A Parable Concerning Values & Challenging Behaviour: The Joy of Wandering

To understand why people’s behaviour challenges us we need empathy – insight into not just their behaviour but their whole person. Their situation. Their experience, as far as we can.

To do that you need to understand the person not just their behaviour, and that requires empathy to take us outside of ourselves and our own agendas, and to try to bridge the gap between one human and another.

So, completing a functional assessment is most often vital to understand challenging behaviour because it clarifies where, when and why (and with whom) issues arise. But sometimes you need empathy more.

But if you do complete a functional assessment, and graph your findings, please don’t think you’ve solved me, don’t think you understand my life and wishes, my wandering and words, because all you’ve really done is describe the dimensions of a couple of my thousands of ways of expressing myself.

Your functional assessment is not an end in itself. It is merely the beginning of my story. A functional assessment is the opening line of a novel. But there are different ways of opening a story.

A functional assessment always reminds me of ‘Once Upon A Time’. It’s so common to hear ‘it’s for attention, it’s for escape, it’s for a tangible, it’s because it feels food’. Imagine a story that started and ended with ‘Once Upon A Time’ and that took you no further. Not much of a story. You’d want to say ‘So what?” or ‘So what happens next?’ But for many people a functional ‘Once Upon A Time’ assessment is presented as the whole of their story. And the people writing such a tale are wrong.

Once Upon A Time and a functional assessment are both clichéd openings to a bigger, longer, more complex story. Your story about me, or that little bit of me that annoys you or concerns you, namely my wandering and my language.