The Chain Analysis
The first skill that’s used for analysing our own ineffective behaviours is called the Chain Analysis. It is a series of questions designed to help us examine the events, thoughts, and feelings we experienced in the build up to the activation of behaviours that we were trying not to do. It’s intended to support us in understanding and highlighting the consequences of these behaviours, and how these consequences may make it hard for us to make the changes we are trying to make towards the life we want to live. The Chain Analysis worksheet is completed by following the guidelines in a methodical manner, answering questions that describe events leading up to the problem behaviour.
The purpose of a Chain Analysis is to figure out what the problem is, what prompts it, what the function of the behaviour is, what is interfering with the resolution of the problem, and what skills, or aids, you can call upon to help solve the problem. A Chain Analysis is an invaluable tool for assessing a behavior that you are looking to change. Although performing a chain analysis requires time and effort, it provides essential information for understanding the events that lead up to a particular problem behavior. In many cases, your previous attempts to solve a problem fail because the problem at hand is not fully understood and has never been properly assessed.
" A Chain Analysis is an invaluable tool for assessing a behavior that you are looking to change. Although performing a chain analysis requires time and effort, it provides essential information for understanding the events that lead up to a particular problem behavior.
~Steven Morris RP.
By practicing chain analysis on a regular basis, we can begin to identify the patterns linking different components of behaviour together. Figuring out what the links are is the first step in finding solutions to stopping the problem behavior. When any of the links of the chain can be broken, the problem behaviour can be stopped. So how do we do a Chain Analysis? There are some basic questions to build an understand for to begin with, and I have adapted these questions to look at things from a multiplistic personality perspective. Taking the dialectical nature of the external world and applying it to the many different parts of our own unique personality system.
These questions are pretty simple, and straight forward, and they are designed to get you thinking about the behaviour pattern you are trying to change from a slightly different perspective than the judgemental, or critical way you might be currently looking at the way you coped with a challenging situation. On the following pages you will find a list of the questions asked in this adapted version of a Chain Analysis worksheet, along with a brief breakdown of what you are trying to achieve, and why you are trying to achieve it, to help guide you through the process.
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