Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Mission Ready

Her default behavior returned. Asking questions but not listening for the answers or hearing them incorrectly. As if the question and answer dialog was running inside her head and she needed to engage her voice and at least try to use her listening ability to hold on to some sense of protection from it. One would assume the dialog was exclusively hers and unpleasant.


Another aspect of the behavior was the obsessive need to perform lists of actions. A rigid list often too long for the time available. A way to fill the time, once again to suppress internal chatter that was disturbing?


The challenge was to gently wake her up from that default mode. Shocking her out of the trance was not effective. In fact, various defensive reactions ensued that made the situation worse and even harder to deal with.


To date, this mysterious modality was essentially just accepted. It did not pose a threat to the daily lives of those around her. Now with the discovery mission imminent and her having a major role in it, the risk was no longer acceptable.


What had been learned so far was this: to the degree that one did not respond as if paying attention, she would eventually find a new equilibrium and would be back to the engaging intellect so appreciated by the team.


What concerned the team is emergency situations, the ones whose probability would rise sharply in the upcoming phase of the operation. If the steps of the mission could be clear, many a training method would solve the problem. But the dependence of the steps on each other meant that there were simply too many unique permutations to train for.


Recruiting her had been haphazard. Deep in the throes of the conflict some years ago ...

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