and not normally on her shopping list.) On her first attempt, she had failed to stop at her third review of her assignment and described to me, while convulsed with laughter, how she had bounced all around her room on one leg. Apparently it really started to hurt when she reached 60 hops and making it to 100 was agony. Keen to avoid repeating her punishment, she found it easy after that to check three times and hand in the work, thus earning her cups of green tea. 

"If only..."

This gave me inspiration for when I worked with a student called Sarah. Her background was different from that of most of the students she had met — she came from a family where people expressed their feelings by shouting, swearing or lashing out, and she had been involved in many abusive relationships, some of them violent. She was worried that her own tendency to get angry easily was pushing away the new set of friends she had made at university, including her boyfriend. She said that, before, it had "worked" for her to get angry but now it made her "look different". What was evident was Sarah's sense of humour. She smiled a lot and wryly poked fun at herself, so I felt comfortable suggesting to her that the punishment of hopping could save her relationships. I suggested that, when she felt herself becoming angry, she start to hop and keep going until she reached 100. Whether she was alone, out in public with her friends or in her bedroom with her boyfriend, she was simply to start hopping. Intrigued, she contracted to do this but couldn't settle on a reward, despite our discussing several possibilities. 

A week later, Sarah announced that the hopping had been a success. It is rare that I am reduced to hysterics in a session, but I was, on this occasion. Sarah told me that she had experienced anger only once in the week when, suffering a bout of writer's block while trying to finish an essay, she felt herself getting worked up. As her boyfriend was with her, she knew where it would all end and so, right on cue, she started to hop out of the room. At this point her boyfriend decided to do the same. "He just looked ridiculous," said Sarah. "He's 6ft 7, for god's sake!" As they were both heading along the landing like kangaroos, her boyfriend shouted, "If only you'd known five years ago that all you needed to do was to hop!" After that, Sarah reported no more problems and she brought our sessions to an end. Perhaps this was the reward in itself, because she never mentioned coming up with one.

Obsessive phone calls

I was also able to help Lisa, a friend of mine, through the use of hopping. Lisa came to see me because she was obsessively calling her partner to make sure that he had not been involved in a car crash. Her partner Robert's journey home, which involved a short motorway journey, was 30 minutes of "torture" for her. Lisa told me that, while she had started off calling only after 5pm, to see if he was okay, the problem had escalate to the point where she was calling throughout the day and at the most inappropriate times for Robert. As I was a friend, I was familiar with their house and knew that their letterbox was, American style, situated at the end of their relatively long, gravel drive. Having introduced my reward and punishment strategy to Lisa, I wondered out loud whether the distance to and from the letterbox was too far to hop. "Well, it's quite far," she said, looking at me askance. "Is that my punishment?" "If you like," I said. "But I don't understand why you think this will work," Lisa protested. "Trust me," I said. We agreed that she would call me in a few days with a progress report. 

Lisa called three days later and reported that, although she had hopped several times, she was still compulsively calling Robert. Uncertain whether the strategy had failed — after all, I had suggested the punishment, not Lisa, although she had agreed to it — or whether it just wasn't deterrent enough, I ‘ordered' Lisa to hop to the letterbox and back not just once, but twice if she called Robert inappropriately. We agreed to leave it a week before talking again. A week later, Lisa reported back. She had made no calls in three days. She now emails me weekly and, although she still finds it hard not to worry (for which I have suggested strategies), the thought of hopping is enough for her to leave the phone alone. 

Enjoying the feeling

Sometimes, people come up with their own ways of working with the strategy. Priti, an art and design student, was so anxious about having to give presentations that, despite being in her final year, she was considering leaving her course. When she came to see me, she was in floods of tears, as she was a committed student and wanted nothing more than to achieve her degree. She knew that she needed to boost her confidence and, in our first session, we agreed that she would give mock presentations to her friends and family and would ask her tutors if she could give some to them as well. I did some relaxation and guided imagery with her, but she found it hard to relax fully. I then decided to introduce the reward and punishment strategy. Priti was interested but didn't want to devise any special reward or punishment: she felt certain that the positive and negative feelings associated with making/not making positive changes would suffice for both. She knew very well how she didn't want to feel, she said, and that was enough. 

When Priti came back for her second session, little had changed. She had found that the ‘punishment' of feeling worse had not been enough to motivate her and her anxiety had simply increased. We needed to find a specific way for her to experience her reward of feeling better. In our discussions, she had happened to mention that her parents ran an Indian restaurant. I asked her if she ever worked in the restaurant. She said that she did, but only in the kitchen or preparing drinks.

"What if you were to waitress?" I asked. "Do you think that would help build your confidence?" She said that it might, but she became visibly anxious, her eyes welling up. We agreed that she could start off slowly, by waiting as much or as little as felt comfortable on a Monday night, gradually increasing the time she spent "out there", as she put it, as the week progressed towards the busy weekend.

By our third session, Priti was transformed, exclaiming as she sat down that she couldn't wait for her presentations. By the Saturday night, she was waiting as confidently as her parents and sister, and felt great. Of course, her reward had changed from simply feeling better to being able to graduate. "If I don't give my presentations," she said, "not being able to graduate would be the worst punishment of all."

Playing safe

In Nick's case, it was the strength of connection to a group of people and his own sense of meaning and purpose that underpinned his chosen reward and punishment. He had come to see me for obsessive behaviour, which manifested itself in the ritualised checking of plug sockets and electrical equipment — all to make the student house ‘safe' before he went to bed, so that no one would die that night. He found it hard to think of a reward and wasn't at all motivated by the types of rewards most other students choose, such as going out for a beer on a week night or buying a new CD. I knew he was a helper at a scouts' group, which he was highly committed to and so, on a hunch, I wondered whether his reward might be to give something extra to the group. "Do you mean financially?" he asked. "Not necessarily," I replied, "but do you feel that is a possibility and you could afford it?" He said he could and seemed pleased to accept the idea. 

He didn't come up with a punishment. For him, probably, not being able to give something would have been punishment enough. Knowing that he felt it was important to be safety conscious (the reason for his obsessive checking), I wondered if his scouts would also feel good if he showed them how they could do the same? He immediately decided to devise a presentation to deliver to his scout pack on being safe in the home. He agreed to place special emphasis on having to check plugs/electrical appliances only once, as this was enough! I have yet to see Nick again to know how this has worked out, but I am hopeful.

I am not claiming that I have stumbled on anything new with my reward and punishment strategy. It is common in human givens therapy to set tasks and agree consequences that follow this pattern. However, I have been interested to see how this strategy can be effective so quickly in helping individuals change unwanted behaviours. As already discussed, it is usually the punishment element that is more salient. When a negative action is reinforced by a concrete self-imposed negative consequence, an element of distancing is immediately introduced. It is, perhaps, the equivalent of counting to 10 when angry, in that bringing the immediate consequence to mind gives time to stand back, reflect and make a rational decision, motivated by what we desire to avoid or attain. It seems to me that this helps to change the meaning or pattern that characterises thinking and behaving in a really powerful way.

It fits, I think, with veteran therapist Bill O'Hanlon's observations at the start of his recent book Change 101:2 "If one considers human history, one can quickly discern that there are two main things that motivate human beings: things they want to avoid or get away from and things they desire or want to go toward". Some people are more powerfully motivated by what they want to avoid and some by what they want to achieve. But the end result is that they do achieve what they want.

<< Back to part 1

References
1 Griffin, J (2004). Great expectations. Human Givens, 11, 1, 12–19.
2 O'Hanlon, W (2006). Change 101: a practical guide to creating change in life or therapy. Norton, New York, London.

©Human Givens Journal and Mark Evans (2007)

This article first appeared in Volume 14, Issue 2 (2007) of the Human Givens journal. (Formally The Therapist)

Mark Evans is a counsellor at De Montfort University, Leicester. He holds the Human Givens Diploma.

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following books both by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Dreaming Reality: How dreaming keeps us sane or can drive us mad

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

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> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following books both by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Dreaming Reality: How dreaming keeps us sane or can drive us mad

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking