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Review of Chapter 2 of Beyond Behaviors
by Mona Delahooke, PhD
“Social behavior and the capacity to manage challenge are dependent on the neural regulation of physiological state.” S. Porges
Top Down or Bottom Up?
“Before We Respond to Behavior, We Need to Understand Its Origin.”
With a deceptively simple observation, Dr. Delahooke reshapes the entire field of behavioral intervention: children’s actions come from two very different places in the brain. Some behaviors are top-down, intentional, planned, thoughtful. But many, especially the ones adults find most perplexing, arise bottom-up from stress responses generated by the body’s autonomic nervous system. We often think of this state in terms of fight or flight, however, it is not that simplistic. It is truly any significant response to the outside environment that leads to a neuroceptive reaction that is not governed by the neocortex, top down. If we don’t distinguish the source, our interventions are guesswork at best and often counterproductive at worst.
She illustrates this through a case, a child whose impulsive, disruptive behaviors were treated as failures of will or desire. School teachers and teams repeatedly urged him to “use his words,” as though language were a faucet he simply refused to turn on. What no one stopped to ask was the foundational question: Was his nervous system regulated enough to access language at all? Was he gated at the level of the amygdala blocking the ability to use his mind consciously and even have the opportunity to respond to a meaningful request? Is he capable of the ask, not in terms of willingness, but in terms of physiological access to the skill itself?
….. and more
Enjoy,
Dr. M