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Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
Anxiety work goes nowhere against this, because there is little anxiety left to work on. What changes it is the shape of the day, with the good things sitting after the effort rather than instead of it, so home stops being the more comfortable option by a mile. Do it calmly and with the young person in the conversation, because done as punishment it just becomes a different fight.
that man will only have what he has worked towards (Quran 53:39). Said gently, it is the same arithmetic: a day gives back roughly what has been put into it.
النجم
وَأَن لَّيۡسَ لِلۡإِنسَٰنِ إِلَّا مَا سَعَىٰ
that man will only have what he has worked towards
Qur’an 53:39read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a secondary analysis of a one day acceptance and commitment therapy workshop with 83 participants, binge eating was examined as a form of experiential avoidance, something done to get away from an inner state rather than purely for pleasure. It is a small secondary analysis in a very different area of life. It carries one relevant idea: comfortable behaviours can be doing avoidance work, so pleasure and escape are not always separate things.
Lillis J, Hayes SC, Levin ME. (2011). Binge eating and weight control: the role of experiential avoidance.. Behavior modification doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
If the easier day is also the better day, nothing about the harder one will look worth choosing.
Two weeks away is the point to stop waiting and ask for help. A year away is beyond what one appointment a week can carry.
Not every child who is not at school is frightened of school. Some are kept at home by what is happening there, some have decided the place is not worth it, and some are angry about one specific thing.
Getting a child back through the gates is not the same as helping them. Ask what the school day is asking of them that they cannot face yet, and put your effort there.