322: Promote positive behaviour

Having witnessed and been involved in quite a few incidents of challenging behaviour, I know that they can bring about feelings of anger, anxiety, upset, depression and guilt. They can also bring about positive feelings such as pride in how you handled a situation and improved self-confidence and self-esteem when you have done a good job.

An individual can experience a wide range of emotions after an incident including embarrassment, anger, pain, guilt and sorrow. It is important that they have the opportunity to discuss these feelings to help them move on from what happened. By discussing these feelings, an individual will be able to apologise to anyone they have hurt, have changes made to their support plans to prevent repeat occurrences and learn lessons from the experience.

The individual should also be encouraged to discuss the consequences of their behaviour. these could be positive (e.g. they got they what they wanted) and/or negative (e.g. they damaged one of their possessions) and they will often be linked with negative feelings (which are discussed in the next question).

In many cases, the consequences of the individual’s behaviour will be negative – they may have hurt themselves or broke something that they cherish or hurt somebody or been arrested. By being open and non-judgmental with the individual, you can help them to understand that are no better off because of their actions and are most probably worse off because of them, which can help make it less likely of a future incident occurring.

It is also important to discuss the incident itself so that the individual can develop responsibility for their actions and work on trying to stop it happening again in the future. Again, it is useful to not attribute blame on the individual and be sympathetic towards them as they may be suffering with complex feelings of guilt or embarrassment. Asking the individual what they hoped to achieve by their actions can be useful and it may be necessary to discuss with the individual what interventions they would like staff to use if this behaviour re-occurs.

Part of my company’s Challenging Behaviour Policy is to have a post-incident review within 72 hours of the incident ending. This gives everyone involved (both clients and staff) an opportunity to speak frankly about what happened, how they felt (and still feel), the triggers that led to the incident and what can be done to prevent a similar incident in future.

It is important to try not to apportion blame during this review, try to understand the point of view of others and come up with practical solutions to avoid these sorts of situations in the future.

The individual who exhibited challenging behaviour should be encouraged to discuss how they felt before the incident happened and what they think could have been done to prevent the incident. This information is vital to adjusting the individual’s support plan so that the triggers that caused the behaviour can be avoided in future.