But fundamentally, if they know inside that the tasks they are doing are still easy, then they're not getting a chance to expose themselves to the feared situation (doing work that might actually be difficult!) and seeing that nothing actually bad happens. That's a basic principle of almost every form of therapy for almost every form of anxiety disorder, regardless of your theoretical orientation -- you have to experience the feared thing, slowly and in a manageable way, and learn both to tolerate the uncertainty and to experience the fact that you *aren't* awful and that you *can* make mistakes without being punished or rejected for it.
So the goal should not be "cure perfectionism before we provide academic challenge." It should be, "treat general anxiety so that we can include provision of academic challenge as part of the ongoing plan to treat perfectionism so that we can provide more academic challenge when perfectionism is less severe." Not this-then-that, but this-and-that-and-then-more-of-that.
She shoots! She scores! The crowd goes Wild!!!!
Now we are talking the Psychologist's language. Thank you Aimee!
This is a great example of the general stratagy for Advocacy. The school brings up a problem. The parent or advocate links the solution of the problem to getting a better fit educations in the minds of the school. The school buys in to correcting the readiness level as part of the way to solve the problem.
I'm guessing that there are some anxiety issues that have nothing to do with readiness level, but for those that are - Wow!
Aimee, I saw this 'avoidance' behavior with my son when it was time to reverse his underachievement. I kept in mind what Robin Schader shared with me: 'Our job is to hook the child on the thrill of accomplishing what once seemed difficult.' Or something like that. Of course it's easier for a parent to deal with an avoid ant kid than for a school folk.
OT: But I got to hear the story of how Martin Seligman was part of the Learned Helplessness Experiment on Dogs and how hard it was to get the dogs back into the cage long enough to reverse their 'learned helplessness' by experiencing that they could now avoid the shocks by their actions. I heard that the only reinforcer good enough was, not deli meat, not access to female dogs in heat, but that they had to cut a hole in the bottom of the cage and send a graduate student in to rub the dog's belly.
I think that there is a great take home message here: For social animals and social humans, it's relationships that are strong enough reinforcers to get folks out of a rut.
Love and More Love,
Grinity
