How do you benefit from this?

This simple question can shed the light even on the most dysfunctional behaviours.

A recurring theme in coaching (and therapy) is the client noticing behaviours they don’t like, trying to swap them for behaviours they do like and struggling in the process.

There are many ways to work with this, but one of them is to inquire into how do you benefit from the behaviour.

This question occasionally baffles my clients. They insist they don’t benefit from something as unhelpful as snapping at co-founders, procrastinating on fundraising document, drinking too much or waging a perennial war with one of their angel investors.

Yet, seen from another perspective, some part of our mind is choosing this strategy to get something good done. The problem is that this “good” objective has bigger side-effects that aren’t obvious to that part of our mind.

For example, one part of you might have learned long time ago that when things get too stressful, the way to deal with it is to have a drink. This “solves” the immediate problem of feeling stressed, but creates two delayed side-effects.

One is all the usual consequences with drinking a bit too much: hangover, health effects, work performance, etc. But the other one is that your mind isn’t actively learning other strategies for dealing with the stress problem.

Photo by Izhak Agency on Unsplash

So, when things get too stressful, your mind might make a seemingly rational decision: I can’t afford to feel overwhelmed and I don’t have any other ways of dealing with it, so I’ll allow myself a drink. Short-term gain, long-term loss.

In such a situation, telling yourself not to drink will be about as effective as telling yourself not to have headaches anymore. A better approach could be to stop and ask:

“How do I benefit from this apparently unhelpful behaviour?”

If, in our fictional scenario, you notice that the benefit is feeling less stressed, this leads to two other questions. First, are there any ways to reduce the stress? Second, what could be a healthier way of dealing with the inevitable stress?

At this point, there’s a really good chance that this inquiry will invite you to face some emotions that are associated with the part that came up with the strategy of having a drink to feel less stressed.

For example, things might feel stressful because they feel out of control, and long time ago you felt out of control to such a terrifying degree that you couldn’t handle it. It needs not to take a life-threatening situation. A child who’s been left on their own for a bit too long and decides they were abandoned, might carry that experience in their body for decades.

So, to address the behaviour associated with some part of you that thinks it’s a good idea, we need not only to see into the mechanism, but also to learn to feel the emotions associated with that part.

By feeling the emotions that once felt overwhelming, we inevitably learn that we’re still alive and feeling them didn’t kill us. At that point, our psyche reorganises itself into a more integrated whole without any effort on our part.

This process can take time. But a good starting point for working with whatever we don’t like is to ask, How do I benefit from this?

It must be said that the answer often will not be obvious, especially if the emotional charge associated with that discomfort is very strong. This is why this inquiry must be done very, very gently, especially when there’s a lot to uncover. Approaching it as interrogation won’t help: instead, your mind will tell you a convincing story about why “everything is well”.

If you’re curious to learn more, read the absolutely brilliant book The Body Keeps the Score. It deals with trauma and addiction, but the underlying psychological mechanism is not much different if you find yourself procrastinating, constantly worrying about something or pointlessly fighting investors. Here’s a quote:

Although widely understood to be harmful to health, each adaptation [such as smoking, drinking, drugs, obesity] is notably difficult to give up. Little consideration is given to the possibility that many long-term health risks might also be personally beneficial in the short term. We repeatedly hear from patients of the benefits of these ‘health risks.’ The idea of the problem being a solution, while understandably disturbing to many, is certainly in keeping with the fact that opposing forces routinely coexist in biological systems. . . . What one sees, the presenting problem, is often only the marker for the real problem, which lies buried in time, concealed by patient shame, secrecy and sometimes amnesia—and frequently clinician discomfort.