Adaptive impossibilities!

an adaptive impossibility?

This blog is called, 'Caught In Two Minds' because it is about displacement behaviour.  This is behaviour that arises when a person or an animal has two opposing or rival motivations competing at the same time.  This might be fight v flight or, approach v. withdraw.

Maybe I should have called this blog, Adaptive Impossibilities.  Why?  Because there are some environments that people and animals cannot adapt to.  In such cases, the organism finds it impossible to achieve certain psychological goal states, such as comfort or safety.  As a result, the brain compensates for the environment with maladaptive or coping strategies.  Hair pulling is one such mode of behaviour.

In nature, displacement behaviour is normal and short term.  For brief periods animals in the wild are confronted by situations that prompt competing behaviours or opposing motivations.  Displacement behaviour, such as grooming sequences, emerge briefly until the situation changes and an adaptive response to the environment can be expressed.  But in captive or artificial environments, which may be permanently static and inhospitable, displacement behaviours can become fixed and stereotypic.

In people, but especially children whose brains are forming and growing, an environment that does not offer safety, comfort or the fulfillment of other core goal states is problematic to them.  The child is troubled.  It cannot find an adaptive relationship to the world.  In short, it does not know what to do or how.  In these circumstances I believe hair pulling becomes highly likely.  Of course, the child may not know why s/he is pulling their hair.  This is because the environment to which it is experiencing adaptive problems may be the only one it has ever known and without a point of comparison it has no way of recognising the cause of the problem.  In this respect, therapists tend to focus on symptoms and not root causes.

Once the pattern of hair pulling is established, it can be very hard to lose.  In time many people simply grow out of it as they leave the initial environment behind or, the urge simply weakens.