Anxiety can be confusing for everyone – the people who struggle with it and the people who love them. Here’s what you need to know if someone you love has anxiety.
by Karen Young (BSc)(Psych)(Hons)MastGestTher
by Karen Young (BSc)(Psych)(Hons)MastGestTher
Anxiety can be confusing for everyone – the people who struggle with it and the people who love them. Here’s what you need to know if someone you love has anxiety.
We don’t need to protect kids from the discomfort of anxiety.
We’ll want to, but as long as they’re safe (including in their bodies with sensory and physiological needs met), we don’t need to - any more than we need to protect them from the discomfort of seatbelts, bike helmets, boundaries, brushing their teeth.
Courage isn’t an absence of anxiety. It’s the anxiety that makes something brave. Courage is about handling the discomfort of anxiety.
When we hold them back from anxiety, we hold them back - from growth, from discovery, and from building their bravery muscles.
The distress and discomfort that come with anxiety won’t hurt them. What hurts them is the same thing that hurts all of us - feeling alone in distress. So this is what we will protect them from - not the anxiety, but feeling alone in it.
To do this, speak to the anxiety AND the courage.
This will also help them feel safer with their anxiety. It puts a story of brave to it rather than a story of deficiency (‘I feel like this because there’s something wrong with me,’) or a story of disaster (‘I feel like this because something bad is about to happen.’).
Normalise, see them, and let them feel you with them. This might sound something like:
‘This feels big doesn’t it. Of course you feel anxious. You’re doing something big/ brave/ important, and that’s how brave feels. It feels scary, stressful, big. It feels like anxiety. It feels like you feel right now. I know you can handle this. We’ll handle it together.’
It doesn’t matter how well they handle it and it doesn’t matter how big the brave thing is. The edges are where the edges are, and anxiety means they are expanding those edges.
We don’t get strong by lifting toothpicks. We get strong by lifting as much as we can, and then a little bit more for a little bit longer. And we do this again and again, until that feels okay. Then we go a little bit further. Brave builds the same way - one brave step after another.
It doesn’t matter how long it takes and it doesn’t matter how big the steps are. If they’ve handled the discomfort of anxiety for a teeny while today, then they’ve been brave today. And tomorrow we’ll go again again.♥️
Sep 3
Feeling seen, safe, and cared for is a biological need. It’s not a choice and it’s not pandering. It’s a biological need.
Children - all of us - will prioritise relational safety over everything.
When children feel seen, safe, and a sense of belonging they will spend less resources in fight, flight, or withdrawal, and will be free to divert those resources into learning, making thoughtful choices, engaging in ways that can grow them.
They will also be more likely to spend resources seeking out those people (their trusted adults at school) or places (school) that make them feel good about themselves, rather than avoiding the people of spaces that make them feel rubbish or inadequate.
Behaviour support and learning support is about felt safety support first.
The schools and educators who know this and practice it are making a profound difference, not just for young people but for all of us. They are actively engaging in crime prevention, mental illness prevention, and nurturing strong, beautiful little people into strong, beautiful big ones.♥️
Aug 19
Emotion is e-motion. Energy in motion.
When emotions happen, we have two options: express or depress. That’s it. They’re the options.
When your young person (or you) is being swamped by big feelings, let the feelings come.
Hold the boundary around behaviour - keep them physically safe and let them feel their relationship with you is safe, but you don’t need to fix their feelings.
They aren’t a sign of breakage. They’re a sign your child is catalysing the energy. Our job over the next many years is to help them do this respectfully.
When emotional energy is shut down, it doesn’t disappear. It gets held in the body and will come out sideways in response to seemingly benign things, or it will drive distraction behaviours (such as addiction, numbness).
Sometimes there’ll be a need for them to control that energy so they can do what they need to do - go to school, take the sports field, do the exam - but the more we can make way for expression either in the moment or later, the safer and softer they’ll feel in their minds and bodies.
Expression is the most important part of moving through any feeling. This might look like talking, moving, crying, writing, yelling.
This is why you might see big feelings after school. It’s often a sign that they’ve been controlling themselves all day - through the feelings that come with learning new things, being quiet and still, trying to get along with everyone, not having the power and influence they need (that we all need). When they get into the car at pickup, finally those feelings they’ve been holding on to have a safe place to show up and move through them and out of them.
It can be so messy! It takes time to learn how to lasso feelings and words into something unmessy.
In the meantime, our job is to hold a tender, strong, safe place for that emotional energy to move out of them.
Hold the boundary around behaviour where you can, add warmth where you can, and when they are calm talk about what happened and how they might do things differently next time. And be patient. Just because someone tells us how to swing a racket, doesn’t mean we’ll win Wimbledon tomorrow. Good things take time, and loads of practice.♥️
Aug 10
Thank you Adelaide! Thank you for your stories, your warmth, for laughing with me, spaghetti bodying with me (when you know, you know), for letting me scribble on your books, and most of all, for letting me be a part of your world today.
So proud to share the stage with Steve Biddulph, @matt.runnalls ,
@michellemitchell.author, and @nathandubsywant. To @sharonwittauthor - thank you for creating this beautiful, brave space for families to come together and grow stronger.
And to the parents, carers, grandparents - you are extraordinary and it’s a privilege to share the space with you.
Parenting is big work. Tender, gritty, beautiful, hard. It asks everything of us - our strength, our softness, our growth. We’re raising beautiful little people into beautiful big people, and at the same time, we’re growing ourselves.
Sometimes that growth feels impatient and demanding - like we’re being wrenched forward before we’re ready, before our feet have found the ground.
But that’s the nature of growth isn’t it. It rarely waits for permission. It asks only that we keep moving.
And that’s okay.
There’s no rush. You have time. We have time.
In the meantime they will keep growing us, these little humans of ours. Quietly, daily, deeply. They will grow us in the most profound ways if we let them. And we must let them - for their sake, for our own, and for the ancestral threads that tie us to the generations that came before us, and those that will come because of us. We will grow for them and because of them.♥️
Aug 2
Their words might be messy, angry, sad. They might sound bigger than the issue, or as though they aren’t about the issue at all.
The words are the warning lights on the dashboard. They’re the signal that something is wrong, but they won’t always tell us exactly what that ‘something’ is. Responding only to the words is like noticing the light without noticing the problem.
Our job isn’t to respond to their words, but to respond to the feelings and the need behind the words.
First though, we need to understand what the words are signalling. This won’t always be obvious and it certainly won’t always be easy.
At first the signal might be blurry, or too bright, or too loud, or not obvious.
Unless we really understand the problem behind signal - the why behind words - we might inadvertently respond to what we think the problem is, not what the problem actually is.
Words can be hard and messy, and when they are fuelled by big feelings that can jet from us with full force. It is this way for all of us.
Talking helps catalyse the emotion, and (eventually) bring the problem into a clearer view.
But someone needs to listen to the talking. You won’t always be able to do this - you’re human too - but when you can, it will be one of the most powerful ways to love them through their storms.
If the words are disrespectful, try:
‘I want to hear you but I love you too much to let you think it’s okay to speak like that. Do you want to try it a different way?’
Expectations, with support. Leadership, with warmth. Then, let them talk.
Our job isn’t to fix them - they aren’t broken. Our job is to understand them so we can help them feel seen, safe, and supported through the big of it all. When we do this, we give them what they need to find their way through.♥️
Jul 21
