My Anxiety Handbook. Bridie Gallagher

can really make the difference.

      Parents’ and carers’ behaviours

      Parents usually want the very best for their children and will try to protect them from hearing, seeing or experiencing anything bad. Lots of parents are aware that their own fears and worries can be passed on to their children and so try to hide them around their children. However, as you probably already know, hiding fears and worries from those close to you is not always easy and is sometimes plain impossible. We can learn anxious beliefs, for example, “Spiders are evil!” or anxious behaviours, for example, “Run run run!” from listening to and watching our parents when they are scared.

      A less obvious example might be if your mum and/or dad are nervous around other people and worry about what they think. This may mean that they spent less time socialising with others when you were little, so you didn’t develop confidence in being around lots of people. Parents might also have said things like, “What will [friend or neighbour] think of our scruffy garden/my terrible haircut?” Over time, these worries can give children important messages about the world and other people that they might have taken on without realising it. Parents often feel very bad or sad about their children worrying about the same things that have made them miserable; we don’t want to make parents feel any worse. We think it can be important to think about how you developed your fears and worries so that you can start to question where some of your ideas about what is scary might have come from. Then you can decide whether you think they are (a) true and (b) helpful. Lots of children are aware of their parents’ fears and anxieties, but have never discussed the issue directly with them. We know that children with an anxious temperament are more likely to worry and pick up anxious messages from parents. Anxious children can see tiny cues about fear and anxiety that other children don’t notice.

      As we mentioned in Chapter 1, avoidance of things that make us feel anxious is a useful and normal human response. However, we can learn from those around us that this is the best (or even the only) way to cope when we feel under threat. When people who are close to us feel scared about facing fears, then it can make it much harder for us to be brave and try new ways to approach the source of fear and anxiety.

      Traumatic or scary experiences

      Sadly, sometimes really scary and horrible things happen to people. They might live with someone who is unpredictable or aggressive, or their family might have lived somewhere unsafe and scary. Parents can’t always protect their children in the way that they might like and some parents can’t keep their children safe at all. For other young people, they may have had relatively safe and happy lives, but something like a car accident or a crime might have suddenly made them feel terrified and uncertain about the world.

      Once you are removed from the unsafe environment, or the traumatic event is over, then you and the people around you might expect that you will feel OK again. Our brains and bodies, however, take some time to make sense of and move on from these events and experiences. Sometimes, you might need quite a lot of help to feel safe again as your threat system and anxious thoughts, bodily sensations, and behaviours will be in overdrive. Following a difficult experience, it is likely that your very sensitive threat system can see threats where no threat really exists. We call these “false alarms”. A sensitive threat system is common to all kinds of anxiety, but after a traumatic event false alarms are normal and to be expected for a few weeks. It is only if this carries on for a number of months that we would think about this as a problem or something that should lead to someone seeking support. Lots of the strategies that we talk about in this book will be useful for people who are experiencing difficult anxiety reactions following trauma. However, this book does not deal specifically with the results of trauma, which can sometimes require different interventions to be effective.

      It is important to acknowledge that our experiences and environments will have impacted on our level of, and responses to, anxiety. Most important, however, is that if you are still living in a scary and unsafe environment, or things are happening to you that you feel upset or uncomfortable about, then we would not want you to focus solely on managing your anxiety, but rather, we would want you to seek support to end the situation that is causing you so much stress (see Useful Information section at the end of the book). For example, in Leon’s story (see Chapter 12), he talks about how he experienced bullying at school that was making him feel anxious. For him to start to feel better, he needed support from other people to end the bullying (rather than just coping with how it was making him feel).

      Loss and bereavement

      When someone dies, parents separate, or a friend moves away, we can feel a lot of different difficult emotions. Losing someone we love is one of the most painful things that a human being can experience. The most common and overwhelming emotion is often sadness; however, anger, confusion, numbness and anxiety are also common experiences following losses too. Even if we have been lucky and felt safe for most of our life, a bereavement can make us feel very fragile or vulnerable and suddenly threats seem to be everywhere. We may start to fear losing other important people and worry that we can’t be sure that others will be around for us. If we have had a lot of difficult experiences and losses, then another bereavement can feel like it is the final straw that we just don’t have the strength to cope with, triggering a lot of anxiety. If we worry about other people sticking around for us, we can become more isolated and feel that it is better to just depend on ourselves. This is understandable, but also a problem, because at these times we need other people even more to help us through them. Sadly, just like our early experiences, we cannot reverse losses, and relationships cannot always be mended. However, we think it is important to acknowledge how these experiences of losing important people and relationships affect how we think and feel about ourselves and other people, because this has a significant impact on our threat system, our level of anxiety and the resources that we have to help us cope with it.

      Transitions

      In Chapter 10, we talk in a lot more detail about the impact of big changes in our lives and how you can manage transitions effectively. Transitions can be exciting; however, change can also provoke a lot of anxiety, whether it is moving schools, a new teacher, or a big loss. It is important to acknowledge how change impacts on our wellbeing and levels of stress and anxiety. For some people, just changing classes at school or a disruption to routine can cause lots of stress, so the impact of transitions on our anxiety can be an important consideration. We know from working with young people that lots of transitions can mean lots of stress, and going through lots of transitions in your early life can lead to you being more anxious than young people who have had more stability in their environment and relationships.

      Everyday pressures and stresses

      Adolescence is a time where expectations change and you become increasingly independent. School expect that you demonstrate your learning through coursework and exams (see Chapter 9 for more information on coping with these) and these lead to independent new roles at work or university. Parents often expect you to demonstrate increasing responsibility, for example, taking on more chores or looking after pets and siblings. You might even end up caring for a parent who is sick or has their own mental health problems so you might be seen as more like an adult. If you feel ready and have developed ways to cope with stress, then these challenges can be extremely positive and lead to growth.

      For some people, however, this pressure can cause a great deal of discomfort and distress. This can mean that the person just hasn’t worked out what they need to do to feel OK when change or stress is around. Their coping skills are overloaded by the expectations of those around them. Once we think “I can’t cope” we can get stuck in a vicious cycle; our beliefs about our ability to cope are just as important as our actual skills and abilities.

      Bringing it all together

      Sorry to say, we can’t tell you exactly where your anxiety came from. We have outlined in this chapter that there are lots of different things that can lead to a person feeling anxious. Some people feel that everyday stresses are very difficult to cope with. Others feel that they are “copers” but then suddenly find themselves feeling extremely anxious.