What we think leads to how we act.  With this in mind, if we want to help people change the way they act, we will be most effective by helping them understand their thoughts and associated feelings, and intentionally change them. 

Often the iceberg is used as a metaphor to describe human behavior.  In a real iceberg, you can only see a small portion of the ice, because most of the ice is beneath the level of the water.  In fact, the only reason this small portion of ice is observable is because the unseen majority of the ice is supporting it.  The same is true for human behavior.  The only behaviors we can see are a person’s actions, like what they say or what they do.  And the only reason those overt behaviors are there is because there’s are lots of covert behaviors we cannot see the person doing, like their thoughts, feelings and core beliefs. 

Often in criminal justice we only look at a person’s actions, without exploring why those actions are present.  This would be like going to the doctor and having them recommend a treatment without diagnosing the problem. 

At CoRe Services, we develop and train a wide variety of cognitive-behavioral interventions focused on criminogenic need areas.