what if you can't stop?

Damian lives up Route 611. Not far from me at all.

Damian blogs over at apace of change. His post about behavior is not far from me at all.

Damian curses a lot, but he's working on curbing that behavior.

According to Damian:

Generally speaking, human behavior can be boiled down to attempts to serve one of four major functions:

1. It feels good (self-stimulation)
2. It gets us out of having to do something difficult or unpleasant (task escape/avoidance)
3. It gets (or keeps) us attention (um… pretty self-explanatory, I think)
4. It reduces pain or stress (yeah, this one too)

I don't disagree, but as I commented on his post:

What if you’re a compulsive hair puller? You suffer from Trichotillomania? What then?

Most likely, it satisfies #1, arises b/c of #s 4 & 2, and gets the wrong kind of attention from #3.

But what if you do the behavior b/c of some event 14 years ago? What if you still haven’t found a way to address that event?

Isn’t it possible that cursing could be a better alternative?

Because what if you began noticing your 1 1/2 year old twirling his hair? What if you noticed your 1 1/2 year old pulling threads from blankets and coats and eating them?

Would you curse your way through this one?

Or would you cry and feel like you’ve already screwed up your kid?