I never understood why my child would cling to
my leg, beg, scream and plead “don’t leave me here”. From the time he was just a beautiful chubby
baby, I knew that he suffered huge separation anxiety and I thought he will
outgrow it. I was completely wrong
thinking he would out grow the anxiety; it was like a forest fire spreading out
of control. The tantrums stemming from
anxiety became much more grandiose, the frequency increased, and they appeared as
“behaviours”.
I still remember dropping him off one morning in
Junior Kindergarten; all the children lined up calmly, my child was on the
ground screaming and crying. I never
understood why he resorted to this behaviour: I would ask myself “why can’t he
keep it together”? At one point I used
bribery, guilt, scare tactics, tears, nothing worked to change his behaviour. The "Aha" moment came to me one day when my son
was having what I called an episode. His
whole body was trembling with fear; I then realized what he was
experiencing was completely real to him.
The question that weighed me down, or caused me to lose the most sleep
was: “how do I make it better for him’?
I then began to really look into anxiety and
what the effects of it are. I was surprised through research how many people
suffer from it, yet manage to suppress and hide it. So many people in our midst walk around with
anxiety, however, they are able to cope for periods of time or silently
suffer. I took the route of seeking out
professional help, and we readily made use of the resources that were given to
us. During my NLP Practitioner course, I
came to understand that anxiety is driven by fear. Fear is a negative emotion that attaches
itself to many circumstances; feeds itself by causing anxiety in many parts of
our life.
For adults or for or children who are older we
use Time Line Therapy to release fear and specific occurrences of
anxiety. With smaller children like my
son, I began to create a visual movie for him and to place it into the
future. He would replay the movie at
peak times of anxiety during the day. He
has become such a master at movie making, that he is now able to create the
visual movie that gives him success. Once the visual movie has been created we
release it and place it into the future.
This technique alone has proven to be successful and the anxiety levels have
scaled back by leaps and bounds.
I have come to realize that anxiety is a pesky
little frenemy; it disguises itself as a protection, however, is really our
enemy. Children know exactly what they
need; they do not have filters or baggage to carry around as adults do. When they feel extreme fear they resort to
protecting themselves by tears, tantrums, aggression and so much more. Anxiety is not something that can be
controlled easily without help, effective therapy, techniques or tools.
Anxiety is most likely something that might rear
itself on and off, during the course of life, however, it can be tamed.
