Anxiety! Your Can't See it.... but its there.

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.