Dear Daniel C.:

Welcome back. I just read a lot of our correspondence, mostly your posts since October of last year, the beginning of the 10th grade for you. Now it must be the end of the 10th grade and in the fall, the beginning of the 11th grade. Your aim is to become a mechanical engineer but you are afraid you are not making high enough grades and will fail in college, not becoming the engineer you hope to become.

A question: do you still attend the same school, a long distance/ long commute from home, still the high work load school/ lots of homework and such?

You mentioned GAD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder repeatedly.

Here is my comment today: in October you wrote: ” when I write something personal, I have fun, I write well, and I put effort to it. Whenever its for school I see to tense up, freeze, and just stop doing anything useful”- this is where all the answers are, I believe, right in that sentence. I will elaborate on it:

You tense up and freeze when faced with school assignments and performance because you already have a negative association between school and your well being. The association is something like this: school-danger. The danger is realizing you are not good enough to get good grades, not smart enough, a failure as a hopeful engineer, a failure as a son and so forth. The association is already there so you freeze. Freezing is a reaction to your fear of feeling these I-am-not-good-enough feelings.

This is the reason you are not motivated to do school work, why you are easily distracted. Who wants these I-am-not-good-enough feelings? Better be distracted.

You are an amazing young person though, that with such fear you sit down and force yourself to study, again and again and again. You are so dedicated to be a good son, so ambitious, to be an engineer, that in spite of your ongoing fear, you sure try so very hard, muscling through the fear. And so you are like a person in the mud, with your feet and legs in a swamp. Walking forward is very difficult but you keep moving forward. Of course you can’t walk faster (metaphorically get better grades) because you are in the mud of fear. If you weren’t afraid, it would be easier to walk faster (get better grades). Everything is more difficult when in the mud/ in fear.

Your goal is to become an engineer and it is very possible for you. There is nothing lacking in your intelligence to prevent you from becoming an engineer, I am quite sure of it. If you heal and manage the fear, you will have way more access to the intelligence you do possess. As it is now, the fear keeps much of that intelligence frozen, not accessible.

Let me know if you agree with me so far; what you disagree with and we can communicate further.

anita