This Is Not a Behavior Problem (But Behaviorism Tried to Solve It Anyway)
A black hole, a bathtub, and the grief no framework could hold.
I’m sitting on a stool in front of my son in the bathtub.
My feet are on the cold tile. I’d just been scrolling on Instagram before getting him in, and this reel popped up- a song I haven’t heard in years. One of those songs that grabs something in your body before your brain even catches up.
So while he’s splashing in the tub, I play the song again. And just like that, I’m gone.
I’m back thirteen years ago, standing in a drafty funeral parlor that was somehow both sterile and trying too hard to be warm.
I’m next to my brother, my sister, and my mom.
My dad’s friends are all standing in the back, waiting to be pallbearers.
And they’re about to close the casket.
And I just split.
Please close it, I thought. I can’t see him like this.
Don’t close it, because once it’s shut, that’s it.
And somehow also:
Close it, because the sooner they do, the sooner the minutes and hours can start ticking toward whenever I might see him again.
That war in my body, the way it all collapsed at once, it still lives in me.
And this song brings it back, while bath water sloshes, and my son giggles.
I feel the cold tile under my feet and the ache in my chest at the same time.
One foot in bathtime. One foot in the black hole.
Where Reinforcement Used to Be
I don’t usually want to write using behaviorist jargon.
It can feel cold, or clinical, or like it’s trying to chart something that refuses to be graphed.
But this black hole metaphor—this collapse of reinforcement—it’s the only language that’s ever come close to describing what it felt like in my body.
And maybe, later on, I will use the framework more intentionally.
Maybe I’ll use it to build tools and scaffolds to help others.
But for now, it helps give language to the experience.
In behavior analysis, we talk about reinforcement.
Behavior, consequence, and increase the future probability. All that.
But grief?
Grief is the absence of reinforcement.
Not delayed. Not thinned. Gone.
There’s no consequence for the behavior of “Dad.”
He doesn’t respond. There’s no stimulus, no connection.
You still want it. The EO is sky high. But there’s nothing to meet it.
It’s not extinction. It’s something worse. A total collapse.
A black hole where reinforcement used to be.
Grief Behaviors (If We Even Want to Call Them That)
Crying. Withdrawing. Rage.
We try to categorize them.
We think about the cultural rules, how long you’re “supposed” to grieve.
Wearing black. Wailing. Quiet stoicism. Widow rituals.
But there are no rules to death.
So why do we keep making rules for grief?
My dad used to say funerals are for the living.
I thought about that when we were walking through the cemetery looking for his burial plot. My boss called me that day to ask if I was coming in. I said, “No, I’m looking for a gravesite for my father.”
There were only a few rows left. Most were already reserved.
We stood at the edge by a line of trees.
And for some reason, there was this man peeing on the trees. And we all just… laughed. And picked that spot.
That image popped into my head again tonight, sitting next to the tub, watching my son stand up and pee in the bath.
I laughed again through the tears.
And he looked up and asked, “Mama, what’s in your eyes?”
And I didn’t have the words.
Maybe that’s the thing.
Grief is the sadness and the laughter and the memory and the collapse, and we don’t always have the language for it.
Prevent, React, Replace: Doesn’t Work Here (But…)
In my work, I’ve spent years thinking in frameworks.
Preventative. Reactive. Replacement.
It’s how I structure thoughts and problems.
It’s how I’ve helped people make sense of behavior, trauma, overwhelm.
And in future posts, I do want to offer tools and support through that lens, gentle, tangible things.
But this? This is different.
This is just a story that needed a structure to hold it still for a moment.
Preventative Strategies?
No.
You can record their voice. You can hoard mementos.
But nothing truly prevents the loss.
The only thing that helps is presence. Squeezing out every drop of reinforcement while they’re still here.
Reactive Strategies?
There’s no right way to grieve.
Cry. Shut down. Scream. Dissociate.
If you’re a friend of someone grieving, don’t try to say the right thing.
You won’t fix it.
Just sit in it with them.
Replacement Strategies?
Forget it.
There’s no replacement for a father.
There’s only honoring.
Tacting- labeling what’s missing
Only the little rituals. The moments that feel close.
My son furrowing his brow the way my dad did.
Me noticing it. And saying it out loud.
Every year the anniversary comes around.
And it might not sting in the same sharp way.
But it doesn’t just disappear.
Twenty-four years of life with my dad (aka reinforcement) doesn’t get wiped out that quickly.
So I honor in my own way as I’m able to.
I look at pictures. I listen to a song.
I remember the man peeing on the tree.
And I watch my son stand in the bathtub with the same unbothered energy.
And I try to hold all of it at once.
🫂 big hugs to you. As a behaviorist who has written a lot about grief, all of this resonates. I think grief is a good example of a response class in collapse—and the black hold metaphor is apt. It is the ultimate kid of extinction; evocative events still evoke behavior with seemingly no place to go. Holding all at once is all we can do. That, and remembering that you aren’t just you. Those 24 years created a you where he lives on.