Nov 20, 2020 | Anxiety, Children, Coronavirus, Holidays, Uncertainty
Last night I called my kids to let them know we would not be visiting them this holiday season. The call broke my heart. All three of them live in Washington State, and we had planned to rent a house up there for a couple of weeks so that we could have some cozy time together, making meals and playing games. The loss of not seeing them made me sad. I was also anxious making the call because I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Maybe they would think we were overreacting, or worse yet that we did not care about them enough.
This holiday season, we have hard choices to make between our personal health versus our family and tribal bonds. We need both to survive, but right now you can’t have one without risking the other. Faced with decisions like this, we long for the normal holiday stress of the “good old days” before COVID.
Find your truth
The first step making decisions about family gatherings this year is to check in with ourselves and define our personal desires and boundaries. Who do you feel comfortable seeing if anyone? What restrictions are necessary to allow you to feel safe? …to keep your loved ones safe? Find your own truth with regard to these questions before you enter into any conversation with others. For help identifying your desires or where your boundaries lie, you can use a pros and cons list.
Express your truth
If you have boundaries that will require keeping loved ones at a longer distance, or perhaps not gathering together at all, the fear of disappointing them will arise. I knew I could not control how my kids felt when I told them we were not coming to visit; I could only control how I said it. It is useful to review the three steps to assertive communication. I define assertiveness as speaking my truth as clearly as possible, while being sensitive to the others person’s feelings, without taking responsibility for them. This can be a balancing act. Here are three steps to assertive communication.
Step 1. Start out with empathy and validation. For example, I could begin by saying, “Kids, we were really looking forward to visiting you for the holidays and I know you were looking forward to it as well.”
Step 2. State the problem. For example, “With COVID on the rise, we don’t feel comfortable traveling and possibly increasing our risk of contracting the virus.”
Step 3. Define clearly what you want to do. For example, “We have decided we are not going to come up during the holidays this year. We can plan a special get together once a vaccine is available, or we could plan a shorter visit once COVID in better under control.
The right decision
After reducing the increased risk of contagion, I was left with the risk of my children’s disappointment over our decision. We so often get hung up thinking that the right decision is one where we can eliminate all risk, guarantee a happy ending. But there is no “right” decision between the risk of getting sick and the risk of hurting people’s feelings. Everyone’s situation is unique to them, and the “rightness” of our choice depends on whether we’ve examined ourselves enough to know our truth and found the courage to express it.
For me, the right decision was to speak my truth and keeping an open heart, even though it hurt. This pain is what makes us human. It is what we have in common. And ultimately our capacity to feel it will keep us connected to one another, whether we can see each other this holiday season or not.
Oct 1, 2018 | Anxiety, Children
It doesn’t sound right, does it? We’re supposed to care about the people we love; the more the better. Caring too much, however, can actually get in the way of loving, especially when it comes to my children! 
Right now, all three of my 20-somethings have recently entered new relationships, all begun on online dating apps like Tinder, something that feels foreign and a little scary to me. Naturally, I am curious and interested in getting to know my kids’ new love interests. As I listen and ask questions, I feel open-hearted and happy and excited for them. But I also feel fear. Will this relationship bring them joy or sorrow? Will it be long-term or temporary? My kids are all at the age that they are thinking about becoming more seriously committed. What are the mental health, family and dating histories of these potential new members of our family? Acting on these fears is likely to undermine our relationships.
I learned about caring less from my mother, who raised me with what one might call a benign neglect. I never had the sense that my mom worried much about me growing up. While she was always interested in my life, she was interested in herself as well. She seemed to trust that whatever it was I needed to learn, I was capable of figuring it out without her help. This gave me a sense of independence and self-confidence. Because of this I always felt I could go to her with both the good, bad and ugly in my life. She always listened with compassion, and rarely any judgement.
My mother wasn’t perfect, but her example taught me that the greatest gift I can give me kids is to trust them, that whatever they need to do in life, they will be able to do. From very early on, when they were still young children, I started to practice caring less and loving more. As with every other family, there were plenty of times when I felt the urge to take over. One of them developed OCD at the age of 8, another social anxiety at 13, another substance abuse in adolescence. In each of those situations, I didn’t know how things would turn out. I could give my children support and resources, but I had to remind myself that each child had a personal trajectory, with challenges they would need to master themselves.
As my fears arose, rather than resisting them, I acclimated myself to them by imagining the worst case scenerios—that they might end up with chronic mental health issues, isolated, depressed, even homeless. However painful it was, I knew that ultimately I did not have control of their lives or how things would turn out. With practice, I became more acclimated to my fear about my children’s futures, allowing me to be more present for them when they share their lives with me. Listening to them talk about their new love interests, when I feel that pull of attaching to the outcome, I remind myself again that
I can’t control their futures, and I don’t need to try. All I need to do is be supportive, open-hearted, and genuinely trust that my children will make the best of their lives. That trust, I have found, is the lifeblood of my relationship with my children. By caring a little less, I can love a little more. And the more I love, the more love I get back!
Sep 25, 2018 | Children, Social Anxiety
By Jennifer Shannon, LMFT, author of The Shyness and Social Anxiety Workbook for Teens, The Anxiety Survival Guide for Teens, and Don’t Feed the Monkey Mind
I will never forget the morning I pulled the covers off my daughter, telling her in my firmest voice that she had to get out of bed NOW. From the beginning of sixth grade it had been a struggle, but with a firm hand, I was able to get Rose out of bed and off to school. But this morning we’d hit a wall. She looked at me with genuine dread. “Mom,” she said, “I would rather die than go to school.”
My beautiful daughter had developed severe social anxiety disorder. On her “good” days at school, she survived by avoiding social interactions, often hiding in the bathroom during recess and lunch breaks. On her worst days, she had full-blown panic attacks and went to the office complaining of stomach aches and asking to be sent home. While there was nothing physically wrong with her, I knew her distress was real. And as a parent, I was suffering too. Read More…
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