Carrying our parenting worries (they get heavy!)
Dear friends,
This month we’ve been thinking about a nearly universal parental experience—worrying about your kids. There’s a saying that a parent never stops worrying about their kids no matter how old they get. In our experience this is true—babies, kids, teens, and young adults—we hear worries about them all. Assuming parents are in this for the long haul, it’s incredibly important to find ways to hold worry in ways that are healthy and manageable rather than dipping into anxiety.
There’s a reason people use the term “Mama Bear” to describe intense protectiveness; the urge to keep our children safe is primal and instinctual. Anticipating and responding to potential risks was an evolutionary necessity. Our ancestors could not have survived if they didn’t learn quickly to run from predators and avoid poisonous plants.
In our modern world, the hazards are often less clear cut, which can make it easier to let our worries spiral into unhelpful anxiety or paralyzing fear and even tricky to know the difference.
We can think of fear as a physical and involuntary response to an immediate danger—that incredible adrenaline surge that lets a mom lift a car off her baby. Fear is important and helpful in the right setting. It can mobilize us for immediate action. But it also narrows our thinking to just the problem and can limit our higher order thoughts. This is perfect in a true emergency but wouldn’t be a useful way to live our daily lives.
Worry isn’t a mobilizing response to an immediate danger but rather a problem-solving thought process. When we worry in a healthy way, we use our higher order thinking processes to evaluate a concern, gather the right information and act appropriately. It's a worry that might lead a parent to assess that their toddler is prone to running off and needs to hold their hand in the parking lot.
When worries become less focused on solutions and become ruminating on potential future problems, we can slip into anxiety. Anxiety and worry can look alike, but there are key differences.
Worry is specific to a situation and helps generate solutions; anxiety is general and problem-focused. Worries help us think through real situations and then pass when the situation passes. Anxiety makes things feel catastrophic and keeps us functioning in fear of the worst-case scenario. Worry creates enough stress to motivate action, but anxiety flips us into distress. Anxiety is what might lead a parent to avoid taking their child to the store because of the parking lot.
Anxiety is our brains responding to a threat that lives in our thoughts. It brings up the same fear responses, but because the danger never passes, that response is paralyzing rather than helpful. We can get stuck in that hyper-arousal response. We might notice tunnel vision, going cold, muscle tension, racing heart, sweating, insomnia, fidgeting, or just feeling frozen. Our fight or flight response can be stuck responding to a mental threat that’s grown out of proportion. It’s hard to activate our higher order thinking because we are so focused on the imagined danger. We’re seeing a cat and thinking TIGER!
When we are slipping toward anxiety, it can be helpful to try to ground ourselves back in the present. Anxiety feeds off the imagined future. It tells our brains we need to fight all the gorillas right now and blots out everything else. If we can focus on where we are right this moment, we are able to help our brain reorient itself to our present situation and be a lot more helpful. Going for a walk, taking a shower, or focusing in on your five senses can help you feel grounded in the present.
Instead of ruminating on all the things that can go wrong, try to identify what if any actions you need to take and then put the rest aside. Some people find that even just taking some time to be mindful of if a thought process is productive or anxious can help them to let it go. If all else fails try changing your state—sleep or get up and move—sometimes just that change can spark things.
Anxious thought patterns can be pernicious particularly because of how immobilizing and consuming they can be. If you find yourself stuck revisiting the same fears over and over or imagining everything going horribly wrong, therapy can help you break out of those thought patterns. We can work together to free you from those spirals and to have tools to avoid the same problems in the future. You don’t have to stay stuck.
*We would be remiss if we didn't express our heartbreak at the recent postpartum psychosis tragedy. Media coverage has unfortunately used imprecise and at times inaccurate language around the mental health condition involved. Postpartum psychosis is a medical emergency and a different diagnosis from postpartum anxiety/depression. If you are concerned about a loved one, 20/20 Mom has a symptom checklist for friends and family that can be helpful in recognizing the condition.
Warmly,
Kellie Wicklund, LPC, PMH-C
Principal + Clinical Director
Christina Moran
Executive Director
www.maternalwellness.org
