Hello. My 6 year old daughter has severe anxiety. It seems like her mind is always working on “what if’s” and worse case scenarios. We do have family history of anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. My husband is anti-therapy and anti-medication at this point in time. He just thinks it’s a phase and she will outgrow it. As a fellow anxiety princess, I know it’s not a phase and will plague her through her entire life. What can I do to help her? Tonight the battle was - I heard something at the backdoor. What if someone breaks in? What if there is a snake? And every reason I gave her that this is not going to happen she had a logical, well-thought reason as to why it could happen. She has been in hysterical tears for over an hour. I desperately need help.
Anxious 6 Year Old: Hello. My 6 year... - Anxiety and Depre...
Anxious 6 Year Old
Well even if your husband is anti therapy could YOU still take her?
No. It’s a matter of logistics. I work full time and she’s in school. School and home are about half an hour away from work. I would have to leave work, pick her up, go back to “town”, do therapy, get her back home. It would be an hour round trip plus the therapy time. I would need his help to get her there regularly. And as a parent, I couldn’t go behind his back or completely go against his wishes. It needs to be a family decision.
Could she speak to the school counselor?
That’s a good option. She will be doing online school for a few weeks but I will discuss with the counselor for when they go back.
Great. Please keep us updated!
Sending warm thoughts your way. ❤️ My daughter started having anxiety at the age of 6. She was very fearful that something bad was going to happen to me. She also began to be very fearful about all the what if’s that you described. Her pediatrician recommended a child therapist and she attended about 4 months of therapy. It was very helpful for her but in the process she was actually diagnosed with ADHD. I was told her untreated ADHD was causing her anxiety. Her mind is always on the go. She is now 8 and doing much better. She is not currently taking any medication for her ADHD but I am a lot more cognizant of her emotions and am better able to help her cope.
Depending where you live, try to find a Safe Sound Protocol practitioner to help with her nervous system to help her middle ear muscles to work more efficiently to maximize her ventral vagus nerve. It only takes five days with minimal prior work and check out soon thereafter to see the effects.
Also if you can get a Dreamed, preferably a large pillow not the small ones download the music programed for aide in helping sleep the child sleep. heavily researched using Stephen Porges research for decades. These tools maximize the nervous state of young children. Or teach them to meditate, if you can pull it off yourself?!?
This is a great way to help what they forgot to tell us in childhood--that our nervous system needs to me honored and to stop overusing the overtired sympathetic nervous system that made so many think they had ADHD.
We were not allowed to honor the nervous system which can send 80% of signals to the brain so the brain can respond with the 20 % back to the body. They got this backwards for centuries. That is why our brains are going amuck with constant rumination, why adverse childhood experiences can damage the future for our children if we do not do something to let them express their fears without overreacting and helping them calm down their nervous system. Partly this needs to happen for the grown up who is already over wired. Meditation is too hard for grown adult to master even in yoga but at least is a start. Qigong is also helpful but the Safe Sound Protocols helps with the process of the nervous system if the body is too tight to move effectively.
Maybe you husband could lean to meditate and help the child along with you if he does not agree to use the headsets to calm down the Childs nervous system. they need to get it from somewhere.
At a time when we just learned this more efficient neuroscience in our history, the pandemic stopped the spead of the word. And within our own country people began to cause further fears within us to inhibit the growth of neuroscience which inhibits the truth to set us free from ongoing fff experiences.
Now we have the lion in the room in the news this past year. Time to realize there is no lion in the room, hopefully, and we can train our nervous system the resilience it has always had, only to be squelched by parents, teachers and society.
Time we allowed out bodies to send us the signals we were born with to send messages to our brains, not the reverse. Do not trust my ramblings but look into the polyvagal theory and find a good caring professional who can help.
Therapy ate this age is really only in the helping the child to feel safe enough to use the earphones for five days and check on the results. This can be an Godsend and your husband can listen to Stephen Porges to check out the truth. If you ca n find someone who can do Safe Sound Protocol I think your husband would be happy.
Thank you. Will definitely be doing some research on SSP. Meditation and Dreamed are great ideas as well. We used to do some meditation and over time we just stopped. We are restarting that today and I’m going to look for the Dreamed.
Dreampad , not dreamed, through Integrated Listening System. It is a large pillow that you sink you head into and hear and feel the music around your skulll. Marvelous sound and warmth as the sound surround the skull and is totally safe without these instruments people try to sell folks to stimulate the ventral vagus nerve when the body needs to learn how to do it on its own. It is not like these physicians manipulations but just the music itself helping heal the nervous system and brain ultimately to calm down the fears within out system.
Thank you. I used to go to therapy and stopped when I changed jobs. It didn’t work with scheduling. It may be time to revisit.
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