We ought not to judge. But if we have to make a judgment about someone, we better judge them by their motives, not merely by their behavior. This old wisdom sounds so obvious, that one wonders how the whole concept of behavioral therapy has survived for so long essentially denying it.

The big goal of behavioral therapy, along with its numerous branches and varieties, is fundamentally to replace the “wrong” behavior (aka dysfunctional, ill, maladaptive, incorrect, inappropriate, socially unacceptable or just bad) with the “right” one (all the respective good epithets here). Once the behavior in question has been dealt with, it is of little or no concern to the behavioral therapist, what is it that is actually going on in a person’s head.

It is argued that in many people’s heads nothing interesting is going on anyway. Well, this is a strong argument. It is surely much more cost-effective to treat people as adults than to properly educate them as children.