Archive | August, 2014

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

27 Aug

    From Your Anxious Child: Emails to Parents by Edward H. Plimpton, PhD                                    

                                              Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

The condition commonly called OCD is not the same as being “obsessed” with football, gardening or “Dancing with the Stars”. To have a strong, consuming interest is not the same as having OCD. In OCD there is an intense preoccupation, which causes considerable distress, and which the individual seeks to get rid of through a series of actions which are known as rituals.  Because of the excessive and often time consuming nature of these rituals, or compulsions, and the emotional distress involved, they begin to interfere with everyday life. Perhaps the most well-known OCD ritual is hand washing, which can be carried out to such an extreme that the hands become red and chafed. But rituals can also take on the form of questions which are repetitive such as, “Are you sure you know the way home?” or, “Are you sure I don’t have cancer?” in which no amount of reassurance seems to put the matter to rest. And with some rituals there is a clear superstitious or magical element, as when a child might tap his foot a certain number of times.  Some rituals do not involve an overt behavior but rather consist of having to have a “good thought”  in order to undo a” bad thought.”  There are several sources for the distress that this condition causes. First, the awareness that the rituals do not make sense and that other people don’t share their concerns. Second, with intrusive thoughts, the child might feel, “If  I am having these bad thoughts I must be a bad person.” Third, the intense discomfort that occurs from the obsessions and consequently the difficulty in not acting on them. The rituals really do provide some momentary relief and consequently become quite compelling. The unfortunate problem is that the rituals begin to act like an addiction so that the more you do them the more you have to do them.

There are a number of good books for parents on this topic: Tamar Chansky  Freeing Your Child From Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, John March with Christine Benton Talking Back to OCD, and Dawn Huebner What To Do When Your Brain Gets Stuck: A Kid’s Guide to Overcoming OCD,  to name just a few.  And don’t get discouraged if your child appears to be dealing with OCD. It is actually one of the more treatable anxiety disorders providing the therapist is trained in cognitive behavior therapy using exposure and response prevention.  There is some emerging evidence that children who receive treatment for OCD may not necessarily retain their symptoms into adulthood, or at least the severity will be greatly diminished.  The reason to take action is simple: we don’t want the child to accumulate the hours of practicing the OCD habits that will then create an entrenched way of doing business, and early intervention can interrupt the development of this habit.  Additionally, don’t be surprised to discover that some of your best intentioned efforts to help your child, while they may have provided short term relief, actually made the problem worse over time. Our default reaction as parents is to provide comfort and reassurance when there is distress, but in the landscape of OCD such reassurance is not helpful. This is not to say that you should stop being empathic and caring with your child, but rather that there are skills that need to be learned. It is not straight forward, but then again neither is OCD.

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First Aid for Panic

27 Aug

From Your Anxious Child: Emails to Parents by Edward H. Plimpton, PhD

First Aid for Panic

A child in the grip of panic, or perhaps even terror, is not a sight that a parent easily forgets. The circumstances can range from a trip to the dentist, the prospect of a thunderstorm  observing  something frightening, or just getting out of the car to go to school. But there is your child hyperventilating, and either huddled in a ball or pacing back and forth and feeling desperate.  And what can you do? Well, actually the first aid advice tends to be very similar, even when it comes from professionals who have every different orientations. The basic elements in bringing a panic attack under control involve the following:

  1. The hyperventilating needs to be replaced by slow, deep “belly breathing.”
  2. The disorientation and dizziness produced by the panic need  to be counteracted by having the child “ground” herself by feeling her feet on the ground.
  3. The child needs help to get “out of their heads” by orienting to the immediate physical environment.
  4. Challenging the self-talk that sustains the panic, as in, “I can’t handle this.”

The trick with children who are in a panic state is to translate those ideas into a format or language that helps them grab hold of the lifeline you are offering.  It may be that the best medicine you can offer at first is to be a calm, reassuring presence while you are waiting for this wave of anxiety to subside.  You don’t resolve the problem by being reactive, and in fact by being calm you create a sense of safety.  But of course we want to do more than just wait the panic attack out, we want to teach your child some skills to deal with these intense feelings.   Children of course depend upon their parents to help them regulate and manage their emotions  because their nervous systems are still under construction.  So the parent’s job is to help the child build a bridge to the basic first aid strategies for panic.  There are several elements in this bridge building:

  1. The parent is actively modeling belly breathing, grounding techniques and orienting to the external world.
  2. When possible, using pleasing imagery that will capture the child’s imagination. I like the image of breathing like a frog, but there are many possibilities: blowing up a balloon, blowing out birthday candles, or smelling a beautiful flower.
  3. The immediate relief provided by avoiding the panic-inducing situation is powerful, which can lead to children avoiding participating in school or other activities. So the parent has to find a way to set some limits to help the child learn how to manage these feelings. Sometimes, “just do it” is appropriate to the situation. But that requires some judgment and sensitivity, not just getting tough, so the child is not just overwhelmed but can learn to deal with the problematic situation. A studied balance between being very firm and very flexible is optimal, and this rests on having a sense of how overwhelmed the child is.
  4. The first aid is going to work better if the parent and child have practiced those techniques outside of the panic moments. In  the heat of the moment it is almost impossible to learn anything new.

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The Importance of Breathing in Dealing with Anxiety

6 Aug

From Your Anxious Child: Emails to Parents by Edward H. Plimpton

 

The Importance of Breathing in Dealing with Anxiety

 

Got a panic stricken, hyperventilating youngster in front of you? One basic first aid  measure will involve convincing the child to take calm, deep relaxing breaths.  Perhaps you will ask them to blow into a paper bag and fill it up, or just look into your eyes and copy-cat your breathing or just imagine that they are blowing bubbles. This calm, deep belly breathing in which you can see the belly or diaphragm move, helps counteract the overactive alarm system that characterizes many anxious children. It also helps to get them physically active to burn off all that anxious energy.

 

But the benefits of practicing this type of belly breathing go beyond temporary first aid. When we breathe, there is a difference in our heart rate between inhaling and exhaling. Our heart rates increase when we breathe in and slow down when we breathe out. This is known as heart rate variability and it correlates with anxiety. About 10-15% of children are biologically more on the shy and anxious side, and as psychologist Jerome Kagan discovered, these children have lower heart rate variability than their less anxious peers. Fortunately, practicing calm breathing can do wonders. In one study, on the power of breathing, adults were given artificial blister wounds on their arms, one group was taught breathing skills and the control group was left alone. The group that was taught breathing skills found that their blister wounds healed much more quickly than those of  the control group. In other words, breathing helps support the body’s natural capacity to heal itself. We know that the emergency response system, the sympathetic nervous system, the part involved in the fight or flight responses, gets a “regular exercise” from all the anxious things your child does. However, the calming and repairing system has been typically sitting on the sidelines and does not have a chance to get into the ball game. Engaging in calm breathing actually helps build up the muscles in the calming and repairing system, or the parasympathetic system. As a result, the child has some calm down “muscles” that can help tame the overactive alarm “muscles” or help set the foundation so that the child can access his/her smart brain.

 

There are many child friendly ways to teach calm breathing and here are some to get you started.

  1. “Make Lemonade”. Get some newspaper and crumple it up. Put one newspaper ball in your hand. Now pretend the ball is a lemon, and squeeze out as much lemon juice as possible. Do one hand at a time, squeeze as hard as possible, and then relax.
  2. Pretend you are blowing out birthday candles
  3. In more tense situations, ask the child to look into your eyes and copy-cat your breathing.
  4.   http://youtu.be/OaVB7j4BJn    This Ytube video also contains some nice suggestions for children.
  5. Consider also the following books: Lori Lite A Boy and a Bear: The Children’s Relaxation Book, Michael Chissick and Sarah Peacock Frog’s Breathtaking Speech: How Children (and Frogs) Can Use the Breath to Deal with Anxiety, Anger and Tension.

 

Anxious children often want instant results and can be quick to dismiss suggestions. Parental modeling of calm breathing helps as well as  incorporating it into the bedtime routine or other transitional moments. It is a skill that needs to be practiced in nonanxious moments for it to have a chance to be helpful in more high intensity situations.

 

copyright@Edward H. Plimpton 2014

Some resources to help with sleep

4 Aug

From Your Anxious Child: Emails to Parents by Edward H. Plimpton, PhD

Basic Sleep References and Material

Sleep is easily disrupted by anxiety. Without daytime distractions, worry thoughts can fill the child’s bedroom. In addition to the references listed below, consider my essay on making a Worry Motel, it has been an extremely useful intervention for many children. The suggested age ranges are approximate because some children are more indulgent of material that might be geared towards younger children and others have decided intolerance of anything seems babyish. These references are not geared towards the issue of helping your child sleep independently, which is a related issue, but rather providing some alternatives to the “worry channel” that can be playing loud at nighttime.

Dawn Huebner What to Do When You Dread Your Bed: A Kid’s Guide to Overcoming Problems with Sleep
This is good parent child workbook for the elementary school age child (8-12). It has a very child friendly format and discusses some very sound ideas to help with sleep.

CDs

Finding a CD that might be helpful to your child may take some experimenting. We tend to have strong preferences about the type of voice we find calming and the type of music or sounds we enjoy. It is hard to predict what might work for your child. However, I have good luck with the following CDs.

For 5-8 years olds

Jim Weiss Good Night: Enchanting story visualizations with sleeptime music.

Jim Weiss Sweet Dreams: Enchanting story visualizations with sleeptime music

I found the two CDs by Jim Weiss to be very enjoyable for children to listen to.

For 12-18 year olds.

Mark Grant calm and Confident: based on Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing

I like Mark Grant because he places no demand on the listening to do anything and consequently removes any performance pressure that can get in the way of sleeping.

Books

The books that have been written to help children ease into sleep are too numerous to list and there are many delightful books in this category. Often it just may be a good book that is engaging and interesting. I suspect each family has their favorite bedtime books.

For 5-8 year olds

Maureen Garth Starbright: Mediations For Children

In order to fall asleep on their own, children need to develop some coping skills. In this book, the parent provides the beginnings of a visualization story to help set the stage and then invites the child to continue the story on his/her own. This helps builds the child’s imaginative capacity to deal with nighttime worries.

Lori Lite A Boy and a Bear: The Children’s Relaxation Book

This is nice book that teaches relaxation skills in which a boy and bear relax on top of the mountain.

Melanie Watt Scaredy Squirrel at night

Melanie Watt has written a series of books on Scaredy Squirrel dealing with fears in a variety of situations.

Sleep problems can be complicated and a professional consultation may be indicated when simple measures don’t work.