Understanding Complex Calls for help
Support Seeking
Our three-hour virtual training that teaches caregivers and professionals how to understand and respond to complex behavior using the CARE-CRIES Model.
Behavior is often interpreted through what can be seen rather than what is being sought.
Escalation, refusal, emotional distress, conflict, or withdrawal are frequently treated as problems to control or eliminate. In reality, these behaviors often represent attempts to obtain safety, connection, recognition, or autonomy when direct communication feels unavailable or ineffective.
Support Seeking introduces the CARE-CRIES Model, a practical framework for understanding behavior as relational communication rather than opposition or dysfunction. This fully virtual, self-paced course provides a clear method for recognizing how individuals seek response, regulation, and support when foundational psychological needs feel threatened.
Participants learn to move beyond reacting to behavior and instead understand what it is attempting to accomplish, why predictable patterns emerge within relationships, and how informed responses can reduce escalation while strengthening trust and regulation.
The CARE Foundation
After years of working alongside children, youth, and families identified as high risk or highly complex across diverse care environments throughout the country, a consistent pattern began to emerge. Individuals described as oppositional, volatile, treatment resistant, or difficult were not behaving randomly, nor were their actions sufficiently explained through diagnosis, punishment models, or compliance-based interventions alone.
Across residential programs, community supports, crisis services, and family settings, behaviors that appeared vastly different on the surface frequently served the same underlying purpose. Escalation, withdrawal, conflict, emotional collapse, and defiance often emerged at moments when fundamental psychological needs were threatened or destabilized.
Through sustained frontline practice and behavioral analysis, these recurring drivers were distilled into four foundational needs that organize human behavior across developmental stages, environments, and levels of complexity. Together, these form the CARE Foundation.
Human behavior is organized around four core needs:
Connection
The need for belonging, relational security, and emotional closeness. Individuals seek reassurance that relationships remain accessible and stable, particularly during stress or uncertainty.
Agency
The need for autonomy, influence, and meaningful control over one’s environment. When individuals experience powerlessness or loss of control, behavior frequently shifts toward restoring influence or choice.
Recognition
The need to be accurately seen, understood, and acknowledged. Recognition extends beyond attention and reflects the human need for one’s internal experience to be validated and taken seriously.
Emotional Safety
The need for internal stability and protection from overwhelming emotional states. Individuals seek conditions in which distress can be regulated and psychological threat reduced.
When these needs remain supported, behavior tends to remain flexible and adaptive. When they are threatened, restricted, or repeatedly unmet, individuals do not simply disengage. Human beings are inherently relational. Instead, they attempt to restore balance by influencing the responses of others.
It is at this point that behavior shifts from regulation to communication.
Support begins to be sought indirectly through observable relational expressions designed to draw response, engagement, protection, or care.
These expressions are described within the CARE and CRIES Model as behavioral CRIES.
CRIES: Support-Seeking Expressions
CRIES represent the primary ways individuals attempt to restore threatened CARE needs when direct communication feels unsafe, ineffective, or unavailable. Each expression reflects an adaptive effort to make internal need visible within a relational environment and to influence the response of others in ways that restore stability, connection, or safety.
In many caregiving and professional settings, these behaviors are frequently misunderstood. Escalation, refusal, emotional distress, or conflict are often dismissed as attention seeking, manipulation, or deliberate opposition. Such interpretations focus on the disruption created by the behavior while overlooking its functional purpose.
Attention, however, is not a trivial reward. From a developmental and psychological perspective, attention operates as a primary mechanism of regulation. Human beings regulate emotion, interpret safety, and restore equilibrium through responsive interaction with others. Being seen, responded to, or emotionally engaged with provides information to the nervous system that support is available and threat has diminished.
When individuals seek attention, they are often seeking something far more fundamental. They are seeking co-regulation, reassurance, protection, recognition, or restored agency. What appears superficially as attention seeking is more accurately understood as an attempt to secure relational resources necessary for psychological stability.
Within the CARE and CRIES Model, these attempts emerge through five primary support-seeking expressions.
Crisis
Escalation or behavioral spectacle that creates urgency and makes disengagement by others difficult or impossible. Intensity increases until response becomes unavoidable, ensuring immediate recognition or intervention.
Refusal
Visible opposition or withdrawal performed in a manner intended to provoke acknowledgement or response. What appears as defiance often functions as communicative disengagement directed toward a relational target, signaling distress or loss of agency.
Injury
Presentation of helplessness, harm, or incapacity that invites protection, accommodation, or reduced demand. Vulnerability becomes the mechanism through which safety and support are secured.
Emotional Evocation
Communication of distress that elicits empathy, concern, or caregiving response. Emotional suffering becomes externally visible so regulation can occur through relational connection.
Struggle
Conflict or confrontation used to secure interaction when connection feels uncertain or threatened. Engagement is maintained through opposition when cooperative connection feels inaccessible.
These expressions are not arbitrary reactions or attempts to create disruption. They represent learned relational strategies shaped through experience and reinforcement. Individuals repeat the behaviors that successfully produce response, engagement, or relief within their environment.