Emotional self control strategies-
Learning Disabilities
(Jerrod case study continued)
After treating some more general issues, Jerrod and I set down to solve his school and homework problems. I assigned Jerrod a series of math problems. As his mother had reported, he immediately began to get upset. His face became tight and tense. His right leg began to bounce up and down. Though his pencil was properly placed below the problem, it did not move. You could feel his tension mount as he became more rigid.
I asked him what it felt like to work on his math. From his tense state, he croaked, “hard”, but did not look up from the problem. As I put him in the CAER machine, I asked him to follow that “hard math feeling” to all the other places he had ever felt the “hard math feeling”.
While he was in the machine, several times I asked him where else he found the “hard math feeling”. He found it in many more places than just this math assignment. He remembered it from math at school, math tests, reading in class, last years science class etc. It was a common feeling crosscutting much of his current and past school experience. After about 20 minutes in the CAER machine, he said that the feeling had gone away and he could not remember any other places where he had felt the feeling.
After he came out of the CAER machine, I had him continue to work on his math problems. He immediately began making progress. The problem that had been completely bewildering to him now was easily solved. His demeanor was also quite different. He was much calmer. However, as he continued to work problems he slowly became more agitated and frustrated. When he was clearly again in the grips of emotional paralysis, I again asked him to take that feeling into the CAER machine and follow it to all the times he had ever felt that feeling.
This time in the CAER machine he found another layer of bad feelings about school work. He had developed a pattern of making negative self statements such as “I am dumb”, “I am not as smart as other kids”, “I hate myself”, “No one is as stupid as I am”, and “There is no way I can ever learn this stuff”. Since the CAER machine is paradoxical, that is, in the CAER machine you want to think about what every you want get rid of in real life, I asked him repeat these and similar statements to himself while he watched the lights. He was to “beat up” on himself mentally. This led to a much broader array of bad feelings in many settings, particularly social. He felt his peers thought he was dumb because of his failures in school. He generally felt he was less than other children he knew, as if they were smarter, and more popular than he. His depression was surfacing. In another 45 minutes in the CAER machine, he said that these feelings were gone. When he got out of the machine there was a buoyancy in his manner and a smile on his face.
The math problems were now easy, so we began to work in a similar manner on his reading out loud. Because we had dealt with many of the broader issues while working on his math, reading went much faster. The best part of the process was his quickly improving mood and self-confidence. This became most apparent just before our lunch break. When I went to ask his mother to come out of the CAER machine to have lunch he wanted to personally open the door for her. As his mother emerged from the darkness of the CAER machine and was still adapting to the room light he blurted out to her “I can read”. Before being willing to go to lunch he insisted on showing off his new skills by reading to her. As I let dad out of his machine, he read to mom. Rather than his typical fumbling with his third grade book, he read articulately to her out of a Harry Potter book, which has a reading level of grade 6.8, and thus much more advanced than a third grade material he had previously found very difficult. To say the least, we had a good lunch.
Why had Jerrod changed so much so quickly? The CAER machine had extinguished the emotional drain on his attention, freeing him up to access the reading skills he already had.
I have been following Jerrod for over two years and his performance continues to improve. He now gets mostly A’s and is in several advanced placement classes.
Now, let’s look more closely at the underlying mechanisms that mentally paralyze children like Jerrod.
