Mental Health — Tools
Parenting in an Anxious World — Part Two
The Awesome in Acknowledgement
In Part One, we learned how Radical Acceptance is a powerful tool that enables us to evaluate our own assumptions, interactions and reactions, without judgement. As parents, this knowledge can significantly improve our interactions with our children — especially with a child struggling with anxiety. How? By understanding our own automatic responses to our child’s stress, we can pivot these responses. After all, our goal shouldn’t be to eliminate the stressors of life that our children will undoubtably face — or minimize their feelings about them, or instill a sense of shame over having such feelings — but to provide them with tools to successfully practice handling these uncomfortable situations as they arise.
Personally, I stumbled about quite a bit figuring out how to manage, not only my own anxiety disorder, but those of my children. I, like the vast majority of parents, want to help my children be the best version of themselves. Unfortunately, my automatic reactions to their anxiety weren’t particularly helpful. The examples below represent common types of conversations I’ve had with my anxious children.
In an effort to support my children, I tended to minimize their discomfort. One day, one of my kids said, “Mom, I have such upsetting thoughts during the day. I just can’t get away from them.” In an attempt not to feed the anxiety, I said, “Sweetheart, everyone has bizarre thoughts. It’s normal. There is nothing to worry about.”
By the sixth time on the same day, as I was asked for reassurance about these upsetting thoughts, I had hit my limit. I finally said, “Jesus! Why are you so worried about that thought!?! It just means you are a normal eleven-year-old. Stop, already!” My intention wasn’t to demean, clearly — but, I was irritated by this point. I figured, if I wasn’t upset about these thoughts in and of themselves, shouldn’t my child know not to be upset? There was no need to worry.
I could see the anxiety “issues” weren’t dissipating. They were getting worse. So, one day I tried something new. Boy, was it magic! It went something like this: “Mom, I love you. Are you sure you are going to be OK today, while I’m at school? What if something happens to you?”
“Dear, I see that you are really worried about me. I know that is a lot of emotion to handle. Scary, even. Has anything happened to me while you’ve been in school?”
“No.”
“It’s not likely that anything will happen to me today, either. I am confident you can handle these big feelings. How about you put this worry on hold for now? You can come back to it later in the day.”
What I had done, without knowing the terminology, is called VALIDATION. I would later learn that this is one of the tenets Marsha Linehan created for therapists practicing DBT. In shifting my reactions, I showed my children I HEARD them, and I UNDERSTOOD they were grappling with big emotions. I did not interject judgement of their having these feelings.
I refer to this as “magic” since I saw something slowly start to change. In my acknowledgement of my children’s struggles and sharing my opinion that they were capable of handling them, they started believing in their own abilities. This took the power away from the upsetting thoughts. I also showed them I was strong enough to handle their upset and I had confidence in the situation. At this time, my children were both under the care of a psychiatrist, and were also being treated with medication. Equally, if not more, important were the improvements that occurred from my shift in behavior.
Perhaps my journey could have been made easier if I had trained as a psychologist and specialized in DBT. I didn’t, and most parents haven’t either. Again, this doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from learning and applying these techniques — starting today.
