Anxiety
It’s very common to experience anxiety growing up. When anxiety seems to be all that you experience then it might sometimes be referred to as a disorder. GAD is a term for General Anxiety Disorder.
Here I will invite you to consider the ‘order’ in anxiety disorders. What I mean by this is to remain curious about the feelings of anxiety because these feelings have genuine work to do for you. If someone talks about anxiety to me then I will often respond with the word ‘alarmed’. The word alarm takes us to the root of the anxiety a lot quicker.
What happens when you’re anxious?
What is happening in the body when we are anxious is that our own alarm system is activated. This alarm system is the order within the disorder, because we all need our alarm systems functioning in life to get by. If we could not feel our alarm system, then we could get ourselves into serious trouble. The work of the alarm system is to bring us a sense of caution. Think of a young child out exploring in a forest, getting a bit too far away from mummy and daddy and the alarm system kicks in. Everything seems that little bit more scarier all of a sudden. Wise move, because mum and dad might be a bit too far away to catch you if you fall here. So this alarm system is protecting us. We want this system working.
So what happens when it becomes a disorder, well maybe it’s getting stuck. It’s very easy for us to go to what is alarming our children and try and manipulate, change or take away the stimulus. But if the alarm is stuck, then the stimulus is not the issue. The problem is not the snake or the elevator. The fear of the snake is there because the alarm system is stuck. When the alarm system is stuck then you might notice hyper-vigilance in the child, constantly on the look out for things that might worry them. It’s very hard for these children to rest with a heightened alarm system on constantly.
A Stuck Alarm System
There are a few reasons why our alarm systems might get stuck. One of the reasons is that it might not have gone through it’s full journey before. A child might not be used to the alarm system going up and then being soothed. The work of the alarm is to bring us to wither bring us to caution or bring us to a sense of futility i.e. I must be cautious when climbing the mountain or mountains are not to be climbed.
The Role of Play
If you have young children you will notice alarm based games in play all the time. It might be running away from monsters, or making it across the shark infested seas. For a very young baby peak-a-boo must be very scary. A sense of aloneness. But the beauty of play is that it is a safe way to feel our own alarm system. This is part of out natural way of developing the alarm system. Opportunities for true play have become less and less in our society and there is a rise in the number of children with alarm based problems.
You might notice these days alarming computer games. Call of duty, Fortnite, these types of games. Very very popular with young children. Maybe the computer game has become the safest place to experiance the alarm. The trade off here though is that it computer games are not true play and it’s not the best way to give the alarm system space to develop.
So if you have a child with an alarm-based problem, my invitation to you is to go straight to the order within this problem. Go to the alarm. The beauty of going to the order is that there is an ease there, there is not a sense of anything being wrong, it’s easier to connect. Can you take responsibility for the development of the alarm system? Make space for alarm-based games in your play, make it fun. Normalise these feelings as much as you can, even though they might be stuck the feeling itself is very normal. How can you give your child safe experiences where they can experaince the alarm go up and come back down again? Think of it a bit like a developing river, where the channel can get deeper and deeper so the water can start to flow more freely. If you can do this then it is the beginning to helping a child get there alarm system back functioning and starting to engage again in the world.
If you want to find out more about my work with families and/or Compassionate Inquiry then please get in touch mail@joeatkinson.co.uk or check out my website www.joeatkinson.co.uk