How fearful were you as a child?

Erm, well, I suppose it is now kids' problems in general...but I specialize in attachment problems, complex trauma, anxiety, abuse, sexualised behaviour and such.....and using systemic frameworks as well as attachment/trauma/neurobiology stuff to help kids and carers.

I guess I shoud be glad for having had good parents,
who showed no fear of anything, as far as I remember.

Among the best of that was being left to live a lot my life
according to my own judgement, since I was alone a lot from age 8,
tho I asked my mother 's help in assessing different options,
from which I had to choose. When I lost her, I missed that a lot.
I saw too many other kids who had it WORSE.
A few times, I defended them.





David

Great links, dlowan! Thank you!

I haven't gotten into the big technical article yet as I want to dive in when I'm able to really concentrate without distraction.

Reading here where several people have acknowledged that their parents ignored their fears or belittled their fears or otherwise didn't address their fears and how that made them feel is very interesting.

I recognize that Mo is afraid of a lot of things -- mostly new situations and what might happen in these new situations -- but I try hard NOT to make a big deal out of all these fears. I was getting kind of worried about the way I deal with things so it's good to see that the experts say you need to recognize the fears without making them into to focus of your life.

It is really hard to figure out the right balance.

I would love to know from other posters here, or from your professional experience, dlowan, what people wished their parents would have done.

Just about what you are doing, Boomer. Caring, and trying to understand...

Well now I don't care all that much. I mean it has been a looooooooong time since I was a child. But I think it would have been good for me if they had let me 'hide' in their room or sat with me until the storm passed. I can't bear to watch a child be unnecessarilybe terrified of anything and can remember how bad that felt.

I wish they had told me that airplanes only fall out of the sky in the movies or other places but it can't happen in our yard or something to that effect. I am no longer afraid of airplanes, of course, but I can still remember how the fear in my gut felt.

Maybe those who can't remember childhood fears had that kind of reassurance without remembering it? Who knows?

I don't think I can think back to then, really, Boomer....and what I would have wanted...because I know what to do now!!!

But..I suppose I would want my poor parents to have been other than anything they had it in them to be at that time.

Bless their cotton socks, the situation when I was little was one for which there is now a LOT of support available...for kids and parents. There is also a lot more understanding of how kids react to trauma and such. There was nothing then...or nothing which my parents would have had the.....I dunno...confidence, wisdom (?)...to access. My mum was all about denial and my dad had the emotional wisdom of a fence post! But they did their best.


What I would want now for a kid in relation to anxiety beyond the norm is proper help.

This means education about anxiety, its physical manifestations (I use a drawing of a kid with all the parts of the body anxiety usually affects, including the brain and therefore the thoughts), the harmlessness and evolutionary purpose of said manifestations (kids often love thinking about being cave people, and how important the flight/fight response was to escape sabre -tooth tigers and cave bears and such), stuff about how, given that now most of our fears are of things that are not dangerous, and can't be responded to by beating something up or running away, the energy stays in our body and makes us feel weird, and we hyperventilate which makes us feel REALLY weird......but those feelings are harmless.

And then the work on the kid's specific fears, using cognitive and behavioural techniques.

Of course, for Mo, his anxiety is fed by his attachment stuff, and hence his difficulties with emotional regulation and some of his likely core beliefs...but you're already working on all that!!!

I like externalising the problem (a la Michael White)...so the kid can take on worry, or fears, or the worry bug, or whatever the hell they want to call it....we can then map all the things the worry bug does to try to make them feel bad, and figure out ways to beat it at its own game......worry-wrangling and suchlike.

You can make it funny and like a game, although the feelings are horrible for the kid.....cos they have to be exposed to the fear-causing situation until the fear settles.

And some relaxation techniques....breathing ones are good, I think.


But understanding is the key.....understanding the nature of anxiety is usually enormously helpful in itself. And understanding the kid....but supporting them in not letting fear beat them.

WORSE, I remember seeing too many times when my friends'
parents tried to INCREASE their fears by THREATENING my friends.
I thought it was an ugly sight (and sound).

On a few occasions, I used reason to defend them.



Truly, I can 't think of anything that I 'd have wanted my parents
to do differently. When I was 13, we acquired some more residential real estate,
such that I got a private furnished apartment, with greater independence
and more resultant freedom (tho I cannot, in good conscience, claim
that thay interfered with my freedom before that, either).

I do not wish that thay had done anything differently,
so far as I can remember.





David

What is the nature of anxiety ?

who can help me to write a dialogue? i'm doing a reserch. if your first languge is english, please ! thank you very much!
Following are the scene you should describe. It has been divided into two parts: real life and on the internet. Please choose the best way to obtain help.
REAL LIFE:You were taking a kind of medicine or maybe a health protection medicine, but there was a serious counteraction. So you went to a hospital to consult a doctor what to do.
ON INTERNET:You were taking a kind of medicine or maybe a health protection medicine, but there was a serious counteraction. You consult a medical expert on a medical treatment consultation network forum.

You need to open a thread of your own Yongheng...look to the upper right of the screen and click on "ask a question".

Your posts have no place in this thread.

For several nights when I was 7 years old, I was deathly afraid my mother would die. I mean - I knew she would - and this was quite hard for me to find a way to deal with. I laid awake for about four nights, horrified about my mother dying. I finally came to terms with it. Funny, now I want to kill her. (kidding)

Ill health ?

pretty normal fear.

I don't remember childhood fears except for having to go where all the big kids were with that woman in black at the front of the class and having to sit with my hands folded on the desk - that is, first grade, with Sr. Marcelline Marie, who would sometimes call on me, which made me very self conscious, two words I know now but could not have described then.

Osso in first grade - see the sign with the lettering? I'm the one on the left behind the sign, if as you look at it. Ah, I still remember some of these kids' names.

On some of mine, I wrote their names behind their images, on the other side.

I feel nostalgic toward people I 've known in my early years.
I also attended a Catholic school in my first grade.
After that, I switched back to NYC public school.




David

To the topic:

I don't remember any childhood fears other than something under the bed, and even that I could rationalize.

Fear and guilt are two emotions which don't figure in my life, and I really don't understand their hold on some people.

Good Lord... This gave me chills. I always assumed I was just kind of strange for worrying about Hussein going bump in the night as a kid. I was six years old when the U.S. sent missiles into Baghdad in response to the attempted assassination of George H.W. Bush. My parents brought me in to sit and watch the news with them, they were certain it was the beginning of a new war. (In a way I suppose they were right) I have the most lucid memory of a nightmare I had that night: scenes of me playing in the kitchen of a house that looked nothing like our own built in the middle of an empty desolate valley made up of polygons of green grass (we actually lived in the suburbs, that image must have come from video games), cut with images of a cruise missile from the perspective of a camera on one of the tail fins, taking off from a launch pad and zipping over the landscape; the nightmare felt edited, like a movie (specifically Jaws), complete with dramatic irony that the "me" in the kitchen didn't know that the missile was headed straight for my window, while the "me"that was having the nightmare was jumping up and down, yelling "Look out! Look out!"

I woke up right when the missile came through the window and went into my parents' room; they laughed and told me not to worry, that he "probably" didn't have any missiles that could reach us and that, if he did, they wouldn't be aimed at us. This was less comforting than they thought it was.

I just found this thread, and the last post was from 2010. So anyhow, the things I remember being afraid of was the thing that lived under my bed, and my closet had to be completely shut or my heart would pound fearing something could be in the closet.

I was in high school during the Cuban missile crisis, I remember everyone was on edge and neighbors (WWII vets) were expecting the worst. I do remember relief when Khrushchev dismantled the weapons.

Funny, the only time I can remember my father truly failing to understand a fear of mine was when he told me to toss a dead fish into a garbage bin. I was and still am grossed out by dead fish. I couldn't bring myself to put hands on it so I scooped it up in a sand pail and tried to dump it. Then damn, the gill if the fish caught on the handle of the pail, and I started screaming and he yelled at me to get rid of it. Even thinking about it now, it still gives me the willies.

U shud complain to him
for failure to have treated u better!

The two things I remember is being afraid someone would get seriously hurt when my parents were fighting and of going into the basement at night. The whole nuclear war thing was kinda there too but it was more background noise than an active fear.