Gotta Keep Trying 2

[Kettricken]

Please forgive me for spamming your thread, GIMA; I will cease and desist if requested.

This discussion just reminded me of something I read on the SSM board a good while ago:

The second approach, used at the same time, is to "Tape Over." I'm sure you all remember cassette tapes, right? They were like CD's, only they cost three times as much to manufacture and a third as much to buy in a store. Well, NH compares problem kids to a tape recorder. All their lives, or at least since they started misbehaving in school, chances are that people have been harping on what they did wrong. Each of these comments gets stored away. If they heard one bad thing per day for five years at school--and that's WAY low for even a fairly good kid, sad to say--that's 180 days x 5 =900 negative comments on the tape.

If you say "Hey, GREAT job on that report! You must have worked like crazy! I think that was the best I've seen all year." to a kid like this, your comment goes on the tape, too. But it's got 899 competitors that all agree that it's false. That's why these kids don't trust adults who say positive things, and the more aggressively positive and forced-cheerful you try to be, the more they dismiss it as fakery. They don't trust. You or people like you (in their minds) have told them over and over how bad they were, and that's what they know.

If you asked a stranger how to get to the park, and he told you to go left, you'd probably go left. But if there 20 people behind him and they all said "No! Don't believe him, you've got to go right!" then you'd probably go right. We're trained by evolution to go with the numbers when we're not in a position to judge the quality of information. Usually, it's right. But when you've gotten erroneous (even if well-meaning) information repeatedly over the years, your logic works against you.

So what does NH do about this? Well, the problem with trouble kids is that they have this backlog of a thousand negative comments, but their behavior at the moment makes it hard to give genuine positive feedback--and remember, faking it makes it worse, not better. One fake positive comment is like two negatives. So if you can't say negative, and you can't say positive, and you can't fake it, what do you do?

In the NH way of thinking, you forget positive and negative and make neutral, but absolutely true comments. Things like "I see you wore your Metallica shirt today." or "You brought your book today." Never anything like "Dude, I love Metallica too!" or "You brought your book! That's EXCELLENT, Johnny, doesn't it feel great to be responsible?" These are dismissed as fake by the NH kid.

The comments suggested may seem meaningless, and in a way they are. They're simple observations of facts with no value judgment made or implied. Their purpose is not to pump up the all-important and all-powerful Self Esteem. They have three purposes:


•They establish that you are paying attention to Johnny. This is not dishonest, by the way, because to do this, you DO have to pay attention to him.
•They establish that you are not being dishonest. The first couple of times you say "Hey, you're wearing your red shirt today" to a truly troubled kid, they'll literally say "No I'm not!" It's a reflex they don't control at first; they trust NOTHING an adult says.
•You are replacing the negative records on the tape, taping over them with neutral comments. The idea is not instantly to change the kid's outlook from negative to positive; that can't be done. The idea is to begin to lower the amount of negativity in his head.

Now, this is directed at working with kids, but personally, I see lots of areas where, with a little creativity and careful avoidance of condescension, it could be applicable to interactions with adults, too. Especially adults who may still be suffering from a childhood with a hypercritical parent.....