Dealing with Challenging Behaviour

Types of challenging behaviour

Characteristics

Causes

Verbal abuse

The characteristics of verbal abuse are:

• Name calling
• Laughter over self expressions
• Jealously over family and friends
• Silent treatment for no reason
• Regular critism or humiliation
• People make fun of you in front of others
• Accusing others falsely to negatively influence on someone else’s decision making
• Using words to make others feel unwanted or unloved
• Isolating a person friends and family.  

The causes of verbal abuse could be parental stress from work, marital relationship, financial problems and etc; this can cause a parent to show that frustration or disturbance on their children which might cause their child to lose their self confidence. A parent who has been abused verbally as a child will more likely to verbally abuse their own child and think it’s normal to do that. Verbal abuse can cause anger management problems, the abuser might have lack of ability to control or deal with their anger or rage so it might be acted out against the victim. The verbal abuse environment could also affect their learning.  

Non- verbal abuse

The characteristics of non- verbal abuse are:

The causes of non- verbal abuse could be doing something or pulling someone’s trigger that annoys them and physically wants to harm that person.

For example, in a relationship the two people could be arguing about something and one of them says “it’s not my fault it’s yours” and that could then cause one of them to get them angry and then there could be abuse in the relationship where they would just argue and fight all the time. The physical abuser or both of them might have to go to anger management classes to learn how to control their anger and how to resolve the problems within their relationship.

The abuse might come from the past when they were children; their parents might have abused them so they might think it’s a regular thing to hit other people.

Non- verbal abuse could also be self- harm because someone could be bullying you or trying to bring you down to the point to harm yourself, your parents could constantly tell you that you’re “a failure” or “a disgrace to the family”. Parents are meant to bring happiness into your life not to bring you down and then you think that about life is general and that there’s nothing that could make it better.

Self- harm

The characteristics of self- harm are:

• Unexplained cuts, bruises, cigarette burns, they are usually on their arms, thighs and chest
• Keeping themselves covered all the times, even in the hot weather
• Might show signs of depressions such as low moods, tearfulness or lack of motivation or interest in doing anything
• Start becoming withdrawn and not speaking to others
• Their eating habits change or being secretive about eating, or unusual weight lost or weight gain
• Might show signs of low self- esteem, blaming themselves for problems or think that they aren’t good enough for something
• Signs of pulling out their hair
• Signs of misuse of alcohol or drugs

Self- harm is described as a physical expression of emotional distress. Some people think that physically hurting themselves is a way to deal with emotional and psychological issues.  

The common social factors of self- harm are:

• Difficult relationships with friends or partners
• Difficulties at school such as not doing well
• Difficulties at work
• Being bullied, either at home, school or work
• Worried about money
• Alcohol or drug misuse
• Cultural expectations
• Coming to terms with your sexuality such as being gay or bisexual

Self- harm could be also be a way of dealing with a traumatic experience, such as:

• Sexual, physical or emotional abuse, which includes domestic abuse and rape
• Death of a close family member or fiend
• Having a miscarriage

The emotional distress of self- harm are:

• Anger
• Guilt
• Anxiety
• Loneliness or isolation
• Grief
• Hopelessness
• Lack of feeling
• Being unclean, unworthy, trapped or silences if you have been abused.

Self- ham might be a way of people releasing their feeling and a way of coping with emotional problems. It is linked to anxiety and depressions and these mental health problems can affect people at any age.

Destruction to environment or property

The characteristics of destructive to environment or property are:

• Someone who has a learning disability
• Someone who has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder also knows as ADHD.

The causes of destruction to environment or property could be the temperature in a place could be a trigger for someone to get restless or disturbed or if it’s really noise someone could get really annoyed.

For example if a service user has a trigger then might rip work up or throw things around but it depends on what the service user does when someone or something has caused that trigger.

Racist abuse

Racial abuse is when treating someone differently or unfairly just because they belong to a different race or culture.

Racism has many different forms which are:

• Personal attack of any kind including violence
• Written or verbal threats or insults
• Bully people because of their race
• Calling them names

Racist abuse and bully are two sectors that are linked together. Racist abuse will make people’s self-esteem go down, make them feel low about themselves and they wouldn’t want to socialise with anyone, when you link it with bullying, it depends on how you treat someone, sometimes it could be how children at brought up that causes them to bully others.

At times racism could come across the wrong way, for example, two friends might be talking and joking about something and by accident one of them says something racist the other person can take that in a wrong way and become offended, it can also come across as racial abuse when it is taken rudely.