We are surrounded by rules. We learnt many rules in our socialisation as children; in our homes, schools and communities, such as learning to cooperate, indicate needs like hunger and how to cross a road safely. Early in our childhood, along with learning through experience, we learnt through imitation, and that by following rules we received approval from caregivers. As we got older, we learnt that following instructions can be useful in leading to successful outcomes. Alongside learning which rules related to skilful actions, we may have also discovered sources of motivation and purpose, developing our own rules for living and identifying what makes for a meaningful life. This is the power of language: enabling us to relate things together in a multiplicity of ways. This ability means you are here, reading these words and seeking to make sense of this article.
Such an approach to valuing, through the lens of RFT, is drawn from the deep history of the discipline of psychology. These are perspectives offered by a behavioural analytic perspective. We can seek to influence our behaviour, by understanding how our histories and environments impact our choices and actions, e.g. respondent and operant learning. By understanding the person behaving in context, even (or especially) when that person is ourselves, we can unlock a variety of ways to learn from experience and be effective.
Within behaviour analysis an important focus is understanding the effects of coercive and punishing forms of control over behaviour. This focus – so central to how we organise our societies and efforts to tackle community challenges – has been a central scientific, ethical and practical concern. Consequences can work to reduce the probability of behaviour (the definition of a punisher). It also recognised punishing consequences can have a variety of deleterious additional features, undermining efforts of influencing behaviours long-term. In contrast to this punishing approach to influencing behaviour, valuing provides a freely chosen way to access sources of reinforcement that are flexible and person-centred. This provides an alternative tool for behaviour change – one that is ethical and effective.
Key features of valuing
Relational frame theory outlines important features of valuing as a behaviour: it is personally defined, embodied, abstract, inexhaustible, available now, inclusive and overarching (Dahl, Lundgren, Plumb and Stewart, 2009). An important feature of being able to relate things together and create rules is that across time, we can be influenced by consequences that are delayed, abstract and intangible. We can be influenced by an idea alone, even in situations where the fulfilment of this idea may be quite challenging or remote. Valuing may be similar to having intrinsic motivation: from an RFT perspective, we can work to discover how to build such motivation through certain processes of language and understand how interacting with our world can strengthen this further.
Valuing is also a transformative act: through linking unpleasant experiences to sources of meaning, we can change how we relate to those experiences. What was previously avoided is approached, what was once seen as antithetical to progress can be responded to as part of progress. We may transcend our suffering, by embracing it as part of the process of doing what matters. Valuing is not a panacea to the hard moments in life, instead these occasions may be accepted or even embraced as part of valuing – when it is useful to do so.
This process of valuing as creating personalised, language-based reinforcement, provides guiding principles for the psychologist. Firstly, when considering valuing as a behaviour, RFT highlights the importance of values being freely chosen. Chosen refers to this behaviour as being personal, deliberate and active. These qualities are associated with freedom: this is behaviour not under influence of coercion, conformity or primarily motivated by escape or avoidance (ineffective drivers of long-term behaviour change). Practitioners want to support the development of values which are about moving towards something wanted and not primarily driven by desires to please others or the wishes of others more generally. Secondly, we can talk about valuing being a process. This is advantageous as we are not prescribing what is ‘right’ to do, but rather we are pointing to qualities of acting on values
(with awareness, being open, curious, harnessing feelings to motivate, being flexible in our responses).
Relational frame theory also highlights the importance of values being broad and overarching; sometimes described as being a ‘life direction’ (as in acceptance and commitment therapy). This creates a hierarchy, enabling a person to organise plans for their behaviour, e.g. a life direction of ‘learning and curiosity’. Such a hierarchy allows for the development of larger scale goals, e.g. to finish a university course, as well as medium goals which fit under this, like ‘pass a subject’, and behaviour which can be undertaken at any given time, consistent with this, such as studying instead of going to a party. Through the establishment of clearly defined life directions or values, we can help clients develop a guide for behaviour that they can use in any context. Regardless of what humans are faced
with, there is always an opportunity to act on values.
This understanding of values also highlights the usefulness in overtly and frequently linking individual behaviours to values. The power of values is that they add a reinforcing quality to an action, either by i) making an action already reinforcing more so, or ii) by making something reinforcing that otherwise wouldn’t have been. For this to be effective, it is important to regularly bring values into consciousness through, where appropriate, directly linking any given behaviour to a chosen value. This can have the dual effect of reinforcing the behaviour in question while also strengthening the value.
Through the ongoing linking of behaviour to freely chosen life directions, psychologists can support those we work with to choose what behaviours are going to be sustainable and build them up over time. Through values work, we can help create meaning for people while helping them create a life which is about moving towards what they want, rather than moving away from what they don’t want, or living primarily to satisfy the desires of others. Relational frame theory provides understandings for why values-based interventions can be so effective, either as a primary focus, or as a component of any intervention.
Focus on the process
Relational frame theory is part of the broader area of direction in applied psychology examining the processes by which psychological interventions bring about change. This increasing focus on process-based therapy has the potential to increase the impact of the work we do as psychologists by allowing us to identify those parts of interventions which are most effective in reducing suffering and increasing thriving in the people we help.
The conceptual and empirical work of RFT and contextual behavioural science can also be seen as linking the psychology discipline back to foundational understandings about learning and human behaviour. In RFT we have a comprehensive theory based on operant learning, enabling examination of the language processes most linked to psychological suffering. Relational frame theory provides signposts to the skilful use of language to enable us to create and connect with deep and important sources of meaning, to nurture and sustain us when life is challenging. Already, RFT has made inroads into understanding key processes such as rule following, ‘selfing’ (self-narratives and self-awareness) and valuing. Through progressive research informed by RFT, we hope to see further practical applications of ‘how language works’ that guide psychologists in helping others, and ourselves, to pursue meaning and purpose
in our lives.
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