Behind Every Behavior Is a Belief: Reimagining Access and Resilience Through the RUMERTIME Process®

By Dr. Yvonne Murray-Larrier | GCSCORED | IMHERS

Train. Coach. Transform. — Train the mind. Coach the heart. Transform the system.

“Behind every behavior is a belief.”

Y.Larrier

When we see a reaction, we are witnessing a story trying to surface.

The Heart of World Mental Health Day 2025

This year’s World Mental Health Day theme — Access to Services: Mental Health in Catastrophes and Emergencies — could not be more timely.
Across continents, communities are reeling from war, displacement, pandemics, and ecological disruption. When systems collapse, the mind becomes both the first and final battleground.

Yet access to care remains uneven.
Clinics are distant, resources scarce, and stigma thick. What the world needs is not only more mental-health infrastructure but processes that live inside people — frameworks that travel with them into crisis, displacement, and daily life.

That’s where the Cultivating SEEDS System® (CSS Framework®) and the RUMERTIME Process® come in. They are not programs to attend but ways of thinking, feeling, and relating that restore humanity to mental-health practice.

Planting SEEDS® of Wellness

The CSS Framework® was born out of a global conversation on how to expand culturally conscious care. SEEDS® stands for Supportive Engagement and Empowerment in Diverse Settings.
It views every human as a seed — designed for growth, dependent on context.

Just as plants need fertile soil, people need supportive environments to thrive.
When the “soil” — relationships, systems, communities — is depleted by stress or inequity, the seed struggles.

CSS® reframes mental health as cultivation, not correction.
Its language of roots, soil, and fruit makes emotional literacy accessible across cultures and reading levels. One facilitator once told me, “When we talk about soil instead of stigma, people finally listen.”

This metaphor also aligns with neuroscience: the brain, like soil, is plastic — able to change, adapt, and regenerate under the right conditions.

From Reaction to Reflection: The RUMERTIME Process®

Within this framework lives the RUMERTIME Process® — a five-step guide to emotional self-awareness and relational healing:
Recognize, Understand, Manage, Express, Reflect.

These steps mirror the brain’s own design:

RUMERTIME Step	Brain Function	Transformation
Recognize	Prefrontal cortex activation	“I notice what I feel.”
Understand	Hippocampal memory integration	“I see where it comes from.”
Manage	Amygdala & vagal regulation	“I can calm and choose.”
Express	Frontal-temporal communication	“I share safely.”
Reflect	Neuroplastic learning loop	“I grow forward.”

In everyday language, RUMERTIME® teaches us to pause before reacting, to translate feelings into data, and to see behavior as belief made visible.
It democratizes brain science: a teacher, pastor, or parent can practice it as effectively as a clinician.

When Systems Fail: A Community Awakens

“We’re tired of talking about what’s broken,” one mother said. “Can we talk about how to heal?”

At a Seasons of Growth™ session titled When All Systems Fail — The Moment We Snap, twenty-five community members gathered in a local library. The room was heavy with exhaustion — educators burned out, parents overwhelmed, youth anxious.

We began with Recognize.
Everyone named the emotion that had followed them in: anger, guilt, numbness.

Then came Understand.
“What’s the soil you’re growing in?” I asked. Silence filled the space, then stories poured out — stories of inequity, of systems too brittle to bend.

As participants moved through Manage and Express, the circle softened. Some breathed deeper. Some cried. One teen quietly said, “I thought I was the only one angry all the time.”

By the Reflect stage, the group had identified seeds of hope: better communication, peer check-ins, self-care boundaries.

In ninety minutes, RUMERTIME® transformed a room of frustration into a garden of empathy.
No one left “fixed.” Everyone left aware. That is access in its purest form.

The Brain Behind the Belief

In my forthcoming textbook on the RUMERTIME Process®, the Recognize and Understand chapters explore how awareness literally reshapes the brain.
When we recognize a feeling, the prefrontal cortex lights up — our inner “control tower.”
When we understand its origin, the hippocampus integrates that memory, lowering amygdala alarms.

The brain, like a diligent gardener, prunes old neural weeds and makes space for new growth.
This is not abstract science; it is hope with anatomy.

Every time a person practices RUMERTIME®, they strengthen the neural pathways of reflection and emotional regulation. Over time, they become less reactive and more responsive — more capable of seeing the belief behind the behavior.

Rumi’s Spring: Healing the Inner Soil

Rumi, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student, entered counseling saying, “I’m tired of being tired.”
Her days were a blur of achievement and anxiety. Using RUMERTIME®, we traced her exhaustion backward.

Recognize: racing thoughts before deadlines.
Understand: a childhood belief — “Love must be earned.”
Manage: learning to breathe through guilt.
Express: writing letters to her younger self.
Reflect: “Today I chose rest without apology.”

Months later, Rumi described her healing this way: “I stopped fighting my emotions and started listening to them.”

In neural terms, she was shifting from limbic storm to cortical calm. In human terms, she was reclaiming peace.

Global Lessons and Local Practices

Across continents, the same principle holds: when people can name and narrate their emotions, healing accelerates.
The RUMERTIME Process® parallels global innovations like the Friendship Bench in Zimbabwe or WHO’s Problem Management Plus program — community-driven, culturally fluent, evidence-informed.

What distinguishes RUMERTIME® is its blend of neuroscience and metaphor.
It invites people to understand what happens in their brains while staying rooted in what makes sense in their culture.

In humanitarian crises, that accessibility matters.
You can teach RUMERTIME® under a tree, in a shelter, or through a mobile phone.
It doesn’t require electricity — only empathy.

“When crises dismantle systems, the RUMERTIME Process® becomes infrastructure.”

Y.Larrier

Five Ways to Grow Access and Resilience

1. Teach the Process, Not the Program.
   Train educators, clergy, and community leaders to facilitate RUMERTIME® conversations wherever people gather.
   
2. Integrate Into Systems.
   Embed SEEDS principles into schools, workplaces, and health-care training so emotional literacy becomes standard practice.
   
3. Invest in Prevention.
   Governments and NGOs should include psychosocial training in disaster-response budgets.
   
4. Normalize Reflection.
   Encourage journaling, peer check-ins, and community storytelling as everyday mental-health hygiene.
   
5. Lead With Cultural Humility.
   Ask local communities, “What does healing look like here?” — then plant RUMERTIME® in that soil.
   

A Shared Call for World Mental Health Day 2025

The World Health Organization estimates nearly one billion people live with mental disorders. That number represents not statistics but souls — teachers, parents, leaders, youth.

We may not rebuild every system overnight, but we can start with process: helping people Recognize, Understand, Manage, Express, and Reflect.

When communities learn this rhythm, they gain something no crisis can erase — the ability to stay conscious in chaos.

The RUMERTIME Process® reminds us that mental health is not a privilege; it’s a practice.
And like any practice, it grows stronger with each repetition, each conversation, each shared moment of reflection.

When crises dismantle systems, the RUMERTIME Process® becomes infrastructure — the inner architecture of awareness that sustains us when the outer world falls apart.

About the Author

Dr. Yvonne Murray-Larrier is the founder of GCSCORED, Inc. and director of the Institute for Mental Health Education & Relationship Strategies (IMHERS). She is a professor of Counseling & Human Services at Indiana University South Bend and the creator of the RUMERTIME Process®, the Cultivating SEEDS System®, and the Seasons of Growth™ community series.
Her work bridges neuroscience, culture, and compassion to train the mind, coach the heart, and transform the system.

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GCSCORED | IMHERS
Train. Coach. Transform: Train the mind. Coach the heart. Transform the system.
🌍 www.everypiecematters.com | imhers@gcscored.org | 574-315-9981