by Kathryn de Bruin | Apr 17, 2020 | Crisis
In our last post, we identified Secure Coping Characteristics. While some may fall under that category, chances are yourself or someone else in your family naturally utilizes anxious coping strategies during stressful and scary situations.
Those who use anxious strategies to cope in crisis are likely to feel extreme amounts of pain and fear, and are likely to demonstrate this visibly through feeling anxious, getting loud and possibly angry, gesticulating.
Basically, they wear their heart on their sleeve. And yes, they experience feelings more intensely than others do. They are easily overwhelmed with their emotions and need help soothing themselves. They look to others to help them to do so.
Anxious children may get overstimulated, overexcited, be more boisterous or active than usual. I think about a family member who could easily give me a long list of grievances if I asked her how she was doing right now. If you are parenting a child with an anxious strategy, you probably feel like they need a great deal from you, and you might be exhausted in your attempts to comfort them. If there is something to be fearful of, this person will be the one to pick it up. Often times, we associate terms like “Worry Magnet”, even possibly “Drama Queen” with this anxious coping strategy.
So how do you support someone who has Anxious Coping Skills?
- Physical Contact – Give hugs, massages, or encouragements to run off the energy. A couple good exercises for this are: “I’m so upset with you, let’s stomp the ground as hard as we can”, “Give me all your worry and pain right now by hugging me as hard as you can”.
- Opportunities to vent – Give them a grumble session. Some good exercises for this may be: “If you could grumble for a minute as much as you could, what would you say?” “If you could change 1 thing right now, what would it be?” journaling is helpful (how I feel; 0 – 10 how intense is the feeling; what am I thinking; what am I doing; something I would change; who am I telling about it).
After you’ve had a good talk, it may be helpful to refocus them onto something else, using phrases like “Wash your face with cold water and then let’s find something else to do”. Encourage them to focus on something that they can control: “You have control over your mind, your thoughts, your behaviors, your immune system, and certain parts of your environment.”
Sometimes it just takes someone to come alongside them in their struggles of anxiety, to show them some ways to deal with it in a healthy way, and give them tools to move forward. This can be incredibly helpful training for identifying emotions and redirecting to healthy secure strategies later on in life!
by Kathryn de Bruin | Apr 7, 2020 | Anxiety, Couples in Therapy, Emotions, Family Therapy
We all experience stress, and naturally want to be able to provide comfort to our loved ones.
This is our responsibility, and what helps us to feel like effective parents and partners. The bigger question is whether you know when your loved ones are distressed or not.
People show stress in different ways and sometimes it’s not always easy to tell. For instance, children who are depressed often don’t look sad, instead they get mad. Active children can get overstimulated and get even more active when they are feeling out of control. Some people get very quiet, some get very loud, some get obnoxious and some get funny. We all experience it and show it in different ways.
Here are some family conversation starters to learn this information, so that we can better read cues and know when to step in and to support one another:
- So we all feel calm at times, and we all get stressed out at times. How do you know when you are calm and when you are stressed?
- Where do you experience stress? Some people feel it in their bodies, some experience it in their minds, and some in their feelings. How about in your body? (i.e. heart racing, hands and feet sweaty, muscles activated, shallow breathing). Do you experience stress in your thoughts? (i.e. same thoughts over and over again, can’t stop thinking, worrying all the time, overly focused on one thing). Do you experience stress in your feelings? (i.e. sad, tearful, anxious, angry).
- What causes you stress? We all have different things that trigger us. Do you feel stress when you’re in trouble? When there is tension in the house? When you are bored? When you are called a certain word? When you feel blamed for something?
- How well do we know the members of our family. Who of us gets angry when we are stressed? Who gets super quiet? Who worries the most in our family? Who gets focused and busy? Who can’t stop talking and gets overexcited? Which of us feels it the most in their body? Who gets funny?
- When there’s stress in our family, what happens to our relationships?
- When “family member A” is stressed, what happens to us? Who notices? Who tries to help? Who gets upset too? Who is affected by it? Who turns away and gets scarce?
We discovered that our middle daughter feels tension. Any time there’s tension in our house, in whatever relationship is present, she feels it. She’s an empath, she dislikes the feeling of tension and would prefer it if everyone was just happy and calm all the time. Once we discovered this, we developed a strategy where she can come and stand close to my husband or I, anytime she feels the pressure. If she squeezes our hand, then it’s her way of saying, “I’m too stressed out and I need help calming down.” This way we know she is experiencing emotional dysregulation and can help her feel supported and calmer and not alone in these times of distress. This can help your child identify those times and feelings, and also help you as a parent better address the situation.
Knowing how our family handles stress can empower us – and cause us to change our interactions. Whether it is reframing a conversation to help prevent stress, or calming your loved one down after they have already experienced stress, knowing what causes them stress and the best way to address it will not only help your family in this crisis, but also with any difficulty to come.
by Kathryn de Bruin | Mar 31, 2020 | Anxiety, Family Therapy, Therapy
I’m thinking about you all as we are going through this environmental crisis that is hitting close to home for all of us.
Some families and couples that I’ve checked in on are rallying together against this common enemy and are feeling stronger in their relational dynamics than usual. This is wonderful news! Other families/couples are struggling more than usual because this crisis is surfacing any crack in their relational foundation and it’s hard for them to get through the day without their negative cycle getting triggered. My heart especially goes out to these families who are feeling that heaviness, and I’ve wanted to put together a series of blogs that gives some coping tools to get through this crisis together as a family.
Blogs 1-3 start with three very different but common strategies many of us utilize for coping: Secure, Anxious and Withdrawn. Obviously we can fluctuate between them at different points, but we often land on one or two that are most comfortable for us in times of uncertainty.
In blog 4 we dive into recognizing our own personal and unique family strategies – this will help give an idea of how your family would like to receive love based on their coping strategy, and what comforts them best during this time of stress (and how you best receive it!)
For our final blogs we get to talking about the virus specifically. I’ll go through questions we should be asking as a family and ways to prepare, ways to utilize play therapy techniques with your child to check in on how they are doing, and finally talking about how the elements of “challenge” and “trauma” play into this difficult time.
My hope in this blog series is yes, to help everyone learn coping techniques, but to also bring light and recognition, perhaps a few “aha!” moments, and awareness of how to better get through this individually and together!
