Case Study 2: Amara — The Threshold Problem

Background

Amara's graduate school applications are in progress. Three programs — all MSW programs, all in cities she would genuinely consider living in, all with orientations that match what she thinks she wants to study.

She has been working on the personal statement for weeks. She has written, by her count, seven full drafts.

Her roommate Kemi has read three of them. "They're all good," Kemi said, genuinely, after the third. "Why don't you just submit one?"

Amara didn't have a good answer. The drafts were different — different emphasis, different structure, different framing of her background — but Kemi was right that they were all decent. The problem was not quality. She could not exactly name the problem.

What she named to herself, privately, was this: she did not entirely believe she belonged in any of the programs she was applying to.

The Self-Efficacy Question

Amara knows what social work looks like — she grew up around it, in the sense of growing up in circumstances that required professional social workers, and she has now been working alongside social workers for six months. She has good instincts for the work. She is observant, empathic, steady under emotional pressure, able to hold difficult things without being overwhelmed by them.

She is, by any reasonable external assessment, well-suited for graduate training in social work.

And yet her self-efficacy for succeeding in a competitive graduate program feels thin. Not zero — she is not paralyzed — but thin. Something like: I might belong there, but I'm not sure, and the not-sure makes it hard to write the application with the kind of confidence that makes a good application.

Working through the chapter's framework on sources of self-efficacy:

Mastery experiences: Mixed. Her work at the nonprofit has provided some — she has been good at the client-facing work, has received genuine positive feedback from her supervisor, has handled difficult situations well. But she has no direct experience of graduate school, so that specific domain is uncharted. Her undergraduate experience was mixed: good academically, but she attended a school where she was frequently one of a small number of Black students, and there were semesters where the environment took more than it gave.

Vicarious experience: Limited. She knows few people who look like her — first-generation, working-class background — who have gone through competitive graduate admissions successfully. Kemi is in a PhD program, but Kemi's path was different. The absence of models with her specific starting point has left a gap.

Verbal persuasion: Her nonprofit supervisor, who wrote one of her recommendations, told her directly: "You are one of the most naturally skilled people I've worked with in my fifteen years doing this. You should be going to these programs." Amara received it, thanked her, and then did not let it land the way Jordan failed to let the VP's praise land.

Physiological states: She feels anxious about the applications in a way that she interprets as evidence that she is trying to reach somewhere above her actual capability. The chapter's point about reappraisal applies here: the same anxiety, interpreted differently, is evidence that she cares about something that matters.

The Contingency Structure

Chapter 10's concept of contingent self-esteem maps well onto Amara's relationship with her own worth.

Her primary self-esteem contingencies are: social approval and family role. Her worth has long been conditioned on whether she is helpful enough, present enough, adequate enough in the eyes of the people she is responsible to. This is the caretaker structure from her childhood, operating at the self-esteem level.

The graduate application is interesting because it is explicitly for her own benefit, not anyone else's. There is no one she would be taking care of by going to graduate school. The application cannot be justified on the grounds of duty or service. It is just: I want this, and I am trying to get it.

That is harder than it sounds.

She has noticed that she is more confident in her professional capabilities when the work is explicitly for someone else — when she is advocating for a client, helping a colleague, supporting her supervisor's project. When the work is for her — when the ask is "show why you deserve this" — something tightens.

The Learned Helplessness History

Amara has a history that is relevant here.

She applied to two graduate programs in her senior year of college, briefly, and withdrew both applications before submitting them. She told herself she wasn't ready. The honest reason, which she can now see more clearly, was that after years of managing a household that felt uncontrollable — where her efforts to stabilize things often didn't stabilize them — she had developed a localized helplessness around "trying to get things for myself."

Seligman's framework: chronic exposure to outcomes she could not control through her own efforts (her mother's drinking, the instability of the household, the grief of losing Nana Rose) had produced a belief — not fully conscious, not generalized across all domains, but present — that trying to get what she wanted was not reliably effective.

She had learned to want less. Strategically. As protection.

The graduate school applications are a direct test of this belief. She is trying to get something she wants. The applications are controllable: she can write them, revise them, and submit them. The outcome is not perfectly controllable — admissions decisions involve factors outside her control — but the attempt itself is within her power.

Seven drafts and counting is not, she suspects, purely about finding the best version. Some of it is postponing the moment of controllable attempt, which would make the uncontrollable outcome possible.

The Reframe Kemi Offered

Kemi, who is direct in the way that good friends are allowed to be, offered a reframe last week.

"You know what your application is competing against?" Kemi said. "Other people's personal statements. Which are also imperfect drafts that someone eventually submitted."

Amara laughed.

"You are not trying to write the perfect statement. You are trying to write a statement good enough to get you an interview. And you have already done that, three times over. You are now just delaying."

Amara thought about this. Kemi was right that the quality threshold had been met. What she was doing was something else — something closer to the "if I never submit it, I can never be rejected" logic that is recognizable as learned helplessness avoidance once you name it.

The option was: submit an imperfect draft and find out. Or continue revising in the direction of a perfection that would never feel like permission.

The Analysis

Self-efficacy for graduate school specifically

Amara's low self-efficacy for succeeding in graduate school is partly due to genuine gaps (no direct mastery experience) and partly due to attributional errors (failing to internalize the supervisor's assessment, failing to count her nonprofit experience as evidence). The absence of vicarious models with her specific background is real and is a genuine self-efficacy deficit — not irrational, but not fixed.

The solution is not to wait for certainty. The solution is to attempt the application — which is itself a form of mastery experience — and allow the outcome to provide data.

The helplessness-shaped avoidance

The seven-draft pattern is recognizable as avoidance — a behavior that protects from the vulnerability of attempting something that matters in a domain where outcomes feel partly uncontrollable. The protection is real: she cannot be rejected from a program she hasn't applied to. The cost is also real: she cannot be accepted either.

The self-esteem contingency

Amara's self-worth contingencies (social approval, family role) are not well-served by the graduate school application. The application is for her, not for anyone she has organized her worth around. This is a genuine challenge — not a psychological failing, but a developmental edge. Moving toward things that are genuinely for herself is part of the arc from people-pleaser to self-directed adult that runs through her story.

What comes next

She will submit the application. She already knows which draft to submit. She has known for three weeks.

The question is whether she can tolerate the interval between attempt and outcome — and whether the outcome, either way, will be processed as evidence rather than as verdict on her worth.

That is a self-esteem question, not a self-efficacy one.

Discussion Questions

1. Amara's low self-efficacy for graduate school persists despite genuine evidence of capability (supervisor's assessment, nonprofit performance, academic record). What maintains the low self-efficacy in the face of disconfirming evidence?

2. The absence of vicarious models with her specific background is described as a genuine self-efficacy mechanism. What does this suggest about the importance of representation at an institutional level — beyond symbolism?

3. Amara's helplessness is localized to "trying to get things for myself" — not generalized across all domains. How do localized learned helplessness patterns develop, and what are the conditions that maintain them?

4. Kemi's reframe — "you are competing against other people's imperfect drafts" — is a form of what cognitive technique? How does it work mechanistically to reduce the self-efficacy barrier?

5. The case ends by distinguishing the self-efficacy question (can she do this?) from the self-esteem question (does the outcome become a verdict on her worth?). What would healthy self-esteem in this situation look like — what would it mean to process either outcome as evidence rather than verdict?

Application Exercise

Identify one domain in your life where you have been preparing or planning but not attempting — where the preparation has continued past the point where it is genuinely useful.

Write a 150-word analysis addressing: 1. Is the delay due to genuine self-efficacy concern (I don't yet have the skills) or to avoidance (I have the skills but I am afraid of the outcome)? 2. What is the minimum viable attempt — the smallest action that would move from preparation to actual attempt? 3. What do you risk by attempting? What do you risk by continuing to not attempt?