Changeable: How Collaborative Problem Solving Changes Lives at Home, at School, and at Work - Hardcover

Ablon, J. Stuart

 
9780143129011: Changeable: How Collaborative Problem Solving Changes Lives at Home, at School, and at Work
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0143129015 ISBN 13: 9780143129011
Verlag: TarcherPerigee, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A bold new way to help anyone change    
 
Why is it so hard to change problem behavior—in our kids, our colleagues, and even ourselves? Conventional methods often backfire, creating a downward spiral of resentment and frustration, and a missed opportunity for growth. What if the thinking behind these old methods is wrong? What if people don’t misbehave because they want to, but because they lack the skills to do better? Or as renowned psychologist J. Stuart Ablon asks, what if changing problem behavior is a matter of skill, not will?
 
Based on more than twenty-five years of clinical work with juvenile offenders as well training parents, teachers, counselors and law enforcement, and supported by research in neuroscience, Changeable presents a radical new way of thinking about challenging and unwanted behavior -- Collaborative Problem Solving -- that builds empathy, helps others reach their full potential, and most of all really works.
 
With illuminating scientific evidence, remarkable success stories, and actionable insights, Changeable gives parents, teachers, CEOs and anyone interested in learning about why we behave the way we do a roadmap for helping people grow.
 
  *Includes a Bonus PDF with charts and graphs.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J Stuart Ablon, Ph.D., is the Director of Think:Kids in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is a sought-after speaker at conferences and institutions worldwide addressing tens of thousands of people each year.

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Chapter One

People Do Well If They Can

As a clinical psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, I've treated a lot of challenging children and adults-pretty much every variety of dysfunction, disorder, and misbehavior. When it comes to children, some of my favorite to treat are what I call inflexible kids. These kids can be extremely bright and high functioning in many ways. They have an almost uncanny ability to learn and memorize new information-it just seems to burn into their brains. But information retention is also the root cause of their difficulty. Because the cognitive associations they form are so strong, they can't be altered very easily. Once these kids experience something, that's it: A template forms, and they have a hard time adapting to even slight deviations. The inflexible kids I see glom on to structure, routine, and predictability. They must go to their restaurant, dress the way they're used to, sit in class where they've always sat. When life doesn't happen as they expect, they can't handle it. I call them "need to know" kids, as opposed to "go with the flow" kids. They perceive the world as black or white, good or bad, their way or no way, and nothing in between.

One inflexible kid I treated, eleven-year-old Susan, was an all-American girl who loved to play hockey and sent me pictures of her team every season. Susan's parents described her as strong willed, capable, and very intelligent, a great kid in most respects. She'd never had serious behavioral problems before. As Susan's mother told me, "About 85 percent of the time, she's a rock star. She's queen of the monkey bars, a strong swimmer and skier, a great gymnast, and a great hockey player." During the other 15 percent, Susan fell into fits of anger. "It's like a switch gets flicked," her father told me. "She'll yell at her sister or hit her. Does the same with her mom. She'll scream, 'I hate you; you're not the boss of me! You can't make me! Don't look at me! Don't touch me!'"

As bad as these tantrums might sound, in the world of challenging behavior, they're pretty minor. Susan wasn't violent. She didn't harm herself or others. She was coping well enough at school. Frankly, she didn't seem that hard of a case.

For the first several weeks of working together, we made progress in helping her parents understand how she was wired and how this wiring led to some of her challenging behavior. Susan seemed to enjoy coming to our sessions, and we forged a strong therapeutic relationship. It helped that her parents loved her and were bent on doing whatever it took to help their daughter.

Then on Susan's first day of middle school, her parents called and said they needed to see me-Susan was in crisis. I was able to fit her in that day, right after lunch. But that wasn't soon enough. I was out grabbing a bite when I received a frantic text from my office: "Your one p.m. appointment is here. They need you!"

I ran back to the office to find Susan in hysterics. Her father was physically restraining her, and her mother was holding her shoes. As her mother told me, she had taken them so that Susan wouldn't launch herself through a plate-glass door and run away. "Susan, what happened?" I asked. She refused to speak to me. This was unlike her. We had developed such a solid relationship.

It took a good twenty minutes, but we managed to calm her using techniques I'll describe later in this book for dealing with people in crisis. Susan still wouldn't speak, but she would write words and phrases down on pieces of paper. Meanwhile, her parents relayed what had happened. Susan didn't want to go to school, and her parents had been trying to force her. Even her beloved grandfather couldn't manage to coax her into going. She had run away, and when she was brought back home, she said she wanted to kill herself. This was entirely out of character. She might have always had minor anger issues, but she never exhibited any explosive or suicidal behavior before. What could possibly be going on here?

It turned out that at overnight camp a few weeks earlier, Susan had suffered severe migraines and wasn't able to reach her parents by phone. The experience traumatized her. Now, as Susan confirmed through the phrases she was writing, she didn't want to go to school because she was deathly afraid she would get another migraine and not know whom to go to or what to do. She feared she would freak out as she had at camp, and the other students would stare at her and think something was wrong with her.

When I uncovered these concerns, they made perfect sense. As her parents and I had discovered, Susan struggled with cognitive skills related to flexibility. She needed more routine, planning, and predictability than other kids, and when these elements were lacking, she ran into trouble. Like other inflexible kids, Susan especially struggled with transitional situations in which existing templates didn't apply and she was forced to adapt to new conditions. Attending middle school for the first time was such a situation, and it made sense that Susan would have trouble with it. Everything in middle school was different from what Susan was used to: the kids, the lockers, the schedule, the teachers, the building itself-everything. If she got a migraine, she wouldn't know what to do. She had no template, no plan to follow. Susan got so upset and anxious that she didn't know how to express her feelings to her parents. All she could do was lash out. And her parents, who would otherwise have jumped to help her, didn't know what to do.

For many years, Susan's parents had interpreted her temper tantrums as a technique she used to get her way. Most parents would probably have come to a similar conclusion. Like Susan's parents, they would have dealt with Susan's behavior by punishing her, setting boundaries, and "teaching her a lesson." But in this instance, Susan clearly wasn't being difficult because she wanted to be. Her anxieties about a brand-new school and the possibility of getting a migraine there tied into her cognitive makeup, and the more her family tried to force her to go to school, the more explosive she became. Her well-intentioned parents were trying to force their inflexible child to do something she wasn't capable of doing. And that inflexible child, lacking the cognitive skills to deal with the situation and come up with a solution, did the only thing she could. She acted out.

Get Out of Line, Do the Time

Our society has an entrenched way of thinking about behavior. We almost always assume it derives from a person's will-that people behave consciously and purposefully. When people misbehave, we likewise assume that they're doing it intentionally. As a result, whenever individuals in almost any social setting act out or misbehave, those in charge usually respond by punishing the bad behavior. When you were a kid, did your parents take away your TV time or allowance when you misbehaved? Most did. When you continued to misbehave, they probably just stepped up the intensity of the consequences and rewards. And they probably also bestowed privileges when you did the right thing.

School discipline is similar. We assume that when kids misbehave in school, they do it on purpose either to get stuff (special attention, for instance) or get out of stuff (like doing...

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Verlag
TarcherPerigee
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0143129015
ISBN 13 
9780143129011
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Tarcher
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