Support Seeking: Understanding Complex Calls for Help

A New Framework for Making Sense of Behavior

In Support Seeking: Understanding Complex Calls for Help, Christian and Taylor Brown introduce a powerful new way of understanding human behavior, not as “good” or “bad,” but as action taken in support of a goal. When internal or external states become overwhelming, unstable, or misaligned, the self must act. Those actions are what we call behavior.

What is this behavior trying to change?

Drawing from real-world experience across child welfare, mental health, education, and crisis systems, the authors present the Support Seeking Model, a state and self approach that reframes behavior as the self’s attempt to restore safety, coherence, control, or connection. Readers learn how people seek support either inwardly or outwardly, through internal strategies like withdrawal or somatic regulation, or external strategies such as emotional escalation, crisis induction, or risk engagement.

Rather than labeling people as manipulative, attention seeking, or defiant, this model reveals behavior as goal-directed action shaped by capacity, context, and unmet needs.

Through case studies and practical examples, this book walks you step by step through how to interpret behaviors using the Support Seeking framework and the A.I.M. lens (Action, Intention, Motivation). You will see how the same behavior can serve different goals, how the same goal can arise from different foundational struggles, and why matching response to direction is the key to lasting change.

Support Seeking: Understanding Complex Calls for Help does not excuse harmful behavior. It explains it. And in doing so, it offers a path toward more humane, effective, and sustainable support.

If you are ready to move beyond surface behavior and learn how to respond to what people are truly asking for, this book will change the way you see distress forever.