Sometimes we are wrong about what's causing our anxiety.
Feb 23, 2023
I'm working with someone who's daughter is struggling with anxiety. He's her Dad so as you can imagine, he is desperate to find a solution.
He talks to her very openly about it which is great!
A couple of days ago she told him. "Look. My anxiety is ONLY about going to school. I'm happy all the time, except when I think about school or when I have to go. So, if you could just homeschool me, this would be over. Everything would be fine."
When our kids are suffering, we would do ANYTHING to make it stop.
This was a very appealing option for him. Not because he wanted to homeschool her but because he wanted a solution.
"Do you think she's right?" he asks.
THAT is one of the tricky things about anxiety. When we feel anxious, our brains search for an explanation. Actually, we do this with other emotions too. We feel happy, we look around and see what's going on that is making us feel happy. We want to repeat that. When we feel anxious, we look around to see what's going on and we want to AVOID that.
But our brains aren't always correct. In fact, a key problem with anxiety is that there is a disconnect between the emotion and our rational brain.
We are looking for a logical solution to an irrational problem.
As we talked more, he was able to think of other times that she showed anxious behaviors, completely unrelated to school. He could see that she wasn't correct. She's been anxious about lots of things.
It can take time to unravel anxiety. It can take time to get to the bottom of where anxiety is really coming from. But, I believe the work is worth it. The work to find calm and peace is possible, you just might have to look somewhere different than you thought.