Anxiety Therapy
Anxiety Therapy Can Help an Overly Anxious Child
Do you feel that your child is overly anxious? Are they easily upset about having to do certain things?
It's exhausting having to walk on eggshells around your anxious child who seems ready to blow up at any moment. You’ve tried being patient, reassuring them, and reasoning with them, but their worries persist.
Your child is so focused on their fears that they refuse to participate in typical activities for their age, so you end up having to do those things for them. The entire household has to work around their aversions.
You can see that your child is clearly suffering under the weight of their anxiety. It hurts you to see them missing out on so many childhood experiences. Your other children are also being affected by the limitations placed on the family. You wish your anxious child could enjoy the freedom other kids their age have.
More than anything, you want to understand where this debilitating anxiety is coming from and find ways to help your child overcome it. You want to be able to recognize minor worries before they spiral out of control.
Most of all, you want your child to be happy, independent, and able to embrace life rather than shrink away from it.
If you are concerned that your child’s anxieties are taking over them and your family, you’re in the right place.
Your Child’s Anxiety Does Not Have to Run Your Lives
It may feel impossible now, but parents can learn to reduce and manage their child’s anxiety.
Therapy for child anxiety can help you do these things:
Understand how anxiety works, and about the large part avoidance plays in this dynamic.
Learn how your child’s anxious avoidance of scary things shrinks and limits their world.
Once you understand how anxiety and avoidance work together, you will learn tools and strategies that make sense to get your child’s anxiety and avoidance under control.
Support your child as they apply new skills in overcoming their anxiety and being BRAVE. They will need your help and encouragement as they do the hard work of practicing doing scary things.
Therapy for Childhood Anxiety Will Help Your Child Become Brave!
Through therapy for childhood anxiety, parents and their child together will learn about how anxiety works for us. You will learn about how anxiety helps keep us safe and how it can get out of control.
Our therapy sessions will equip you with specific tools and strategies to handle your child’s anxiety.
Once you understand how anxiety and avoidance feed each other, you and your child will learn how to break the cycle. This will include thinking about anxiety differently, and then not avoiding the scary thing your child has been avoiding. We will do this in little steps, and only with your child’s agreement.
Your child will need your support to implement the strategies we come up with. The most helpful aspect of these strategies is to practice them as often as possible. We will come up with a plan that your child will agree to.
Strategies are based on the latest research on managing anxiety and are practical and straightforward to master.
Practice (exposure) is the key to progress and we will plan out how this can be done. Your child’s anxiety will make them naturally resistant to this, but we will add incentives that will make it worth their while.
As your child masters their anxiety, they will be able to engage in a wider variety of healthy, age-appropriate activities. They will be able to go places and engage in activities without fuss.
The skills you and your child learn will serve them lifelong in managing the natural anxieties that may present themselves.
Child Anxiety Therapy Will Help You Go From This…
Rigid behavior
Digging in their heels
Emotional outbursts – angry, sad, fearful
Clinginess
Refusal to engage in ordinary activities
Household arguing, reassuring, cajoling
To This…
Relaxed demeanor
Improved management of emotions
Increased emotional maturity
Ability to take part in typical activities
Increased confidence and self-esteem
Improved parent-child relationship
Who Is Child Anxiety Therapy For?
Your child is a good fit for therapy with me if:
They are between 4 and 12 years old.
Both parents (if living together) attend all therapy sessions.
Both parents (if living together) are willing to learn and make changes to benefit their child.
A single parent attends all therapy sessions and is willing to learn and make changes to benefit their child.
Your child is NOT a good fit for therapy with me if:
Parents are currently engaged in, or have experienced, a contentious divorce.
They exhibit behaviors consistent with severe OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).
Your child has been diagnosed with OCD and their symptoms severely limit their ability to function.
Parents are severely anxious and are not able to tolerate their child taking any risks.
FAQs About Child Anxiety
Does family therapy actually work?
Yes! Family therapy is a powerful and often quick way to see change in your household. The strategies and methods used have been shown to be successful in reaching parents’ short term goals of having more peace, calm, and better behavior in their households, and also in developing healthy resiliency in their children for the long term.
Why do both parents need to attend? Couldn’t one just come and report back to the other?
In the decades I have been doing this work with families, I have been very pleased with how willing both parents have been to participate in this important work. The Dads (sorry, but they are usually the ones left out of this process!) that I have worked with have universally been invested: in their parenting, in their children, in coordinating with their parenting partner, and in making necessary changes in their parenting. It’s been a pleasure and a delight to witness fathers’ knowledge about and investment in their children.
This work is much more powerful when both parenting partners add their perspective, personalities, and skills to the therapeutic process. Sharing the burden of parenting a child with challenges gives great comfort to both parents.
We don’t want our child to take medicine.
I am not a physician and cannot prescribe medicine. The work we do together will center on learning new techniques and strategies to help you manage your child’s behavior and to have your parenting skills better fit their particular needs.
There will be cases in which my professional judgment dictates that I inform you about the potential benefits of medicine for your child. Early in my career I made sure we exhausted all options before exploring the possibility of medicine for my child clients. However, after seeing how well their child responded to medicine, many parents expressed regrets that they had waited so long to try medicine, and felt that their child had lost important time.
I will suggest an evaluation for medication when I note that a child may not be able to achieve their parents’ goals for them without it. That said, parents are free to decide for themselves what treatment options they choose to pursue.
We just want our child to be happy. Is that a reasonable goal?
In a perfect world, happiness would be a reasonable goal. But in our world, life will present everyone with challenges. My goal for your child will be resilience — the ability to manage themselves in both good times and in hard times. To me, resilience is the closest you can get to happiness and is a powerful quality to foster in a child.
How do we get started?
Getting started is easy! Just contact me to schedule a free initial consultation call. During that call, we will decide if I am the right family therapist for your family. If I am, we will schedule our first session. If I am not the right therapist for you, I will point you in the direction of someone who can help.