The stages of change model

Retrieved and edited 06/12/2021 from “Voice of Experience: Three rules for identifying abnormal child sexual behaviors” by Gregory K. Moffatt, a veteran counsellor with more than 30 years experience. If you are a survivor of sexual trauma at any age, I encourage you not to read this article.

From the perspective of Moffatt’s professional experience, childhood sexual behaviours can be grouped into three categories: 1. normal behaviours, 2. behaviours that are not normal but not unusual, and 3. behaviours that are abnormal or statistically rare. For the purpose of this post, I will be replacing the word “normal” with “natural” and/or “common” moving forward.

Rule No. 1: Natural or common sexual behaviours in children are never forced. The exploration is mutual. While one child likely had the idea first, both children must participate freely. This doesn’t mean that two children might willingly agree to engage in abnormal sexual behaviours, however, therefore read the next to rules for clarification.

Rule No. 2: Natural or common sexual behaviours in children are never painful. Children who behave within cultural and developmental norms will stop what they are doing when they realise they have caused pain.

Rule No. 3: Natural or common sexual behaviour in children is never invasive. Natural childhood curiosity does not include inserting objects or one’s own body parts into the cavities of others — anus, vagina, mouth, etc.

I’m unsure why Moffatt didn’t make this a 4th rule – he did add that most of the time, this type of childhood behaviour occurs between children of similar age. It is highly unusual for a young child to sexually engage with a teen without violating one of the three rules above. That behaviour definitely calls for further investigation. And, certainly, any sexual interaction between an adult and a child is cause for mandated reporting.

Multiple theorists and researchers since Freud have independently converged on the same concept of psychological defences because of the potential utility of the concept.

Alfred Adler, known for emphasising the importance of overcoming feelings of inferiority and gaining a sense of belonging in order to achieve success and happiness, developed a similar idea which he called psychological “safeguarding strategies.”

Karen Horney, who believed that environment and social upbringing, rather than intrinsic factors, largely lead to neurosis, described “protective strategies” used by children of abusive or neglectful parents.

Leon Festinger developed the well-known concept of “cognitive dissonance,” proposing that inconsistency among beliefs or behaviours causes an uncomfortable psychological tension leading people to change one of the inconsistent elements to reduce the dissonance (or to add consonant elements to restore consonance).

Carl Rogers, who was one of the founders of humanistic psychology, known especially for his person-centred psychotherapy, discussed the process of defence as “denial and perceptual distortion”.

Albert Bandura, known for ground-breaking research on learning via observation and social modelling, and the development of social learning theory, conceptualized defences as “self-exoneration mechanisms.”

The influential psychiatrist George Vaillant organized defences on a scale of immature to mature, defining them as “unconscious homeostatic mechanisms that reduce the disorganizing effects of sudden stress.”

Current discussions of coping mechanisms and emotion regulation embody the idea of defences as well. Is a defence mechanism merely a learned internal process manifested in our behaviour to protect us – or our ego – from pain? Is a defence mechanism a merely a coping mechanism to resolve internal stress?

Whatever you believe the answers to be, we can cultivate, learn, and practice adaptive, context-specific and generalised coping strategies that will aid self-development that can improve our health, relationships, self-esteem, workplace performance, and stress management skills.

Unhelpful Cognitions

Mental Filter: This thinking style involves a “filtering in” and “filtering out” process – a sort of “tunnel vision”, focusing on only one part of a situation and ignoring the rest. Usually this means looking at the negative parts of a situation and forgetting the positive parts, and the whole picture is coloured by what may be a single negative detail.

Jumping to Conclusions: We jump to conclusions when we assume that we know what someone else is thinking (mind reading) and when we make predictions about what is going to happen in the future (predictive thinking).

Mind reading: Is a habitual thinking pattern characterized by expecting others to know what you’re thinking without having to tell them or expecting to know what others are thinking without them telling you. This is very common, and most people can identify. Oftentimes, when we are telling someone a story about an interaction, we’ve had with someone else, we will make mind reading assumptions without actually having fact or evidence e.g., “They haven’t phoned me in two weeks so they must be angry with me for cancelling on them last week.”

Personalisation: This involves blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong or could go wrong, even when you may only be partly responsible or not responsible at all. You might be taking 100% responsibility for the occurrence of external events. It can also involve blaming someone else for something for which they have no responsibility. This can often occur when setting a boundary with someone and you take responsibility for their guilt or anger.

Catastrophising: Catastrophising occurs when we “blow things out of proportion” and we view the situation as terrible, awful, dreadful, and horrible, even though the reality is that the problem itself may be quite small.

Black & White Thinking: Also known as splitting, dichotomous thinking, and all-or-nothing thinking, involves seeing only one side or the other (the positives or the negatives, for example). You are either wrong or right, good or bad and so on. There are no in-betweens or shades of grey.

Should-ing and Must-ing: Sometimes by saying “I should…” or “I must…” you can put unreasonable demands or pressure on yourself and others. Although these statements are not always unhelpful (e.g., “I should not get drunk and drive home”), they can sometimes create unrealistic expectations.

Should-ing and must-ing can be a psychological distortion because it can “deny reality” e.g., I shouldn’t have had so much to drink last night. This is helpful in the sense that it communicates to us that we have exceeded our boundaries, however, saying “shouldn’t” about a past situation can be futile because it cannot be changed.

Overgeneralisation: When we overgeneralise, we take one instance in the past or present, and impose it on all current or future situations. If we say, “You always…” or “Everyone…”, or “I never…” then we are probably overgeneralising.

Labelling: We label ourselves and others when we make global statements based on behaviour in specific situations. We might use this label even though there are many more examples that are not consistent with that label. Labelling is a cognitive distortion whereby we take one characteristic of a person/group/situation and apply it to the whole person/group/situation. Example: “Because I failed a test, I am a failure” or “Because she is frequently late to work, she is irresponsible”.

Emotional Reasoning: This thinking style involves basing your view of situations or yourself on the way you are feeling. For example, the only evidence that something bad is going to happen is that you feel like something bad is going to happen. Emotions and feelings are real however they are not necessarily indicative of objective truth or fact.

Magnification and Minimisation: In this thinking style, you magnify the positive attributes of other people and minimise your own positive attributes. Also known as the binocular effect on thinking. Often it means that you enlarge (magnify) the positive attributes of other people and shrink (minimise) your own attributes, just like looking at the world through either end of the same pair of binoculars.

(CCI, 2008)