Thursday, May 19, 2016
Revisiting Intervention Kaila
The Intervention episode focusing on Gina and Kaila was the perfect opportunity to showcase how positive reinforcement can turn around and end up harming someone. Kaila’s main motivation for the weight loss was due to the people around her not approving of her old body type, and she had wanted a way out of the bullying. When she did lose the weight, she was showered with compliments and encouragement, and after a while, someone could easily grow used to that kind of affection. When people had grown used to her new appearance, that special form of attention faded away, but Kaila had already become accustomed to this. Rather than being able to cope with this in a healthy way, she resorted to extreme weight loss, eventually going as far as to “play god with her own body”. While positive reinforcement is in no way a negative thing, sometimes, when mixed with the wrong personality type, it can become more detrimental than expected.
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I agree with the point that you are making here. But I disagree with the last part about the personality type being a factor here. I think that if anyone (regardless of personality type) has repeated trauma in their childhood (in this case the bullying directed at her body), they experience both operant conditioning and learned helplessness. The learned helplessness causes them to believe that they can't stop the bullying because it is repeated and it may be about something that they can't change about themselves. In terms of the operant conditioning, a person learns by association that the bullying is stopped by changing whatever it is that they are being made fun of. For Kaila, she learned that losing weight caused the bullying to stop and people to like her more. Each time she lost more weight and received more praise, this connection grew stronger. In Kaila's specific case, codependence is what I believe is most applicable to her. Her parents provide a lot of things for her, which is a positive in her life. She realizes that even if she doesn't go along with a treatment program or looses more weight, her parents will still provide these things to her. So this is why she keeps doing it and why it isn't until the parents stop enabling her that she decides to stick to the treatment.
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