Understand Complex Calls for help
Support Seeking
This three-hour virtual training provides caregivers and professionals with a practical and insightful introduction to the CARE-CRIES Model, equipping them to better understand and respond to complex behavior.
Too often, behavior is interpreted only at the level of what is visible. Escalation, refusal, emotional intensity, conflict, or withdrawal are commonly viewed as problems to control rather than as meaningful forms of communication. Yet in many cases, these behaviors reflect attempts to secure safety, connection, recognition, autonomy, or co-regulation when more direct forms of communication feel unavailable or ineffective.
Support Seeking reframes behavior through the CARE-CRIES Model, helping participants understand complex responses as relational efforts to restore stability and obtain support. Delivered as a fully virtual, self-paced course, this training offers a clear framework for recognizing how threatened psychological needs shape behavior and how more accurate interpretation can transform intervention.
Participants will learn how to look beneath the surface of behavior, recognize recurring relational patterns, and respond in ways that reduce escalation, build trust, and support greater emotional regulation and long-term stability.
CARE-CRIES
After years of working alongside children, youth, and families identified as high risk or highly complex across diverse care environments, a consistent pattern began to take shape. Individuals labeled oppositional, volatile, treatment resistant, or difficult were not acting randomly, nor were their behaviors sufficiently explained by diagnosis, punishment-oriented models, or compliance-based interventions alone.
Across residential programs, family systems, crisis services, and community supports, behaviors that appeared vastly different on the surface often served a common underlying function. Escalation, withdrawal, conflict, emotional collapse, and defiance frequently emerged when essential psychological needs had been threatened, disrupted, or persistently left unmet.
Through sustained frontline experience and careful behavioral analysis, these recurring drivers were distilled into four foundational needs that organize behavior across developmental stages, relational contexts, and levels of complexity. Together, these needs form the CARE Foundation.
Human behavior is deeply organized around the pursuit and protection of Connection, Agency, Recognition, and Emotional Safety.
Connection reflects the need for belonging, relational security, and emotional closeness. In moments of strain or uncertainty, people seek assurance that important relationships remain accessible, dependable, and intact.
Agency reflects the need for autonomy, influence, and meaningful control. When powerlessness begins to dominate experience, behavior frequently shifts toward attempts to restore choice, impact, or self-direction.
Recognition reflects the need to be seen accurately, understood deeply, and acknowledged meaningfully. More than attention alone, it involves having one’s internal experience recognized as real, important, and worthy of response.
Emotional Safety reflects the need for internal stability and relief from overwhelming emotional threat. People seek environments and responses that reduce distress, support regulation, and re-establish a sense of psychological safety.
When these needs are sufficiently supported, behavior tends to remain more adaptive, flexible, and regulated. When they are threatened, constrained, or repeatedly left unmet, individuals do not simply disengage from the need itself. They begin attempting to restore balance, often by shaping the responses of those around them.
At that point, behavior begins to move from regulation into communication.
Support is then sought indirectly through observable relational expressions designed to elicit response, care, protection, engagement, or acknowledgment. Within the CARE and CRIES Model, these expressions are conceptualized 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 responses of others in ways that restore stability, safety, recognition, or connection.
In many caregiving, educational, and professional settings, these behaviors are frequently misunderstood. Escalation, refusal, emotional distress, withdrawal, or conflict are often interpreted as attention seeking, manipulation, or deliberate opposition. These interpretations tend to focus on the disruption a behavior creates while failing to recognize the function it serves.
Yet attention is not a trivial reward. From both developmental and psychological perspectives, attention is one of the primary mechanisms through which human beings regulate distress, assess safety, and restore equilibrium. People do not stabilize in isolation alone. They often stabilize through responsive interaction, co-regulation, acknowledgment, and the felt experience of being noticed, interpreted, and responded to by others. To be seen, engaged with, or emotionally held by another person communicates something essential to the nervous system: support is available, danger may be diminishing, and one does not have to manage the experience alone.
For this reason, when individuals appear to be seeking attention, they are often seeking something far more fundamental. They may be seeking co-regulation, reassurance, protection, recognition, emotional containment, or a restored sense of agency. What is often dismissed superficially as attention seeking is more accurately understood as an attempt to secure the relational resources necessary for psychological stability.
Within the CARE and CRIES Model, these efforts typically emerge through five primary support-seeking expressions.
Crisis
Crisis involves escalation, intensity, or behavioral spectacle that creates urgency and makes disengagement by others increasingly difficult. The behavior grows in intensity until a response becomes unavoidable, ensuring immediate recognition, intervention, or containment. What may appear chaotic on the surface often functions as a powerful means of forcing visibility when calmer or more direct bids for support have failed.
Refusal
Refusal involves visible opposition, disengagement, or noncompliance expressed in a way that draws acknowledgment or reaction. What is often labeled defiance may, in many cases, function as communicative withdrawal directed toward a relational target. Beneath the resistance may be distress, protest, loss of agency, fear, or an attempt to regain some measure of control within an experience that feels overwhelming or invalidating.
Injury
Injury involves the presentation of helplessness, harm, incapacity, or vulnerability in ways that invite protection, accommodation, or reduced demand. In this expression, vulnerability becomes the pathway through which care, responsiveness, and safety are secured. Whether the injury is physical, emotional, or functionally presented, the underlying aim is often to obtain relief, protection, or a shift in how others respond.
Emotional Evocation
Emotional Evocation involves the outward communication of distress in a manner that elicits empathy, concern, comfort, or caregiving response. Emotional pain becomes externally visible so that regulation can occur through relational connection. Tears, despair, panic, hopelessness, or visible overwhelm may all function as ways of making suffering unmistakable when internal distress can no longer be contained silently or expressed more directly.
Struggle
Struggle involves conflict, confrontation, or oppositional engagement used to maintain interaction when connection feels uncertain, threatened, or inaccessible. In these moments, opposition can become the means through which relational engagement is preserved. When cooperative connection feels unavailable, conflict may serve as the only reliable way to keep another person emotionally present, engaged, and responsive.
These expressions are not random reactions, moral failings, or simply attempts to create disruption. They are learned relational strategies shaped over time through experience, reinforcement, and the environments in which support has been sought. Individuals tend to repeat the behaviors that successfully produce response, engagement, relief, protection, or recognition within their relational world.
Seen through this lens, CRIES are not best understood as problems to suppress in isolation. They are signals to interpret more accurately. They point to the ways a person has learned to seek support when direct pathways feel blocked, unsafe, or ineffective. Understanding these expressions more clearly allows caregivers and professionals to respond not only to the visible behavior, but to the threatened need organizing beneath it.
