ABSTRACT
People learn their way through life. Development of skills, abilities, and behavioral repertoire comes through learning. Self-defeating responses and inappropriate ways of dealing with challenges are learned. Intervention techniques are little more than teaching techniques geared to produce self-enhancing learned responses to replace problematic ones. So far, this text has described four major types of learning families, each with slightly different dynamics and each particularly useful for producing specific types of response. It would be relatively easy to identify cognitive deficits or surpluses, or behavioral deficits or surpluses, and then apply an integrally-sound intervention to rectify the identified condition were it not for a number of confounding variables. People are individual, unique, and different one from another in many ways, all of which impact the intervention process. Four categories of individual differences will be considered as contextual issues, things that need to be taken into account when personalizing an intervention strategy for each particular client. These are personality, developmental, social, and spiritual dynamics. The first two will be treated in this chapter, with social and spiritual dynamics being the focus of Chapter 10.
