Choosing What to Work on First in Therapy/Tutoring

In this chapter, we consider the timing of interventions. This chapter helps you navigate how to decide which issues to address, in what order, including how to break down and create a plan for each specific problem your patient faces. We explain how the physical aspects of an environment may be important, including how crowded an area might be, size, amount of light, amount of noise, temperature level, or clothing requirements. We discuss the nonverbal aspects of social environments which are likely worth considering, such as the amount of structure the activity provides and how familiar the patient is with how this activity proceeds. The logistical aspects of environments such as amount and complexity of transit time, familiarity of transit route, and flexibility of arrival and departure times from the event are explained. Lastly we address the psychological aspects of dealing with difficult environments, namely, trained or innate social anxiety and psychological perceptions, sometimes bolstered by outside influences, of how the patient “should” feel and behave in different environments.