I believe thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are also an interdependent ensemble and cannot be segregated our from one another. Based upon my observations as an educator, behaviors have no agency in and of themselves; they are the tools of the brain and therefore reflect what the brain is doing at all times.

However, we educators are taught in our psychology courses to understand and manage our students thoughts, emotions, and behaviors as if they are separate entities, a fact which I believe is damaging to their mental health. We are particularly taught to focus on shaping and molding student behaviors, getting rid of ‘bad’ behaviors and eliciting ‘good’ behaviors.

To me, focusing on changing a child’s behaviors is like changing the color of his clothes to make him do better on a test. It makes no sense and is likely damaging to the child.

Psychologists promote a distorted view of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors because they discuss them in isolation, but they never work in isolation.

If a person is exhibiting a particular behavior, that behavior has to make sense in relationship to what his thoughts and emotions are in any given instance. So it is really impossible for a behavior to be disordered.

Psychologists look for disordered behaviors to spot children with personality disorders, but calling any behavior disordered is a distortion. Furthermore, expecting children to manage or control their emotions is also a distorted expectation because emotions are cues that give important information in the moment for how to manage information.

Emotion exist to help us manage information, not for us to manage them.

The notion every human is making sense of information in the way that makes sense to him or her, I believe, can allow us to develop a theory of the brain that can in turn allow us to replace non-evidenced based psychological theories with a biological accurate theory of the brain.