Contactivity: Advanced NVR Interventions for Overcoming Avoidance

Social anxiety, avoidance, withdrawal, and self-isolation are becoming increasingly widespread among children and adolescents. Parents of avoiders typically come to therapy feeling utterly helpless. They find it impossible to engage in any meaningful conversation with their child, let alone motivate him. While these parents are usually aware that their child avoids school and social activities, they may not realize how disconnected the child is also from his own self. The solution to avoidance is reconnecting – to self, other, and group. Contact is the most important ingredient in disrupting patterns of avoidance. Yet to achieve contact with an avoidant child is not easy.

This book provides an innovative approach to motivate and encourage these young people. Specific tools are provided to shift the avoider from experiencing shame and anxiety to developing self-pride and the courage to face the challenges of life in the contemporary world. Through this book, therapists, educators, and parents will learn:

• How to have a conversation with an avoider
• How to help adolescents who refuse to go to school
• How to motivate the avoidant child
• How to reestablish within the avoider a sense of belonging to family and friends
• How to use video games as a leverage to empower the avoidant person

“This is a beautiful book. Dr. Weinblatt has developed ways of reaching the avoidant child that are sure to inspire innumerable therapists, myself included. It suffices to say that I have introduced major changes in my program for suicidal adolescents after reading Connectivity. Though Dr. Weinblatt is one of the creators of the ‘sit-in’ in NVR, he had the audacity of highly creative therapists to change his own creation, so as to meet the needs of these children. His way of changing the parents’ view of their child’s virtual gaming is an eye-opener. I am thankful for this book and proud to have Dr. Weinblatt as one of NVR’s most original and provocative thinkers and practitioners.”
– Prof. Haim Omer, Founder of the NVR approach for parents and teachers