I remember when I first graduated from Occupational Therapy school…I was working in an outpatient department with patients with workplace injuries. I was inexperienced in many way, and had much to learn. I was embarrassed one day when a patient (not my own) pulled me aside and said, “You know, your client doesn’t speak English very well, but her hearing is fine. When you are speaking to her, it’s like you think if you speak loud enough she will get it.” As humiliating as that feedback was, I remember it as being profoundly helpful.
It did more than change how I spoke to people for whom English is an additional language.
It remains an illustration of how we tend to apply the adage of “If a little is good, then more must be better”. Nice idea, huh? Speaking slowly and clearly to a person whose first language is not English helps comprehension, but speaking louder and clearer doesn’t actually improve understanding—rather, there is actually a point at which it is insulting.
More of a good solution often creates its own problems.
I’ve come to see anxiety is rather like that:
It’s helpful for a person to experience some anxiety about how a dinner will go, or in preparation for an exam. The anxiety serves as a helpful internal cue to become motivated to reduce the anxiety. So, recipes are researched and effort is put into shopping for all the ingredients, and the cooking starts early allowing time for unforeseen circumstances for a good outcome. Notes are reviewed and the text read more diligently in preparation for an exam—and people do better when they study.
But too anxious, and a person isn’t calm enough to follow the steps to the recipe, or be calm enough to double check the grocery list—and mistakes made. Or studying for an exam—the student is too anxious to concentrate on the material, and sleeps so poorly that they aren’t in a good space to write the exam.
One of the important part of changing behavior that is painful and out of keeping with what a person really desires, is to look at how the behavior (however misguided) is/was actually intended to help the person engaging in the dysfunctional behavior. Often these motivations are so hidden under entrenched behavior that it is only with therapy that they emerge.
With that insight comes new possibilities and options for behaving in a way that both allows the original goals to be accomplished, and with strategies that fit the situation in a comfortable and synchronous way with a person’s values and ideals.
More on anxiety in a day or two…
Write a Comment