Ep30 Removing the Mask Hiding Trauma: Discovering and Altering the Functions of Challenging Behavior with Dr. Jeannie Golden

Children who are traumatized by maltreatment often learn to engage in functional survival behaviors. Living in a chaotic environment, with intermittent reinforcement for challenging behavior, unpredictable aversive stimuli, deprivation of attention, care and comfort, and discriminative stimuli for punishment of expression of emotions, can create the setting conditions for unattached, callous, and unemotional behaviors.

The emotional and physical hurt and pain from maltreatment are so severe that they become an establishing operation for escaping negative emotions, making the reinforcement value of escape more salient and stronger. By blocking or numbing the pain, sadness, and/or anxiety so they cannot feel these emotions, children can be negatively reinforced and thus more likely to continue blocking those emotions. When they start to feel anxiety, pain, or hurt, or even sad, guilty, or ashamed, they escape those feeling by blocking them or becoming numb. Often what survives are anger and rage expressed in the form of challenging behavior.

This presentation will address ways for behavior analysts to discover these setting events, distal antecedents, and establishing operations masking hidden traumas and to provide effective treatments.

Learning Objectives:

1. State some of the devastating effects of maltreatment of children and the types of challenging behaviors that can serve survival functions for these children.

2. Describe how childhood maltreatment can create setting events, distal antecedents, and establishing operations for challenging behaviors in these children.

3. Describe how maltreated children can receive negative reinforcement in the form of avoiding or escaping negative emotions and how that can affect their behavior.

4. Describe treatments that can be effective in reducing challenging behaviors of maltreated children by assisting them in feeling safe, developing trust, establishing relationships, and regulating emotions.

Worth 1.5 Learning CEUs

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