From the category archives:

Reflections on how we think

Are the 12 Steps Relevant for Today’s Struggling Teens?

by Rita Argiros on June 18, 2009

AA Big Book
Image via Wikipedia

I run a school for troubled teens, founded by my parents and based on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, a program developed in the 1930s by and for men and women mostly over 30  who were addicted to alcohol–not the troubled teen girls and boys at my school who are mostly not addicts though many have abused substances.   What could those old-timers have to say to kids today?

My office is where the principal’s office would be in a traditional high school. It opens onto a large main office and in the front there is a small waiting/reception area. A few weeks ago I came out of m office to see one of my most volatile students–no history of addiction–just a very angry, disruptive, intractable 15 year old sitting in the reception area when he should have been somewhere, anywhere else.   Based on past experience I could assume that someone had told him to do something he didn’t want to do, or had told him not to do something he was already doing and he was angry.  We had been through this before.  Once again we worked through all the things about the school and his life that he didn’t like.   We worked through all that and the conversation was winding down.  I knew he would get up now and go back to class. I was reviewing this student’s recent history in my mind.  His act-outs were becoming more frequent.  I was questioing our effectivness when, out of the blue he says,

“You want to see something neat?”

“Sure”  I say.

“It’s page 417 in the Big Book.”   he says.

I am surprised. I wouldn’t have thought that this particular student would have read the AA Big Book at all, never mind taking it to heard.  I retrieved a copy and began reading page 417. The student followed along reciting with me.  Another surprise, he has memorized the passage.

It starts,…  acceptance is the answer to all my problems…..when I am disturbed it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation–some fact of my life–unacceptable to me…Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”  He forgot to mention that I was the chief critic. I was always able to see the flaw in every person, every situation. And I was glad to point it out…

You can find the entire passage on page 417 of the 4th edition.   It was brilliant. Exactly what this student needed to hear.

One of AA’s many slogans–you have to give it away to keep it.  The student gave me a great gift that day.  He reassured me that the 12 steps are relevant–that today’s troubled teens can read that old book and allow it to teach them how to live.

He also convinced me I need to get a new copy of the Big Book. When we first opened to page 417 and started reading, I was startled.  I had never read that passage before.  How could that be? I consider my self fairly well versed in the AA Big Book. I went home to my copy.  Perhaps it had been too long since I had read my BigBook from cover to cover I thought. I couldn’t find the passage.  I looked on page 417 and 471. Then on 317. Nada.

Turns out this really wonderful passage on acceptance only shows up in the 4th edition of the book. The copy that I use all the time is the 2nd edition.  Here I have been treating the Big Book like a Bible–frozen in time. But AA and the 12 steps aren’t like that–they change, grow adapt and are relevant still.

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If I am going to help you, I need to understand you

by Rita Argiros on March 16, 2009

I did an experiment in my Living Skills class the other day, a little free association. I wrote words on the board and asked students to write the first thing that came to their minds.  Then we compared answers. Predictably many–but not all– the students made the same associations.  Both the commonality of answers and the few odd-ball responses intrigued and disturbed my 15 year olds.

I said “yellow.”  Several students said “green.”  One student said “duck.” Nobody said “submarine.”   If you “get” why that’s funny then you are probably a lot older than my students.

I used this exercise to continue our discussion of the brain.  They’ve learned about neurons and neural networks.  The associations they make reflect their neuronal networks. They aren’t all the same.  What implications this has.  The teacher speaks and the students understand. That’s the way its supposed to work.  It often doesn’t because  understanding really means making connections and for that to happen the maps in our brain need to match pretty closely.

I don’t  know what is worse–a complete mismatch between the students’ cognitive map and mine, or that maps that are just slightly “off.”  Certainly the later is the cause of much mis-communication, argument and strife.  When a student is completely clueless, at least there is a chance the hand will go up and some version of “I don’t understand” will come forward.

yellow_submarine_1999
Image by Brian’s Tree via Flickr

I am going to greatly simplify a recent conversation that illustrates this.

Background

Several staff have come to me about a female student that I work with, complaining that her behavior is rude, arrogant, and disrespectful.  When I ask for more details, I usually find out that the student has “barged into my office,”  “interrupted in the middle of the conversation” or “took it upon herself” to make a change or fix a problem without permission.

If this student was younger or a new arrival at The Family Foundation School, I think the staff would be more tolerant. But she has been here for several months, is 17 years old, generally well spoken, takes good care of her appearance, is lively and out going.

If you ask her about any of the specific situations you can sense her frustration.  In each and every case, she feels both justified in her actions and mystified by the criticism.

The conversation

We spent some time working with the words “rude”, “arrogant” and “disrespectful”.   We needed to find out what those words meant to her first, before we tried to explain the perceptions of others.  I needed to build a bridge from her understanding to the common understanding of those words.  Explaining the perceptions of others

“Rude” is the best illustration.  To my student rude=unnecessarily and intentionally, impolite.  That is a distillation of about twenty minutes work, reviewing events and having her explain why she felt the people who criticized her were unfair.  When I made the connection rude=thoughtless.  The light bulb went off.

How do I know?  We were examining her most recent encounter with a staff person that she respects.  This was the “barged into my office” scenario.  The second the word “thoughtless” came out of my mouth, the student turned red, starting with her ears and throat and extending to her entire face.  She had no difficulty doing the next right thing; going to the staff person in question and making an apology.

Application

The cognitive work we did to get to the new equation rude=thoughtless required that I not act on thoughts I was having like, When will she stop blaming everyone else for her problems? and remember my living skills students–communication depends upon making connections between similar mental maps.

The most common mistake I see is that we start from the wrong end. The bridge must be built from the student’s point of view outward.  If your student says she doesn’t get it, dive in and figure out what she does get. See if she has any wrong ideas and correct them. Then work out to new knowledge and new understanding.  Too often, we just repeat our explanation, possibly with some variation in example or modality.  Sometimes that works–a connection is made.  And when it doesn’t work we are likely to blame the student.

The same principal applies to misbehavior.  In this case,  I began with her point of view.  Many therapists would say that I “validated” her experience or reality.  Perhaps. But the relief I senses from her, didn’t seem to come from validation as much as from connection, that is, mutual understanding: she of me, and me of her.

I would see it that way. I am sociologist, not a psychologist and, for me, connection is everything.

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Understand Randomness and Avoid Pointless Change Efforts

by Rita Argiros on January 5, 2009

Test takers
Image by hyperscholar via Flickr

(This is the second of three parts on regression toward the mean.)

If you don’t understand randomness, you can have a hard time telling a real problem from chance fluctuations. This is especially true when it comes to tests of any kind.

Your grade on any test is a combination of luck and skill. I am not going to argue how much of each goes into the mix. Just accept for the moment that to the degree that luck is involved, your test score will vary.

Let’s say you get two A’s in a row. What could explain that?

  • You were lucky –that is your true abilities fall below the A range
  • You are an A student–that is, your average score is in the A range

Time, and a few more tests,  will tell which answer is correct.  But almost nobody waits around that long.

Apparently the concept of “random variation” didn’t have much survival back when we were evolving those big brains of ours because random chance isn’t the first explanation we come up with. Instead, we’ve evolved to be superb pattern recognizers and inventors. We are emotionally tuned to find patterns and solutions. We comfortable and feel in control when we think we have “explained” things.

“Uses time wisely” and “Works to potential” were my two worst conduct grades in grade school and high school. Lots of A’s, lots of F’s and everything in between.

Rogers' bell curve
Image via Wikipedia

First semester of my freshman year, I faced two very difficult final exams. Based on past experience I expected to get “bad” grades. Instead, I aced both tests. I cast about for an explanation.  I recalled that I was wearing the same shirt both times.  Maybe the shirt was lucky.  My prefrontal cortex told the rest of my brain that this was superstition. But I could not shake the association. I remember thinking; “This is nonsense. The shirt had nothing to do with it. But what if I am wrong? Who cares, nobody has to know. What harm can it do? “ I wore that shirt to every test, for the next 4 years and couldn’t help myself—I wore to my oral exams for my PhD.

Between High School and College I had become an A student—I’m not exactly sure how. But my first semester I didn’t know that, and so I came to believe that I had a lucky shirt. This particular lack of logic didn’t hurt me much, but similar reasoning can mean unnecessary criticism of the struggling student and it can prevent a mediocre student from taking actions that really will lead to improvement.

Every semester I have conversations like this with at least one of my students:

Student: Dr. Argiros, I failed Sociology this month what should I do?

Me: What did you get?

Student: 71

Me: What grade did you get last month?

Student: 77

Me: And the month before?

Student: 75

Me: So, you have been passing so far, but just barely, and this month your grade is a little below the bar. Is that right?

Student: Yea, I’m not sure what happened.

Me: The difference is just a few points; do you think it might have been bad luck?

Student: Surprised at my response, Maybe, but I really didn’t understand all that stuff about capitalism we had to learn this month. I liked the stuff we were doing before that better.

Me: O.K. I can buy that. It’s easier to learn something if you like it. But I still don’t see a big difference between a 71 and a 77. I don’t think you should focus on what happened this month only. Whatever you are doing now is good enough to get you grades in the 70s. If you don’t want to get a grade lower than a 75 then you need to figure out what to do so that your average scores are higher—in the 80’s. That way if you are unlucky one month you will probably still pass. Does that make sense? If you like, I’d be happy to look at your notes and we could talk about what you are focusing on …

Sometimes this works. But more often than not, the student never comes to talk to me about study skills.

Either in the conversation with me, or later on when he is discussing the situation with parents and friends, almost invariably the focus shifts back to a comparison between this month’s failing grade and last month’s passing one. Having decided that he only passes when he is interested. He may decide there is nothing he can do except hope that he likes the rest of the semester better.

Even if he decides he wants to do better, unless he changes the way he has framed the problem, whatever he picks as the “reason” is not likely to do much good. It will have little more real impact than my “lucky” shirt. Here is the kicker. Because of regression toward the mean, there is a very good chance that next month’s test scores will be higher anyway. This will confirm the change in his mind. And he will continue another month and another—at least until his luck changes. Score: Superstition:1 Improvement:0.

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Why common sense is nonsense

by Rita Argiros on December 24, 2008

I’ve been reading The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow.  No, no, don’t click away yet.  The ideas in this book are important.  For anyone who has ever tried to change herself, or to teach something to somebody else, the most important is on page 9. Its called “regression toward the mean.”

Here’s the short version.

When we do something well its usually a combination of skill and luck. Ditto the reverse. When we perform badly its lack-of-skill and/or lack-of-luck.  Examples–SATs, golf shots, investments, job interviews, sales calls, first dates (do people still date?), Yorkshire pudding.  Whenever luck is involved there will be variations in performance–we will do better sometimes than others. These variations will tend to cluster around their true value, or average value.  If you have a really good day on the golf course, chances are your next day will be worse.   Conversely, if you have a really bad day, then the next game you play will most likely be an improvement.   In both cases, the scores are tending to move in the direction of your true or average score.   This means you can’t really tell very much from one or two observations.  Its only by watching and recording outcomes consistently, time after time that you can discern whether your golf game, investments, or cooking is getting worse, getting better or staying about the same.

The problem is that our brains have difficulty holding on to this concept.  We are hard-wired to make associations (to find patterns).  We naturally tend to discount the role of chance and to see patterns where they don’t actually exist.

Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman Image via Wikipedia

Mlodinow tells this story to illustrate.  In the 1960’s Daniel Kahneman was teaching behavioral psychology to Israeli flight instructors to help them improve their teaching.  A basic principle is that rewards(praise) work better than punishment (scolding).  A flight instructor  disagreed with this, saying when he yells at a student,they do better next time but when he praises a student that student does worse the next time.  Therefore, the flight instructor concluded,  scolding was more effective than praise.

What was going on?  Chances are that a performance worthy of a good verbal thrashing is way below average and, because of regression toward the mean, it is highly likely that a better performance will follow.   The student does better next time but its because of random variation, not because of the the instructor’s tirade.  Conversely, that excellent performance that the instructor praised was also partly a matter of luck and, statistically speaking, the most likely outcome next time will be a  worse performance but that too had nothing at all to do with the instructor’s praise.  (By the way, Kahneman devoted much of his career to studying how humans consistently misinterpret random events.  In 2002 he received the Nobel prize in economics along with Tversky for his work.)

Still seem a little “out there?”  I’m going to follow up with a few examples in my next post.

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Triggers

by Rita Argiros on December 18, 2008

The Family at Christmas
Image by shelms via Flickr

People sometimes ask me why some teens need residential treatment.  It seems extreme to separate a teenager from friends, family and community for one or two years (the average length of most therapeutic boarding school programs).  There are lots of reasons and I will write more about them later. But in this blog I want to talk about triggers.

About a year ago, I placed a golden retriever puppy, Coda, in the home of another employee at the school, Audra.  His first family was  unprepared for all the normal things a retriever puppy brings to the relationship and Coda is an above average Golden Retriever.  He has what it takes to be a great working dog — way too much energy for most pet owners.

Coda only spent a few days in my menagerie before Audra adopted him.  But it was enough.  The contrast with his former existence must have been huge because I became a a very strong positive stimulus.

In the weeks that followed, every time Coda saw me he became a wired-up frenzy of energy. It didn’t matter what Audra tried–planned ignoring, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, teaching a competing behavior, nothing worked.   No learning was possible because we couldn’t communicate with him.  The second he saw me, Coda’s fore brain shut down.  He writhed and wriggled, bounced,  came up off his front legs whenever he saw me. His overwhelming urge seemed to be to lick my face in the classic puppy gesture of submission and joy.

In a young puppy, that behavior is beyond cute. But this puppy would grow to be a 70 pound monster knocking over toddlers and the elderly with impunity.   Audra understood that. She put Coda and me on “black-out.”  That is a term we use at The Family Foundation School.  Its a consequence applied when two students bring out the worst in each other.  We put them on “black-out.”  They avoid any and all interaction with each other.

Coda and I stayed on black-out while Audra worked with him on basic puppy obedience, gave him lots of exercise and while his puppy brain developed.  Gradually, she reintroduced me to Coda. I still have to be careful not to trigger his exuberance.  We keep contact brief and I don’t play with him becase the old associations are still there. They may never go away.

Wet Puppy

Image by Pirate Scott via Flickr

A good residential program is designed to separate an at-risk teen from her triggers just like Audra separated Coda from me.  Friends, music, patterns of family interaction; sights, sounds and smells of the neighborhood, styles of clothing, drug paraphernalia–all these can be overwhelming stimuli that fire-up the old neuronal pathways.  They can instantly bring back feelings, thoughts, and patterns of behavior that were violent, or addictive, or depressive, or abusive.  They are all there just waiting for resurrection.

The school creates a safe haven where we can make new associations and learn new patterns of behavior. The hard part is knowing  how much practice we need with the new patterns before we can safely handle even a limited exposure to our old environment.   It’s not easy.

Coda and I still have to be careful around each other.  Over the holidays Coda will stay with me while Audra and her family take a vacation. I will need to be mindful of Coda’s limits if we aren’t going to undo all the work Audra has done.  Most of our students will go home for the holidays. Let’s hope their parents are mindful of their limits too.

(Note: Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not claiming that dogs and teens are identical.  Human beings have a much more complex brain (mind) than dogs do.  Nevertheless there is some correspondence. We are both mammals, our neurons fire the same way. )

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