The APET Model

What is written here is our own summary and interpretation of some of the ideas presented in the Human Givens book and training provided by MindFields College. For a full description please refer to the book "Human Givens: a new approach to emotional health and clear thinking" by Joe Griffen and Ivan Tyrrell.

This model provides a way to understand how human beings respond to the world. It is a human given - something we are born with. It offers an explanation for behaviours which we all experience which may have nothing to do with our rational understanding - for example how we can be so terrified of a spider which we also logically know cannot harm us. Think about this model in relation to some recent event in your own life and see whether it fits your own experience.

A is for Activating Agent

Actions
Activating
Agents

“Stuff which
grabs our
Attention”

Stuff happens. This is the "A" in APET. Through our senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell or taste we become aware of something in our environment: the sudden bang of a firework in the street; a quizzical look from our partner; the fact that another driver cuts in front of us in a dangerous manner. Consider these stimuli to be inputs to our behaviour pattern.

P is for Pattern Match

The very first thing that happens in response to a stimulus or “activating agent” is that we automatically and subconsciously perform a pattern match to the stimulus. It is as if we ask ourselves "does this match to something I am currently expecting to happen or to some previous experience?" - but it happens before any conscious thought occurs. The firework sounds like that time we witnessed gunfire. The quizzical look from our partner is similar to just before we had that furious row. These are pattern matches.

E is for Emotion

Each pattern has an associated emotional tag - the emotion which was present when the pattern was initially encoded. Our brains pick out a matching pattern at very high speed and evoke the associated emotion. We feel again the sudden fear that we felt when we heard the gunshot. We feel the resentment of the previous argument with our partner. See below for what happens when the emotion is strong.

T is for Thought

The sequence initiated by the original stimulus (the 'A' or activating agent) may be completed with conscious thought. But if this comes at all it is always after the initial pattern match and associated emotional response.

The APET model explains how we behave in response to stimuli in our environment. The solutions to problems we may have as a result of this mechanism may be found in a variety of ways. We may choose to avoid the activating stimulus - to not do the things which cause us to react in ways that do not serve us. A therapist may use relaxation techniques to discharge the emotional content of a pattern and re-encode it as a narrative memory which has lost its power to automatically evoke an emotional response. We may use our rational mind to question our behaviour and retrain our automatic responses.

Human Givens therapy uses this model of human behaviour in conjunction with a variety of techniques to help people free themselves of unwanted automatic responses such as anxiety or panic attacks, addiction, obsessive compulsive behaviour, phobias, depressive thinking.