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Behaviour as communication
This Raising Achievement Update article is from March 2007. To receive the latest issue,
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• Attachment theory
• Behaviour Management
• Classroom Teacher
• Communication and social skills
• SEAL Coordinator
• Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning
• Teaching and Learning

Using attachment theory, educational therapist Heather Geddes elaborates on James Wetz’s
idea that behaviour is a form of communication about social and emotional experience that
we need to understand before we decide how we are going to intervene.

The capacity to communicate with others is at the heart of human

experience. We use language, thought, feelings, creativity and movement to let
others know about ourselves. Through that communication, we also develop our
capacity to understand others.

The way we come to communicate and understand is shaped by our early

experience of relationships – the context in which we begin to learn about, and make
sense of the world. Good early attachment experiences facilitate the capacity to
communicate effectively, while adverse early experiences can inhibit communication.

Secure base

John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, maintained that all of us, from the
cradle to the grave, are happiest when life is organised as a series of excursions,
long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.

A secure base provides the infant with a safe place from which to explore the world,
but return to when he or she feels threatened. The aim of attachment behaviour is
sufficient proximity or contact to ensure that we always feel secure. The infant and
mother negotiate a way of relating. This soon becomes a pattern that affects future
relationships and the expectations of others.

Securely attached

Secure enough attachment fosters the capacity to resolve distress. The experience
of empathy – having one’s feelings and experiences understood by another – allows
the development of self awareness. From there we evolve a language to
communicate emotional states.

Someone who has experienced a secure attachment is, said Bowlby, ‘likely to
possess a representational model of attachment figure(s) as being available,
responsive, and helpful.’ This gives rise to a complementary model of himself or
herself as ‘a potentially loveable and valuable person’. As a result, he or she is likely
to ‘approach the world with confidence.’ This makes it possible to tackle potentially
alarming situations, or ‘seek help in doing so’.

An outcome of fears being understood, soothed and put into words and thoughts by
another is that the infant becomes able to:

• experience being understood

• develop an understanding of self and become self-aware
• become able to recognise feelings in others
• develop his or her own coping mechanism in the face of uncertainty. This is
based on being able to put words to fears, and to think in the face of
adversity.

Insecure attachment

When adverse experiences of early attachment are not relieved by more positive
relationships with others, the consequences for communication, behaviour and
learning are negative.

Insecurely attached children struggle to find the words to identify experiences buried
in infancy, before any capacity to explore or express experience with words and
actions had evolved. These experiences are unconsciously known but never
understood. Memories of them do not remain in the past, but become actions in the
here and now. They are communicated through behaviour.

Withdrawn children

Some pupils communicate their struggle by the way they seek to avoid drawing
attention to themselves. Social withdrawal can be a way of letting others know that
other preoccupations have ‘taken over’. Such a communication is easy to overlook in
a demanding classroom. Most teachers’ capacity to respond is taken up by those,
usually boys, who are acting out and behaving in disruptive ways.

Children who have not been given the opportunity to process adverse experiences,
within the context of a relationship with a sensitive carer who can understand their
fear and transform this into words and thought, are left with insufficient resources to
resolve the challenges and traumas that almost inevitably occur. For some children,
the adversity leaves them with little capacity to let others know about their
vulnerability and fears except by extreme behaviours.

Stan’s behaviour was unpredictable, reactive and aggressive. Stan’s response to

being asked to do any task in educational therapy was to draw a football pitch. His
choice of activity was to kick a soft ball around the room and often at the therapist.
However, over time, the game was interrupted by ‘another player’ who attacked Stan
in the penalty area. This happened over and over again until Stan began to issue
him with warning cards. Finally he was permanently sent off and was not allowed
back into the game because he hurt the other players. At last Stan had found a
metaphor for his experience. The therapist could understand his communication, and
put into words the associated fear, hurt and anger. Stan could then describe his
experience of his face and his legs being hurt. His behaviour around school became
calmer. Having found words for his experience, he could think about it. This was the
beginning of being able to cope with the feelings it provoked.

Helping young people to change

Attachment theory shows that when children are made anxious, they lose their
capacity to think about feelings or attach feelings to their thoughts. They do this so
as to avoid exposure to situations that threaten distress.
What, though, enables people to overcome the damaging consequences of poor
attachments? Researchers have found that it is the capacity to:

• reflect upon the difficult experiences they have undergone

• work through their feelings about this
• build a model of doing things differently

What differentiates those who have done this from those who have not is their
capacity to draw together the facts of what happened to them with the feelings that
were aroused, and from this to create a narrative account of their lives that is clear,
consistent and coherent.

Those, by contrast, who have not been able to make sense of their experiences
cannot change the patterns of behaviour they developed in order to survive them.

Unprocessed history

In some families, history and trauma are acted out over generations because they
remain unprocessed and unresolved. The parent whose own experience of
deprivation or hurt has gone unresolved may well act these out in the context of the
relationships with their own children. In this way, patterns of adversity can be passed
on through generations.
Sadly, Nickie demonstrated this all too well. She was in Year 5 and difficult to teach.
Whenever she made a mistake or found a task too challenging, she would drop her
head on the desk and sulk for hours, totally unresponsive to any approaches from
her teachers. It was as if she left the situation. On some occasions, she would react
by standing up suddenly. Her chair would crash over and she would walk out of the
classroom to wander the corridors. She would also hide and wait to be found. She
spoke very little and seemed very socially isolated.

She repeated this behaviour in the treatment room, turning her face to the wall and
excluding me. I was made to feel left out and unwanted. I talked of such feelings but
to little avail. It was as if words meant little. I turned to the metaphor of stories. After
a period when she showed little interest, one story did make a difference. It was the
tale of two little black twins washed up on a shore and found by a girl who took them
home and looked after them. She taught them what to do and how to read. After
some time, though, the little twins rebelled. They were naughty. They played
dominoes in bed. They ran away and went to sea, as if to return from whence they
came. However, they missed her.
When she read this, Nickie was entranced and asked if she could show it to her
mother. The story enabled Nickie’s mother to talk of her experience of her parents
moving to Britain and leaving her with her grandmother. Some years later, she left
her beloved grandmother to join mother and father. It was hard. She had missed her
grandmother and she wanted to make her grandmother happy; so she was sending
Nickie to live with her. In fact she was planning to send her within the next few
weeks.

At last, Nickie’s way of excluding herself began to make sense. I had a sense of
Nickie feeling that she was about to be left out, sent away, excluded. The experience
had not been processed or communicated in her mother’s mind: it was just too
painful and so being acted out. In the sessions that followed, Nickie began to
describe her grandmother’s family whom she would be going to and was able to
begin to think about the changes and her feelings about leaving her family behind to
join her ‘other’ family.

Making sense

These experiences of children’s stuck communications make it possible to see the

value of making sense of behaviour as a communication rather than reacting to it. If
experience can be put into words, then it can be thought about. So the need for
challenging behaviour and acting out can diminish, leading to an enhancement in
learning and achievement.

Schools need to be resourced to do this. In particular, they need to recognise that

teachers act as the containers for enormous anxieties. They need training to ensure
that their responses, behaviours and stuck communications are informed by
understanding, so that they can help words and thought to emerge. Reaction can be
replaced by reflection and school can become a secure base, not only for the most
vulnerable but also for all pupils and teachers.

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