Two weeks ago, I posted (https://blog.mrbigler.com/2020/11/18/resiliency-and-pandemic-fatigue/) about students who were struggling to do much of anything this year because of their situations. In many cases, these students have difficult home lives. The messages coming at them have been negative (and often emotionally abusive) for most of their lives. This post is about one of those students, whom I’ve met with over Zoom a couple of times. While her backstory is not a happy one, what prompted me to write this post is quite positive.
For most of these kids, their support network consists of their friends and adults in the school—teachers, guidance counselors, therapists from the community health center in the school, the school social worker, etc. Without their support networks, they are stuck at home with nothing to counteract that negativity, and it turns into depression (or at least something depression-like; I’m not a psychologist so I can’t actually make a diagnosis) and academic paralysis.
I had a one-on-one conversation with one of my students around the time I wrote that post. The student had just written the following to me when her lab report was a week late and it was one day before the quarter closed:
“Before I continue with this message I want to start off by apologizing for any inconvenience that I may have caused. I am a very stubborn human being and I don’t like usually asking for help because I get embarrassed and want to figure things out myself but I came to realize that it is not healthy and that I have little time left so is there any way that you can help me out with the lab write up today?”
To a non-teacher, this message may seem innocuous enough, but it raised a red flag when I read it. (Yes, this is often all the information we get about an individual student.) So I took a look at what she sent in my student intake surveys. She has six ACEs (categories of Adverse Childhood Experiences—a measure of childhood trauma) and a significantly lower than average resilience score. [Note that six ACEs is a lot. In the landmark CDC study from the late 1990s, three or four ACEs correlated with statistically significant increased risks of alcoholism, chronic depression, perpetrating domestic violence, liver disease, smoking, being raped, attempting suicide, teen pregnancy, COPD, and absenteeism at work.] In the post I linked above, I noted a correlation between both high ACE scores and low resilience and the kind of paralysis that this student seemed to be exhibiting.
So when I met with her over Zoom, the first part of the conversation was about her.
I made some educated guesses—that she probably had grown up with a lot of negativity and few or no positive messages to counteract it or people she could talk to growing up. I guessed that she probably got blamed for just about everything, and probably thought that she was a terrible person and that everything was her fault. She confirmed all of those things.
We talked for about an hour about how those messages got programmed into her head, and a bunch of strategies for protecting herself from several of these messages while still allowing her brain to think what it wanted to (because it was going to do that anyway—merely telling her that all of those things weren’t true wasn’t going to help). We talked about the long, gradual process of reprogramming her self-talk and peeking past her own defenses a little bit to see how there is a part of her that believes in herself, but how that part is afraid to speak up, and how the rest of her is afraid to listen to it. And many other things. She could already tell by the end of the conversation that it helped more than she imagined was possible, and she was already beginning to look at some things about herself in a more positive way than she had been able to before.
After an hour, we switched to talking about the specific things she was stuck on with the lab, and she was able to finish it and turn it in before the quarter closed.
Today, two weeks later, she sent me a private message during class saying that she felt sick when she got up in the morning, but was doing better by class time. I wondered if it was stress-related, so I asked if she wanted to chat for a few minutes after class.
We ended up talking for about 45 minutes (through my lunch and planning time), checking in on how she is doing. I had expected that she might need a little booster for some of the things that we talked about. As it turns out, she didn’t need much of anything. She had internalized a lot of the positive messages from our previous conversation. In just two weeks she managed to reframe a lot of what she had been through in ways that didn’t change the fact that a lot of it was abuse, but that enabled her to see them as things that were not her fault and not things that she deserved. She could feel sorry for her abuser because of the life circumstances that turned him into what he is, but not in a way that excused the behavior or allowed it to continue getting under her skin. In those two weeks, she managed to find more self-confidence than either of us had thought she possessed—as if someone had flipped a switch and turned it back on. She was already noticing improvements in her ability to concentrate and get school work done. And she was beginning to really believe in herself. In short, she managed to do more for herself in two weeks than I would have thought possible in months.
Obviously this student’s response is exceptionally unusual. However, I am incredibly proud of her and happy for her. (And yes, of course I told her so. We also talked about how her life can’t improve exponentially forever, and that we should make sure to talk when it starts to plateau.)
Doing this kind of thing definitely takes a lot out of me, and I have about a dozen students who are in similar situations, with whom I’m also having similar meetings and conversations. But when even one student shows such a dramatic change, I feel like I could find the energy to meet with dozens more!
