Anxiety and social competencies - part 2

Michelle Garcia Winner

In the first blog on anxiety (please read first), we concluded with how the "Spiral of Social Success" can work for your students if you talk to them along these lines:

1. You will encounter some stress approaching this situation that you are used to bailing out of from your anxiety. However, instead of starting by doubting yourself, explore what strategies you can use to help yourself deal with the uncomfortable social situation.
2. Use your inner coach to remind yourself how much better you will feel once you use your strategies, that you are capable of using these strategies as well as what the strategies are to use.
3. You feel better about yourself when you see yourself demonstrating your abilities or social competencies.
4. This encourages your to implement the use of the strategies.
5. Resulting in the fact you are training your brain that "you can do it" better than you have done it before!

Here's how this looks:

To not approach the task this way usually results in "The Spiral of Failure":

1. You encounter the same stressful situation.
2. You think of excuses for why you won't engage in this situation today.
3. Your self-defeater voice assures you that you can't do it and that you have never been able to do it.
4. You have negative emotions about your lack of being able to do this social behavior.
5. You want to avoid putting yourself in the situation.
6. You teach your brain one more time that you cannot do it! Your memory now is once again about your inability.

Here's how this looks:

These Spirals have helped tremendously by:

* Starting with students taking responsibility for their own learning and accomplishments
* Changing the conversation from students coming in with excuses for not working on their skills to seeing that all their excuses only impact them negatively. (They also learned to identify their excuses!)
* Helping them to understand that these negative behaviors were still teaching their brain
* Motivating them to teach their brain more healthy habits.

After creating the Spirals with adolescents who were of high academic ability and all of them saying they wanted to help themselves get through some of their more anxiety evoking situations, we entered into a some different conversations:

* My students teased me that I was nagging them, so I said to them, no need for me to nag you anymore. You can see so clearly when the other members of the group are making excuses and not helping themselves. Therefore, from now on when you see someone in the group engaging in this more "self-defeater behavior," here is what I want you to say to the person who is defaulting to anxiety, "Sounds like that is an excuse; what are you teaching your brain." As I shifted from me being the teacher to having the students teach each other that each of them had some pretty obvious maneuvers to default to anxiety, they each took their own learning more seriously.

* A student was not going home and refusing to do the work she had just done at the clinic (was not doing her homework); she was encouraged to explore if she was avoiding using her newly recognized competencies because by getting upset and arguing she was getting more attention than if she just did what she new she was supposed to do. She responded to this by stating, "that's creepy," and came back talking about the fact she did get a lot of attention for being less than competent. This helped to motivate her to find new positive ways to get attention and helped her parents shift into giving her more positive attention for when she did things "expected" rather than "unexpected." (She was 20 years old and saying she wanted to be perceived as more independent.)

* A student I had worked with for over seven years had learned many strategies but was still not using them. I pointed out to her one day that I thought her anxiety was her best friend. She clearly stated that I was wrong and she hated her anxiety, then she asked why I would say that. I responded that now that she had learned many social competencies and ways to think socially about the situations she was in, when she had a choice she still almost always chose to default to her anxiety rather than to her strategies. Again, this changed the focal point away from her anxiety towards focusing on her competencies.

On a final note: What about those who may truly have social anxiety and have many social competencies?

Based on our growing experience, it appears that some of our students have far more anxiety than they do lack of social knowledge and related ability. For these students, we still find that helping them through their anxiety has a lot to do with helping them explore and practice their social competencies. The Social Thinking teachings helped to put this all into context. Thus, these same lessons have shown to be helpful to them as well.

It is always a good idea to have a mental health professional on your team to help with all of this, but our mental health professionals (counselors/social workers/psychologists, etc.) will do well to become familiar with how to teach Social Thinking and related social competencies/skills.

Our book for high-level teens and young adults to read themselves to help them learn about the intricacies of the social mind and how to learn new social competencies is entitled Socially Curious and Curiously Social: A Social Thinking Guidebook for Teens and Young Adults (Winner and Crooke, 2009). However, we have also learned from many professionals that this book was helpful for them to read, as it teaches directly how we address various topics with our older kids, young adults and in fact our adult population. As Pam and I completed writing this book, we decided not to put in a chapter on anxiety since the book was already longer than we had hoped (we added the chapter on the difference between being friendly and making friends in the 11th hour!), so the above summarizes what we would have written. I have yet to put this in a publication but thought I would share it here since many have found it very helpful (including our adult clients!).

Courtesy SocialThinking.com