Child Anxiety; Enable or Empower?
Witnessing your child becoming the fodder of anxiety is a tortuous business. This year has presented increasing cause for our children to feel anxious. With the new term starting, anxiety is evermore present.
As a parent, our natural instinct is to protect and serve; protect them from harm and serve their best interests. Please read that again with their anxiety in mind, for herein lay the challenge. What actually protects and serves them and what enables anxiety to devour the very nature of who they are? What does enablement look like versus empowerment?
Of course, childhood anxiety has always been there and will continue to be. It’s virtually a right of passage as the young person slowly expands their circle of awareness and ventures out into the world. This expansion takes their awareness from their small world and extends it to see the light and darkness in a seemingly endless universe. However, when I look at this world, I’m not sure many children will escape unaffected by a visit by the extreme impact of the Anxiety Monster. Let me introduce it to you and the various ways my family consider its’ form…
Left unchecked, this energy can be all-consuming and given the opportunity will feast upon the very light in your soul. The potential depth of its’ darkness is almost incomprehensible. In my house, we identify it in a few ways, all in visual terms. We give it a face so we know who not to answer the door to when it comes knocking. These apply to how Anxiety would like us to experience it , the more disparaging names are what we call it!
The Black Hole; sucking all energy into its’ centre with such force, it consumes all those nearby into its’ depths too. If one of us in the family reaches the Horizon Point, we’re all going in! This is not about blame, this about teaching children that anxiety touches us all, adults too and helping them to visualise the energetic impact of allowing it to simply have free reign upon us. It also helps them to understand the energetic impact on the social group. They are not alone, we are in this together. We are all effected. It helps to identify the feeling of being consumed by anxiety; powerless, with a sense of inevitable doom.
The Energy Vampire; it simply feeds off your energy. I have taught them the energetic law of entrainment where energy entrains to the nearest, strongest frequency. They learnt to think of the Anxiety Monster as having a very strong but low frequency and began to identify when their energy was being drawn to align with its’ frequency. They learnt to feel it. By the laws of physics, they started to understand they had to raise their energetic frequency to be stronger than that of the anxiety. This is the subject of a forthcoming article.
The Narcissist; it simply wants everything to be about it! It wants your every waking and sleeping thought to be engrossed in thinking about it, your every feeling to be affected by it and your every action to be consumed by it. It will not stop until this is the case and it can fight back hard if it senses a loss of control over you.
However, if we can teach our children to step into their power and equip them with skills to fight back, it becomes The Great Oz, the little character behind the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz”! It is exposed as all smoke and mirrors and completely parasitic. It cannot exist without a host. It has only the power we offer up to it. This was a real revelation.
So, once it is named, then what? What is the greatest weapon we can offer our children to dispel anxiety? Their thoughts, it is that simple.
This is a tough one for children to consider and accept, however a vital life lesson that’s good to embrace early on in life. When I first broached the fact that my children could gain control over and diffuse the power of anxiety with their thoughts, the reaction was one of anger and frustration. “But I can’t help it”, “I cannot stop feeling this way”, “you just don’t understand”. Oh but I do my darlings, I understand all too painfully well. I also hear this reaction a great deal from clients in my role as a Self Actualisation Coach.
The main obstacle revealed by presenting this solution is one of perceived blame. This statement is often heard as, “but if I can difuse anxiety with my thoughts, then it must be my fault that it still has power over me” and herein lay the debate between protect and serve, between empowerment and enablement.
Do I want to protect my children from ever feeling the torture of the Anxiety Monster? Of course I do. Is that a realistic prospect? Of course it isn’t. Can I acknowledge their experience with care while making them aware they can gain mastery over this heinous beast? Yes, I can do both. We must, as parents, do both.
It is not about sweeping it all under the carpet, pretending they are not slipping further and further into its’ grasp. It is also not about encasing them in bubble wrap and keeping them hidden from the outside world, lest the Anxiety Monster comes seeking them out. It is not about assuming the role of saviour and doing the work for them in order to feed our own sense of accomplishment as a parent. It’s not about allowing them to reside as a victim of anxiety, feeling powerless to take back their life. It is about knowing our children will, at some point, feel the force of anxiety and empowering them to understand they are already equipped with the skills to reclaim their power over it.
Put simply, our thoughts produce an energetic vibration, a frequency. That vibration goes out into our bodies which projects our vibration out into the world. By the Law of Attraction (like attracts like and a Universal Law), we then attract things into our world on the same frequency we transmit. What we put out into the world, shall return to us. If our children think they have no power over anxiety, so it will be. If they can learn to identify their self-talk and understand that these thoughts create their reality, they can begin to replace it with a more helpful narrative, one that diffuses rather than feeds the Anxiety Monster.
There is a great way you can demonstrate this to your children. It is the Rice Experiment. Kiddies love this!! Take two identical and sterilised glass jars with lids. Place the same amount of cooked rice in each. Label them, one ‘positive’ and the other ‘negative’. Keep them in a dark cupboard, taking them each out separately once a day. Spend the same amount of time talking to each one. Talk love and positivity to one. Talk negativity to the other. Both need to be done with meaning! Do this for a month, after which, see the physical impact on the rice. Usually, the rice that has received the negative tough and feeling is more mouldy and in far worse shape than the ‘positive’ jar.
This is a great visual explanation of the real power of thought and the words they produce. It is also worth asking your children to notice how the different ways of talking makes them feel. One of my daughters said talking negatively each day made her feel sick. A wonderful realisation in itself!
So, with a new school year imminent under the looming influence of coronavirus, I urge you to consider how we all talk to our children about anxiety, how we can empower them to navigate their way through it and as parents, not to mistake care for enablement in disguise.