Understanding the Difference Between Positive Intention and Secondary Gain
As you may recall, all of our behaviors, strategies, or beliefs serve our values (roles, missions). Therefore, when they first appear (or are formed), they are always positive. (In simple terms: Value → Action that serves it.) Intention acts as a generalized strategy (in the broad sense of the word), like a vector pointing in the direction where you are most likely to find suitable ways to fulfill your value.
By serving its value, a positive intention ideally “illuminates” many alternative ways to realize it at the levels of behavior and environment.
Sometimes, the results and/or processes of implementing the variations we find can cause inconvenience to others—so people around us may perceive our behavior as negative. A similar situation can occur within our own personality, when the actions of one subpersonality, aimed at satisfying an important value, simultaneously cause significant harm to another subpersonality. In this case, our internal psychological or physical ecology is disrupted. Additionally, if, for various reasons, all possible ways to satisfy a value are reduced to just one, a person can develop a strong psychological dependency.
Throughout our lives, as we grow and develop, our values and/or their hierarchy periodically change. At the same time, the contexts in which we can realize our values usually expand, and with that, the number of resources and ways to satisfy them (potentially) increases, allowing us to stay relevant to our age and society. As you can imagine, what worked well in early childhood is not always appropriate in adulthood.
That’s why, from time to time, it’s helpful to change the means of fulfilling your values, even if your intentions remain the same. But if you’ve been using them for a long time and have gotten used to them, or are afraid to leave your comfort zone, or can’t imagine a worthy alternative, you may unconsciously want to keep “wearing your old, familiar, and comfortable childhood sneakers that are now extremely worn out and two sizes too small.”
Sometimes, certain values can be fully and appropriately satisfied at a certain age and no longer need an intention—like a child’s bike no longer needs training wheels once the child learns to balance on their own. Ideally, you would “retire” all the options associated with that intention. But people rarely reconsider the usefulness of their actions, strategies, and beliefs, so they keep “chewing over” the same old things out of habit.
Sometimes, people simply forget why they started doing certain things in the first place and continue to spend their resources out of habit, coming up with clever and convincing explanations for their odd behaviors.
Another thing that sometimes prevents us from changing in a timely manner is the connections and interdependencies with other values that have developed over a long period of using the old way of fulfilling a positive intention. If these connections were flexible and appropriate, change wouldn’t be so scary. But when, due to limited resources (or some kind of prohibition), a person finds an inefficient way to fulfill one of their intentions, their psyche tries to “squeeze out” as much benefit as possible from the situation. These “sticking together” of ways to fulfill intentions usually happen by accident, when the psyche, which has long been searching for at least one way to satisfy an important value, grabs onto any option—even if it’s not healthy.
Example
Let’s say two brothers, emotionally ignored by their parents, once got into a fight to see which of them their father disliked more. The children’s intention here, for example, is to prove to each other their special importance to the family and their unconditional value to their parents. Suddenly, their father comes in because of the noise, yells at the boys, separates them, and spends 10 minutes telling them they’re idiots (he, by the way, also has a positive intention). It seems like this episode ended badly and unproductively. The brothers’ intentions were “fulfilled” after the fight, and they realized their father is equally indifferent to both. In the future, there should be no need to fight over this again. But the children’s psyche picked up an interesting pattern: if you start a fight, a significant relative will magically appear and give you at least 10 minutes of the attention you crave! After this, the brothers will unconsciously start fighting as the only way to get their father’s attention.
As we can see, there is no longer a natural need for the original intention, but the way of fulfilling it suddenly becomes especially important for the value of “love,” since the children have no other way to satisfy it.
It’s possible that while you were using your old belief (which once served one of your values), other “consumers” (values) of the process or result of that belief “stuck” to it, following the principle: “why give up free resources?” If these additional, outside values don’t have better alternatives for satisfying themselves, they will fiercely resist change, because they can’t allow themselves to lose their only way of being realized. As a result of this codependency, all attempts by the primary value to switch to a more appropriate way of self-realization will be strongly blocked. This is roughly how secondary gains work.
By the way, not every old belief has secondary gains, but every one of them must have a positive intention, which may still be relevant or may have already been fully realized.