One of the questions we are asked most, both at psychdomain.com and in our everyday work, is a variation on this basic idea: “Why is it no matter how much I explain or punish or threaten, my child still can’t settle down and do what they are asked?” That can be a difficult question to answer at times.
Often when first working with a family, it can be difficult to see where many of the child’s attributes may come from. Are they genetic, learned, willful? Sometimes many of the difficulties the family has faced, or is currently facing, do not come out in an intake or a consultation. Sometimes it can take weeks or months of working with a family before many of the details begin to fill themselves in.
This is not to say the parent or other family member or relatives have necessarily been abusing or neglecting the child. Oftentimes, the genesis of many problems are from much more benign or at least overlooked sources. In many cases the parents have their own history of anxiety or impulsivity. Sometimes there can be a history of difficulty with a former spouse or partner that created anxiety for parent and child.
Stressful situations such as these can create a difficult environment in the child’s brain. When a child’s brain is forming if there is not predictable and stable interactions between them and their caregivers at an early age, the brain often can become overly aware of possible threats around it and also become increasingly poor at distinguishing between threat and safety.
The neuroscientist, Dr. Joseph LeDoux in his book Anxious points out several characteristics of people who suffer from anxiety:
- Increased attention to threat
- Failure to discriminate between threat and safety
- Increased avoidance
- Heightened reactivity to unpredictable threats
- Overestimation of threat significance and likelihood
- Maladaptive behavioral and cognitive control
As we look at how the brain processes information, this becomes a very crucial component in looking at people’s behaviors. The brain is known to process information in a “bottom-up” manner. This means all information your brain takes from outside, or inside, sources needs to pass through lower, or more primitive, parts of the brain first before making its way to higher, or more logical/rational, parts.
The lower parts of the brain are usually seen as being comprised of the brainstem/cerebellum, which monitors and regulates bodily functions (heart rate, blood pressure, etc), and the diencephalon, containing the thalamus and other related structures, which regulates attention, arousal, and basic information processing.
In other words, before a human can access the logical parts of their brain, all information must be “cleared” by the lower parts before getting to the higher parts. If your lower parts are interpreting incoming information as threatening, your brain can easily go into “threat mode” and attend to the potential threats through normal means, increase in heart rate and breathing, readying the body for defense, and not attending to non-threatening stimuli.
This is typically why children, and adults, with anxiety difficulties have difficulty in many areas like attention and organization. Additionally, for someone who has been subjected to psychological trauma, these problems will be even more pronounced. Imagine the difficulty we have concentrating at times if we feel hungry or need to use the bathroom, and then try to imagine the challenges for someone who has undergone physical or emotional abuse.
This idea of the lower parts of the brain having control of information before it is able to be processed by the higher parts is why Dr. Bruce Perry often espouses the idea of “regulate, relate, reason” as a model for helping children with psychological difficulties. If a child has a difficulty in a lower area it will typically manifest in lower areas as well. Further, Perry contends that if a person has trouble regulating their stress response, they will not be able to maintain consistent progress in the other areas.
Of course, this is not to say that there is no way forward from this and people have no recourse but to be a prisoner to their anxiety or trauma. There are many ways to move forward and begin to retrain your brain and nervous system to reframe and begin to reprocess information in ways that are more efficient in serving the higher parts of the brain. As is always the case, one should consult their doctor to see if medication is an appropriate adjunct to the suggestions below.
From our point of view at psychdomain.com, the first step toward finding relief is build one’s ability to be “mindful” or build Mindfulness. For some people, this word, along with many ideas in psychology, has become fraught with negative connotations at times. It is sometimes seen as being ideological or having an agenda on some level. As we hope to continue proving on this site, we reject all attempts to politicize our message in any direction and instead will carry on giving tips and providing support to families of all backgrounds. If you wish to call it self-awareness or any other adjective you wish, be our guest.
The basic precept of Mindfulness is to draw one’s attention inward and to allow themselves to sense what they are feeling, thinking, or experiencing in a given moment without judging or shaming themselves. As one cultivates this ability, they can grow in their ability to understand their reactions to different situations and see almost any area of their life in new ways.
It doesn’t really take much thought to understand that if someone wants to change the patterns of their life on their own, they would need to be aware of exactly what those patterns are and what brings them about. Of course, the problem when attempting this with children or anyone who is not ready for this step is that it requires sustained effort and consistency to build the skill.
As one endeavors to gain insight into their suffering there are many different roads to help one’s self find new ways of looking at the world. As with any type of change, one does not have to “master” mindful thinking before moving forward but it can often make the process more fulfilling in the long run, as it can lead to new opportunities that we may never have entertained before. Below we will look at some areas where one can find new ways to reprogram and re-energize themselves as they address their anxiety.
Nature
One of the easiest and most universal means of connecting with yourself is in connecting with Nature. This can come in many forms. Of course going to the mountains or the beach are two of the most common forms of connecting with nature. As someone who grew up in a rural area, hunting was a pastime that many people enjoyed. I can remember many a morning getting up at before dawn and being by myself out on a draw. Watching the sun come up and listening to the forest and mountains begin to awaken always seemed to make me feel so full of purpose. Of course many people will go to the beach to watch the sun rise or set. If you live in a large city or far from beaches or mountains, many cities and towns have large parks or opportunities for hiking or biking.
The key to doing this in a mindful way is to shut off your phone, take your headphones out of your ears and simply sense what is going on around you. Take note of all the sensory information you can both outside and inside yourself. Be aware of things you find create anxiety within you, smells, sights, sounds. Now look for things you find create calmness.
Prayer/Meditation
Call it whatever you want, prayer or meditation that is focused and without interruption is another widely used way of connecting with one’s inner experience. Again it is vital to shut off your phone and put headphones away. Focusing on what you feel in the moment with judging it is one of the keys to mindful thinking. If you feel bored, notice that without acting on it. If you are hungry or thirsty focus on that feeling within your body and hold it there.
Yoga/Working out
Again, both can be equally efficient in helping us gain insight into our internal experience. Of course, Yoga is set up to be a built-in mindfulness exercise. The goal is typically to learn how to become attuned to our body and feelings. As mentioned above with mindfulness, Yoga sometimes seems to be linked to certain classes of people and political ideologies but this should not preclude someone from practicing it simply on those grounds.
Working out in a typical American type of gym or at home can also be a viable means of checking in with one’s self and building awareness. As always, if we are trying to build insight into our experience, working out needs to be done with as little extraneous interruption as possible while being aware of the sensory information being communicated to our brains.
Breathing
Breathing can be seen as both a category of its own and a piece of the above categories. As mentioned previously, all information in the body must pass through lower levels of the brain before being integrated into higher levels. If one has been programed by past experience to see threat all around them, one of the first steps the body takes is to increase our blood pressure and heart rate to ready the body for escape or fight. As this happens, our breathing often becomes shallow further pushing our brain into feelings of threat in many instances.
As one learns to recognize their bodily sensations, through some or all of the above activities, they can learn that by returning to deep, slow breathing the brain will be signaled that the threat has passed and bodily functions can return to normal.
There are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of different breathing techniques that are featured all over the Internet. Our suggestion is to pick two or three that your child feels fits them. They will often be resistant to this at first as people often are to any new activity. As an adult, you can often influence getting the rest of your family engaged by making this part of the family routine. Set aside, five to ten minutes in the morning and evening (possibly before bedtime) and practice. It is our experience that children often will not voluntarily engage in the practice at first, but as you continue practicing consistently, the children will often become involved over time.
Anxiety is a part of everyone’s life. It can often be functional as it is the body’s way of alerting us of possible threats around us. However, if we are not careful and allow anxiety to interfere with our everyday lives, it can become crippling, especially for children. Thankfully, there are many ways for us to address anxiety and make it work for us as we become more effective people and live lives of possibility.
Please drop us an email or comment at psychdomain.com if there is an area of mental health you would like us to address in the future.