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Despite centuries of the technique's failure, many people still try to stop problem behavior directly with some kind of punishment. If billions of rat hours have proven anything in experimental psychology, it is that punishment doesn't extinguish learned behavior. Punishment only suppresses behavior by creating conflict between opposing motivations. Most people have enough conflicts already; they don't need more. In contrast, Virginia knew that if you teach people satisfying ways to interact, they will simply not want to go back to painful and destructive ones. As Mammy Yokum said many years ago, “Good is better than evil, because it is nicer.” Most therapists attempt to subtract problem behaviors. Virginia, instead asked herself, “What can I add to this person's life so he won't want to do the problem behaviors anymore?”
I spend no time stopping behavior. I say, “That's a skill you've got. Now let's see if we can have some other ones.” (1984)
Instead of these being bad things, they only tell us what we had an opportunity to learn, that's all. And anything that's learned, we can leave it there, and we can learn something else. We don't have to unlearn one thing in order to learn another. It doesn't have to work that way. So we don't even have to bother about getting rid of the things we learned. What we have to do is learn what we learned, and then out of those things choose the things we want to learn better, or new things. (1984)
After Virginia helps the husband, Casey, elicit a positive response from his wife, Margie, by reaching out to her, Virginia says:
Is that a new idea? That you could be that impactful to somebody? (Casey: Yeah.) So maybe there's a piece here for you to learn about what your impact really is. You've heard an awful lot about when you yell. You know that impact. But there's lots of other things. Here's one of them, so to know that piece, too. (1983, p. 120)
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