Process of Adjustment
The more stress a person is exposed to before he learns to cope with it, the harder it is to effect good adjustment. One may think of behavior going through four stages of adjustment. First, the individual has some motive which is pushing him toward a goal. Second, he meets some baffling difficulty or frustration. He tries to overcome it, but cannot do so readily. Impelled by the motive, which is still urisatisfied, the individual makes various attempts to fulfill it. This process results in the third stage of adjustment involving trial-and-error behavior, or what we generdly call "varied responses." Finally comes ~ solution which, in whole or in part, satisfies the motive that started the adjustment process. In this chapter we shall describe how all this takes place.
We can think of human behavior as having three components.
First, behavior is directed toward effectively solving problems, and for most of us this is what we usually do. We may not think so because when we solve a problem, it no longer bothers us; hence, we tend to forget that we even had a problem. This integrative behavior we call "good" adjustment. In contrast, behavior can have a second dimension, which we call nonintegrative. This occurs when we do not see the whole picture and are, therefore, left with some conflicts. For example, we may not notice some positive aspects of the situation. A person may work so hard at reducing some immediate anxiety that he fails to see how well he is doing in other areas. Third, behavior 'may be nonadjustive, causing the person to remain in a continuing, restless, and unresolved state of anxiety. In these three descriptions we are dealing with classes of responses,not types of people. Put another way, people differ in the degree to which their behavior is inrp.grative, nonintegrative, or nonadjustive. The very healthy person shows ineffective behavior at times, while the severely maladjusted person is effective at certain times.
