Archive | August, 2015

Why Doesn’t My Child Want to Get Help?

21 Aug

Your home is nice, but sometimes you would like to go out for a change of scenery, perhaps a game of mini-golf or dinner at a family oriented restaurant. Is that really asking too much? Well actually, yes, says your anxious child, home is really better. And realizing how much your child’s anxiety is affecting the entire family, limiting positive family activities, you decide to get help. But there is one problem: your child doesn’t want any help and indicates in no uncertain terms that it is not happening. What to do? The situation is getting urgent and your child won’t budge. Here are three items for your consideration.

First, it may be that you have a child whose first response to anything new is an emphatic “no” or perhaps a dramatic scream of bloody murder–it doesn’t matter whether it is mini-golf or a scheduled visit to a therapist. But given some time, he will come around when he senses you are not going to give up. So time and a clear parental directive is what is needed for the child to wrap his head around this new turn of events. Even though an anxious child’s first reaction to a suggestion to do something different might always be a “no”,  often she can end up going to the birthday party and having fun. But sometimes  that doesn’t happen, so of course, we also want to take the time to see if there are some specific concerns we didn’t know about.

Second, the problem may be that it just feels too hard to talk about those anxious feelings. For some children the concern may be that talking about their fears will make them more real or make them come true. This may be a reflection of the magical thinking that can color children’s mental processes. Saying something out loud, they fear, will somehow make the fear more likely to happen. Even adults will sometimes say “don’t say that,” as if silence offers some protection. Another way in which it may be hard to tolerate talking about worries is that some children are extremely self-conscious and tolerating any attention is rather painful.  Or it may be that your child is just very emotionally reactive for any number of reasons, and tolerating any feelings is very hard. And for this type of child, any new situation needs to be introduced slowly so they can build their tolerance or capacity to deal with it.

Third, if your child shows little motivation to change or to deal with an obvious problem, it may be that you have been too helpful and accommodating. It is only natural as a parent, when your child is in distress, to want to provide comfort and reassurance. And if your child is screaming bloody murder, it may feel a lot easier just to give in to whatever is demanded.  However, if things are too easy and comfortable at home, the anxious avoidance is powerfully reinforced. And then there is little incentive for the child to get out of her comfort zone and challenge herself. Accommodation to anxious behavior can take many forms, from indulging a child’s need for  reassurance,  to buying excessive amounts of soap for a child with germ concerns, or not making them go to school. And because it runs against our natural inclination not to provide comfort to our distressed children, most parents of anxious children have done some reinforcing of anxiety by being overly helpful. However, that does not mean giving free rein to the feelings of impatience or irritation that having an anxious child can create. Yes it is pretty frustrating for your child to have a temper tantrum just because you need to go to a clothing store. But that doesn’t mean that a get tough policy (“we have had enough of your games!”) is appropriate or effective. In fact it will probably make things worse because in the potential power struggle that follows, the real point of mastering anxiety gets lost in the midst of a parent-child battle of wills. Rather, think in incremental terms of how to decrease your accommodating actions, so that the child can adapt slowly, not losing sight of the purpose of this change, which is to help him/her be less limited by anxiety.

“Just scared but can’t say why”

9 Aug

It is generally easier to help your child when he/she can clearly identify what is scary. A monster under the bed is an easier problem to contend with than a nonspecific “I am afraid”.  But there are occasions when children can’t identify why they are scared, or if they do, it may feel like they are making up an explanation. Sometimes we haven’t asked the right question or the child doesn’t feel safe enough to spill the beans. But there is another layer to this problem: the experiences of anxiety and fear are products of the brain’s alarm system, designed to keep us safe and alert to danger. When we consider how the alarm system can malfunction in two different ways, we may get a clue as why your child can’t pinpoint the reason for his/her concern.

The first way is that there may be a problem in the wiring and software of the alarm system, so that it generates too many false alarms or overstates the magnitude of the threat. OCD, for instance, is a problem with the junk mail filter or “anti-virus” program in the brain. The junk mail filter isn’t doing its job and is letting anxious thoughts clutter the mind. Educating children about junk mail or “not believing everything you think” can be an extremely helpful first step.

The second way the alarm system can malfunction is by getting overloaded. Just like any other system, our alarm system has a limit to what it can process, and this is what happens with trauma. When the alarm system can successfully implement a self-protective response of fight or flight, no trauma results because it has done its job. But there are a variety of circumstances in which the alarm system gets overloaded and the system shuts down. It can’t run away or put up a fight so it just  freezes.  What comes out are all the symptoms we associate with PTSD: flashbacks, avoiding any reminders of the trauma, and increased anxiety and emotional arousal. Traumatic stressors can include war, natural disasters, car crashes, medical procedures, and interpersonal violence, to name a few.   When it comes to children,  this type of stress actively interferes with nervous system development, which is actually a 25- year construction process, according to contemporary neuroscientists.

A central brain structure in anxiety and fear is the amygdala. It can form nonverbal, essentially unconscious memories of frightening events and it is operational at birth. The part of our brain that helps make conscious recollection, the hippocampus, is a work in progress during the first two years of life, which is why we don’t have clear memories of being babies. However, the amygdala can encode traumatic events on a nonverbal level: in one study, boys who were circumcised without anesthesia were shown to be more reactive to vaccination shots at 4-6months compared to boys who received this procedure with anesthesia. Although there is no conscious recollection, the reactivity of the infants who did not receive the anesthesia suggests that their bodies  had learned something from the experience and that the sensations wer remembered. While the research is clear that chronic stress and trauma can make the nervous system more reactive and anxious, on a more practical level, it is a hard thing to prove. Sometimes, a parent can say that their child was never the same after a particular incident, such as illness or accident, or that the mother knows she went through a horrific experience while pregnant or giving birth, and it certainly affected her. But the science is clear that nonverbal memories can be formed. So we are making some informed speculation based on neuroscience, trauma research and the clear inability to come up with an alternative explanation.  It may be that when your child can’t say why he or she is afraid, what you are seeing is the long shadow of something frightening that happened long ago to a tiny brain that got overwhelmed. Therapeutic interventions that are more based in becoming aware of body sensation, such as Somatic Experiencing Therapy, EMDR and Sensori-Motor Psychotherapy, can be very helpful with this kind of trauma.

copyright@edward plimpton