Case Study 2 — Chapter 23: Procrastination and Time Mastery

Amara: When the Avoided Thing Is Personal

Background

February. Amara's second semester is underway. The clinical hours are accumulating — slowly, but accumulating. Her coursework is manageable. Her friendship with Sasha is real and sustaining. Her calls with Yusuf are regular, and something has settled in that thread that wasn't settled before.

There is one thing she has not done.

For eight weeks, she has been meaning to call her mother Grace. Not for any specific reason — not in response to a crisis or a request. Just to call. To check in. To be in contact without a reason beyond the relationship itself.

She has not called.

This is not the same as their previous relationship, in which contact was laden with emotional burden and predictable drain. Grace has changed, at least in this period. The call after Amara's MSW announcement was real. The "I'm sorry for the parts that were hard" was real. Grace has been in what Amara's family therapist course would call a "period of relatively stable functioning."

And Amara is avoiding calling.

She is aware that she is avoiding. She knows Grace's number. She has time. She has picked up her phone four times in the past week with the intention of calling and, each time, found something else — a text from Sasha, a course reading, a video she had been meaning to watch — and put the phone down.

She has not examined why.

The Task Aversiveness Inventory

In her personal journal (which she maintains separate from the program journaling), Amara works through the aversiveness sources:

Boredom: Not applicable.

Performance anxiety: Interesting. Sort of. I don't know what version of Grace I'll get. The good period might be over. The call might require me to manage her. This is anticipatory — I'm afraid of what the call might turn out to be.

Resentment: Some. Not of the call itself — of the fact that a call to my own mother requires this much preparation. Other people call their parents without strategizing.

Ambiguity: The call doesn't have a clear purpose. I don't know what I'm calling about. There's no agenda. That feels uncomfortable in a way I hadn't named before.

Perfectionism: Not exactly. But something adjacent — I want the call to go well. To feel like the relationship is something it might be becoming. If the call goes badly, that's information I don't want yet.

She reads this back. She writes: So I'm afraid the call will reveal that the relationship isn't as far along as I hope. And I'm protecting myself from that information by not making the call.

Which is how I've always managed the Grace relationship. Manage my own expectations by not testing them.

The Self-Regulation Insight

Amara has been tracking her own regulatory patterns throughout the MSW program, partly because the clinical training explicitly requires it and partly because she finds it genuinely useful. She recognizes what she's doing as the pre-emptive regulation pattern her friend Kemi named in Chapter 13: suppressing the experience before it happens.

The difference here is that she is not suppressing an emotion she's already having. She is suppressing an experience she might have — she is not calling in order to avoid feeling something that the call might produce.

She writes: This is anticipatory avoidance. I'm not managing a feeling I have — I'm preventing an experience that might produce a feeling I don't want to have.

The Zeigarnik effect: the uncalled call is always in the back of my mind. Every time I pick up the phone and put it down, I've added to the cognitive weight without resolving it. The call is everywhere because I haven't made it.

She also notes the planning failure: she has been telling herself "I'll call this week" for eight weeks. Each week passes. The call doesn't happen. The intention is real; the implementation is absent.

The Implementation Intention

Amara applies the framework. This is not a task that needs to be blocked on a calendar or structured with a Pomodoro timer. It needs a specific trigger.

She writes: On Sunday evening between 7:00 and 7:30 PM, I will call Grace. Before the call, I will spend two minutes identifying what I actually want from this call — not what I'm afraid it will be, but what I'm hoping for. I will call regardless of what mood I'm in, regardless of my certainty that the call will go well.

She also writes the self-compassion intention, because she recognizes this pattern: If I miss Sunday, I will not tell myself I always do this. I will note that this is hard and make the call Monday.

Sunday Evening

7:05 PM. Amara sits on her bed. She has her phone. She has spent two minutes identifying what she's hoping for: I want to know she's okay. I want to tell her something from my week. I want to hear her voice without managing it.

She calls.

Grace answers on the second ring. She sounds — awake. Clear.

They talk for thirty-seven minutes.

Grace asks about the MSW program, and Amara tells her about Dr. Okafor and the research methods revelation. Grace doesn't fully follow the clinical logic but she tracks the part that matters: You found out why it matters. She says: "That's the thing about school. Sometimes you go in thinking you know what the point is and it turns out to be something you didn't expect."

Amara tells her about Sasha. Grace laughs at the description — "I need someone who won't require me to manage her state" — and says: "You always did know exactly what you needed. You just used to hide it."

There is a pause. Amara lets it sit.

Grace says: "I've been going to the meeting. The Wednesday one. I've missed three since October but I've gone back each time."

Amara says: "That matters. Going back matters more than not missing."

Grace says: "I know. Someone there said the same thing."

At the end of the call, Amara says: "I'll call again in a couple weeks."

Grace says: "I'd like that."

The Reflection

Amara writes afterward:

I was afraid it would confirm that the relationship isn't as far as I hoped. Instead: it's further. Not complete. Not healed. But further.

I spent eight weeks with the call in my head, a low-grade background presence every time I looked at my phone. All of that weight for a thirty-seven-minute conversation that was mostly just — two people being in contact.

The anticipatory aversiveness was worse than the actual experience. By a lot.

The version of Grace I was afraid of encountering wasn't the Grace I encountered. Which doesn't mean she won't be harder next time. But the call I was avoiding was the one in my imagination, not the one on the phone.

She also notes something about the implementation intention that she hadn't anticipated: the two minutes of identifying what she was hoping for changed the affective texture of making the call. Instead of approaching it from a defensive posture (what will I have to manage?), she approached it with a specific positive intention. Not an expectation — an intention. The distinction mattered.

The Clinical Parallel

Two weeks later, in supervision with Marcus, Amara brings a case involving a client who has been avoiding scheduling a follow-up appointment with a specialist. The client knows the appointment is necessary. The client is managing a condition that will worsen without attention. The client has had the referral for six weeks.

Marcus asks: "What do you think is driving the avoidance?"

Amara considers. "It's not that she doesn't know what to do. She knows. It's that making the appointment makes the situation real in a way it isn't yet. Not making the appointment is a way of not having the diagnosis be fully true."

Marcus says: "How would you work with that?"

Amara: "Not by telling her to call. By asking her what she's afraid the appointment will confirm, and whether that thing is real or anticipated. And then asking what the first step would be if she were going to make the call this week — not whether she's ready, but what the step is."

Marcus nods. "Where did that come from?"

Amara smiles slightly. "I've been thinking about it from the inside."

Analysis Questions

1. Amara's avoidance of calling Grace is not driven by boredom or performance anxiety in the conventional sense — it is driven by anticipatory avoidance of a feeling she might have (discovering the relationship hasn't progressed). How does the chapter's framework on task aversiveness apply to interpersonal avoidance — situations where the aversive element is not task-related but relationship-related?

2. Amara identifies the Zeigarnik effect in her own experience: "the uncalled call is always in the back of my mind." How does the uncompleted interpersonal task generate the same cognitive intrusion as an uncompleted work task? What does this suggest about the scope of the Zeigarnik effect?

3. Amara's implementation intention includes a two-minute pre-call intention-setting step: "what am I hoping for?" rather than "what am I afraid of?" How does this reframing shift the affective texture of the task? Is this a form of emotion regulation, and if so, which type?

4. The actual call was "further" than Amara had hoped. The anticipatory aversiveness significantly exceeded the actual aversiveness. The chapter quotes Dr. Reyes: "the feeling before starting is not a sign that you shouldn't start — it's what starting feels like." How does Amara's experience illustrate this? What is the adaptive function of anticipatory aversiveness, and when does it become maladaptive?

5. Amara transfers the framework directly to her clinical work with a client who is avoiding a medical appointment. She asks "what is the first step if she were going to make the call this week — not whether she's ready, but what the step is." Why does removing the readiness criterion matter? What psychological function does the readiness criterion serve in procrastination, and what does its removal accomplish?