Supporting people to live full, meaningful, self-directed lives is at the heart of Positive Behaviour Support (PBS). Yet one of the most complex aspects of person-centred practice is helping individuals exercise their right to choose while also ensuring they have the opportunities, skills, and experiences needed to make those choices in an informed and empowered way.

This includes supporting a person’s right to choose nothing – to decline activities, to rest, to withdraw, or to opt out – while also recognising that limited experiences, anxiety, trauma histories, or restricted learning opportunities can inadvertently narrow a person’s world. PBS asks us to hold these tensions with compassion, curiosity, and ethical clarity.

1. Choice as a Fundamental Human Right

Within PBS, choice is not an “added extra” – it is foundational. Human rights frameworks, the values of social inclusion, and the emphasis on autonomy in PBS all position choice as essential for wellbeing. Choice-making:

• Supports personal agency
• Reduces the likelihood of coercive or restrictive practices
• Helps build engagement
• Contributes to quality of life

Crucially, the absence of choice can function as an antecedent for distress or behaviours that challenge. People who feel powerless, unheard, or over-directed may express this through escape, refusal, or more high-intensity behaviours.

2. The “Choice to Do Nothing”: Valid, Meaningful, and Often Overlooked

As practitioners, we sometimes unintentionally privilege active choices – activities, tasks, engagement – over passive ones. But the choice to do nothing is a choice like any other.

Doing nothing can be:

• Restorative: allowing regulation and recovery
• Self-protective: particularly for people with trauma or anxiety
• A preferred sensory state
• A form of control in environments where many other decisions are constrained

By respecting the choice to do nothing, we send a strong message:

Your autonomy matters even when it is inconvenient or doesn’t fit our proposed plan.

However, PBS also pushes us to explore what “doing nothing” means for that individual. Is it a genuine preference? A way to avoid overwhelming or inaccessible environments? A signal that past experiences have taught them that “choice” isn’t really meaningful?

3. The Risk of the “Illusion of Choice”

We can unintentionally offer choice in ways that are limited or shaped by our own assumptions. For example:

• Offering choices only within restricted parameters (“this activity or that activity”)
• Presenting options the person has never experienced before
• Offering options that require skills or confidence the person does not yet have
• Mistaking compliance or lack of protest for preference

In PBS, true choice requires:

• Access to meaningful alternatives
• Understanding of options
• The communication tools to express preferences
• Support that does not bias or pressure the outcome

Without these, we risk offering illusionary choice, where a person “chooses” based on familiarity, fear, or constraint rather than informed preference.

4. Broadening Experiences: Essential, Ethical, and Sometimes Uncomfortable

To make genuinely informed choices, people need opportunities to learn, explore, taste, touch, try, and experiment – safely and at their pace. This is the PBS principle of enhancing quality of life translated into practice.

But broadening experience can feel like a conflict with respecting choice. So, one of the enduring questions we have as practitioners is: How do we encourage someone to step into new experiences without overriding autonomy?

Strategies for ethical experience-building include:

a) Low-pressure exposure

Introduce new experiences gradually—through visuals, stories, sensory previews, or being an observer before a participant.

b) Co-creating a “menu of possibilities”

Work with the person to map what they like, what they might like, and what they’re curious about.

c) Ensuring emotional and sensory safety

New experiences must feel psychologically safe. Without safety, the person will understandably default to familiar options.

d) Skill-building before expectation

If a person doesn’t choose something because it feels hard, unfamiliar, or unachievable, skill-building can make the choice more genuinely available.

e) Celebrating micro-steps

Small, voluntary steps toward new experiences maintain autonomy while expanding the person’s world.

5. Navigating Refusal: Respect First, Curiosity Second

Refusal does not necessarily mean “no forever.” It means:

• “Not now.”
• “Not like this.”
• “Not until I feel safe.”
• “Not until I understand it.”
• “Not with you.”

A PBS perspective encourages teams to respond with open curiosity:

• What is the person communicating?
• What need does refusal meet?
• What conditions would allow a different choice if the person wanted it?

Respecting the “no” gives credibility to any future “yes.”

6. The Role of Relationships in Expanding Choice

Relationships are the conduit through which trust, experimentation, and new experiences become possible. A person is far more likely to explore when:

• They feel understood
• Their communication is respected
• They trust that saying “stop” will be honoured
• They are supported without pressure or judgement

Positive relationships create the soil in which new choices take root.

7. A PBS Framework for Balancing Choice and Experience

A practical PBS-informed approach might look like:

Step 1: Honour current preferences

Validate the person’s choices, including choosing nothing.

Step 2: Understand the function

Explore what the choice or refusal communicates.

Step 3: Assess opportunity and barriers

Ask: Are they choosing freely, or choosing within limits created by environment, skill gaps, or past experiences?

Step 4: Build capacity

Develop communication tools, coping skills, regulation strategies, and environmental supports.

Step 5: Introduce new experiences in a way that preserves autonomy

Offer authentic choices, scaffold accessibility, and avoid any sense of coercion.

Step 6: Review and reflect collaboratively

What worked? What didn’t? How did the person experience the process?

This creates a cycle where autonomy and growth co-exist, each informing the other.

Conclusion

Balancing the right to choose—including the right to choose nothing—with the need to broaden experience is one of the most nuanced aspects of PBS practice. It demands:

• Deep respect for autonomy
• Ethical awareness
• Creativity in offering opportunities
• A trauma-informed lens
• Strong relational foundations

When done well, it supports people not only to make choices, but to make choices that are meaningful, informed, and expansive. It helps people move from a life shaped by limits to a life shaped by possibilities—at their pace, on their terms.

Paddy Behan

PBSuk Co-founding director

November 2025