Juanita Lepage MSW, RSW, BHP

Counselling & Energy Healing (289) 812-8089 Hamilton, Ontario

anxiety

I Don’t Know, I Don’t Know, I Don’t Know

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One thing that really stuck with me from my time at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing was when one week we had the theme, “I don’t know”. We spent time leaning into how much we truly don’t “know” about life and this world and all of it’s mysteries.

As a therapist and energy healer, there is this weird conundrum of knowing and not knowing when I’m with a client. I know generally what I can do to help a person, but I have to leave a lot of space open to the unknown too. Sometimes changes can happen rapidly for a person and with great ease. Other times healing takes time and this can be incredibly frustrating. Sometimes there are tools to help with managing some things, yet most of the time it’s most beneficial to give space to feel the discomfort of being in the unknown and then clarity arises and shifts happen.

One of the big things that living with COVID and the changing rules is that there is an incredible amount of unknown. In the span of 4 days as a parent I shifted from, “my kids are going to school in person” to “my kids are going to school online”. I felt incredibly frustrated with the change. I wish I felt like Lisa Kudrow (below) about this, but I didn’t.

The Tool Three Things (AKA being in the present moment)

One practical tool that helps me, is consciously shifting to the here and now. I was lying beside my son in his bed as we chatted about the upcoming announcement from the government and I could feel all my anxiety. Being that close to bed time I knew I didn’t want to sit with it so I started naming out loud where I was and what I saw around me.

So many spiritual leaders talk about the present moment being the only one that we have and to embrace it. In some therapeutic approaches, this technique is called “Three Things” – you take time to name 3 things you see, hear, and feel on your body and then 2 things and then 1 thing in each category. I find it interesting to note that while I am shifting to “the present moment”, I question if that’s really true. I think perhaps I am shifting from having one part of myself dominate my reality to other parts that are more peaceful. Often in the spiritual world we forget that the anxious part of ourselves is real too and needs attention at some point or it will let itself be known quite loudly.

Sitting With Discomfort (AKA – sitting with “I don’t know”)

At a different time of day, I might have intentionally sat with anxiety and saw it as one part of myself and not all of myself. I can notice what it feels like in my body and what other emotions arise. Often, being present with it in a conscious and safe way helps it release. Often with anxiety, one of the most helpful ways to reduce its intensity is to become more comfortable sitting with the discomfort that arises in a safe way. In other words, it’s becoming more comfortable with “I don’t know” and the emotions that arise from this notion and leaning into it.

If you’re a person who enjoys adventure, it can be like travelling to a new place knowing you have some resources at your finger tips to provide some safety and at the same time being with the variety of unknown factors such as language, culture, or moving around a new city. Every traveller I know has a story of plans that didn’t go as planned.

When I was growing up, my parents enjoyed travelling to a destination with a general plan, but nothing booked. Most of the time we found a place to sleep and sometimes we slept in the car or on the side of the road. I felt comfortable with the unknown because I felt safe with them there. The “I don’t know” was sometimes uncomfortable and stressful and at other times provided us with new experiences we never would’ve imagined.

What ways have you found helpful to sit with “I don’t know”? Do you find that some places it easier to embrace in some areas of your life than others?

To Meditate Or Not To Meditate: Easy Ways To Get Started Or Restarted

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I have been an on again-off again meditator for years.  I have always envied those individuals that have made meditation a regular habit in their lives.  When I met my husband, he would meditate daily for 30-minutes to an hour every morning and evening. He would invite me to join him, but at the time I thought it looked pretty boring to sit silently for that long. He too goes through periods of meditating and not meditating.

Over the years I would read about people such as Ram Dass, Yogananda, or Michael Singer who had mystical and transformative experiences meditating, and I thought, “Well of course if you’re having that type of “wow/life-changing” experience, you would continue to meditate”. Or I would think, “Of course if you’ve chosen the spiritual vocation as your life path, these transformative experiences would happen”. And then at the same time I would read about stories of people who meditated for years and never had that “wow” experience while meditating.

So, if I can’t get a Guarantee of that “Wow Factor”, Why Meditate?

So, without having the “wow” factor goal in mind, I wondered why meditation would be so highly recommended for individuals.

  1. Physical, mental, and emotional benefits

Calmness, focus, centeredness, happiness, better health, and self-love are all benefits of meditation.  It seems that as each year goes by, more and more research demonstrates the healing benefits of mindfulness[1]  or meditation for more and more things. Pain, mental illness, stress, and burnout is just a few of the things it can help with.  Just google “research meditation” or “research mindfulness” and you’ll notice a plethora of information at your fingertips.

When I taught Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to teens and adults, mindfulness was a key component to this therapy. The main benefit of mindfulness in DBT is to help a person pause and connect with their thoughts & emotions and how they are using this information to interact with the world. Many other types of psychotherapy involving mindfulness have been created too, with the most famous probably being Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) created by Jon-Kabat Zinn. In other psychotherapies, the word mindfulness is never mentioned, but it is used in practice to help a person connect to their emotions and bring awareness to thoughts.

  1. Spiritual benefits

If you’re on a spiritual path, meditation seems a key part in going deeper into one’s spiritual journey whether it be with a religion or a more general spiritual path.  Meditation allows a person to connect beyond themselves to something on a much grander scale – God, the universe, specific religious individuals such as Jesus or Buddha, and more.

Where Do I Start (or restart)?

 

Books

  1. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Wherever You Go, There You Are, was one of the books that inspired me to start meditation. It’s an easy read with short chapters. This book is especially helpful if you’re interested in the Physical, Mental, & Emotional benefits. If you’re a person who is interested in being mindful but doesn’t want to sit quietly in meditation, this book provides many other options.  You can do anything mindfully. Really.
  2. Want a book that also captures the spiritual benefits? Michael A. Singer’s The Untethered Soul  is succinct and you can tell from the depth and simplicity of this book that he is a seasoned meditator.

YouTube Meditations

There are a lot of guided meditations available on YouTube, it can be a matter of trying a few to find your favourites.

  1. Tara Brach is my favourite person to listen to for a guided meditation. I love her voice and her variety of meditations. You can find many selections on her website or on YouTube.

Apps

There are many apps related to mindfulness and meditation. After not meditating for many months, I tried the 14-day trial with Headspace.  This was a great way to hear if I liked the person’s voice for guided meditation and try out some of their meditations.  When flying on Air Canada earlier this year I found some of their meditations available on the online entertainment system.

After the 14-day trial I decided to buy a subscription for a year (They offer a great discount after you’ve completed the trial).  I really appreciate the options to have a 1 minute or a 30-minute meditation.  Also my screen can be dark and it can keep playing (unlike YouTube). Some days I’m happy if I meditated for 1 minute. Other days I want to meditate for a longer time.  They also have great packages for different topics such as sleep, restlessness, worry and more.

Summary

If you notice in your life that it feels busy, even a few minutes of meditation a day can provide benefits of restoration and calm.  Often between sessions with clients a take a few minutes to connect to myself and shift my energy from the past client to the next one.

I don’t use the word mindfulness in most of my sessions, but often I’m helping clients to connect with themselves in a deeper way to find the solutions that they seek. Many of us like to spend time in our minds, and while we would benefit from connecting with our bodies or our emotions, we are often not practiced at doing so. We are often on the move.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you found something to inspire you to start or restart your journey with meditation!

 

[1] Meditation is a form of mindfulness. There are many ways to be mindful without meditating, but meditation is a popular method of mindfulness.

Consciously Parenting A Child With Anxiety: Part 1

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Consciously parenting a child with anxiety is both rewarding and tough.  Our first reaction may be to get someone else to “fix” our child’s problem.  This has been the first step in supporting children for a long time in the therapy world.  As a parent it can feel overwhelming and intimidating to put the lens on ourselves instead of our children.  More research is showing that if parents makes shifts in their lives and also learn different ways to support their child that the outcomes are better for your child.  Read anything by the physician and author Gabor Maté and this will become clear.  I will explore this more in Part 2.

That being said, there are still some basics in supporting a child with anxiety and it’s helpful for parents to understand the framework.

Today will focus on the moment you wonder if your child has an anxiety disorder and how to support them.  Here is a breakdown of future posts.

Part 1: I have a child with anxiety and don’t know what to do

Part 2: I have a child with anxiety and they’ve been in therapy, but I need help supporting them

Part 3: I have tried the regular approach to supporting my child with anxiety but I’m searching for alternative methods to help them

Part 4: I want to understand what is going on in my family from a spiritual lens

Part 1: I have a child with anxiety and don’t know what to do

Supporting an anxious child can be tough.  Maybe you have a child that acts out or maybe you have a child that has stomachaches, headaches or panic.  Anxiety manifests in different ways.

Today I’m going to give you a brief break-down of conventional ways to support an anxious child.  I won’t lie, there are TONS of resources online to learn about anxiety and how to support your child. Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is the GO-TO starting point for supporting a child with anxiety.  It provides a framework for understanding anxiety and practical approaches to helping your child.

In summary, CBT helps you connect your emotions, behaviors, & thoughts.  It will give you tools to help you shift your thoughts or your behaviors so that your emotions can shift too.

The following is a combination of things I have used with my clients and recommendations from experts. Let’s start with the cheat-sheet to give you an overview of supporting your child.

Cheat-Sheet:

  1. Identifying if your Child has an Anxiety Disorder
  2. Understanding Anxious Thoughts
  3. Connecting with Your Child (aka validation)
  4. Shifting
  5. Encourage Connection to The Wise Brain
  6. Action: Taking Steps to Overcome Fears

Step 1: Identifying if your child has an anxiety disorder

Worry & anxiety is normal.  It’s when it starts interfering with life that a person can be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. It could be an intense fear about something specific (e.g. dogs), it could be extensive worries about everything, it could be acting out behaviors that look like anger and tantrums when going to school, or it could show itself with physical symptoms like headaches, stomachaches, nausea, or panic.  The main clue is that something is interfering with day-to-day life.

Example:

If you have a child who’s afraid of snakes and you live in Ontario – that fear is unlikely going to be a problem because snakes are fairly easy to avoid. However, if the intensity of that fear stops a person from doing things they enjoy such as camping, going outside, or on playdates – then it has become problematic.

  • When in doubt go to your doctor and they can help you determine if it’s diagnosable.
  • If you first want to research it yourself, the book– Freeing Your Child From Anxiety by Tamar E. Chansky is an excellent resource for summarizing each type of anxiety disorder and helping you assess if your child fits into one of them.

Step 2: Understanding Anxious Thoughts Yourself

Before supporting your child, it’s important to have some understanding – especially if your child’s anxiety seems ridiculous and frustrating.  If you want the anatomical understanding about anxiety and the brain, google it.  There’s a lot out there.  Today, I’m going to put it into kid language.

The brain has different parts and one of them is the worry part of the brain. We all have a worry part in our brain, and the worry brain is an important part.  Imagine you were in the jungle and you heard the grass start to rustle.  It could be something small or it could be a lion.  The worry brain will tell you to find a safe spot.  Without the worry brain you might get eaten by a lion.

Sometimes the worry brain starts over-acting.  You have other parts of your brain, but the worry brain is the loudest.  If a person is afraid of dogs, then with every dog or even pictures of dogs, the worry brain tells you that it’s dangerous and you need to get away.  The other part of your brain – the wise brain helps you pause and listen to all parts before deciding about whether a dog is dangerous or not.

As a parent you can name the parts of the brain whatever you want – the important part is using kid language.  I don’t know about you, but even as an adult – as soon as people start describing structural parts of the brain and their function, I start falling asleep.

Prefer a video explanation?  Here is simple explanation of what the world can be like for a person with anxiety.

Step 3: Connection to your child (aka Validation)

Any parent of an anxious child has said things that are unhelpful – how could you not?  You have a million things going on in your life and now your child is needing more attention and interfering with your routine.   Don’t be hard on yourself.  Take a deep breath and try again.  Connection with your child is the MOST helpful thing for your child.  They need to know that you’ve got their back no matter what happens in their life.  As much as you want to rush them out the door and drop them off at school, (or keep them at home and never let them face their anxieties), connection is key. 

Think of 3 reasons why your child might be scared/worried/anxious and then fill in the blanks.

“I can understand why you would be worried about ________  because ________  because _______ and because __________.  This is from Emotion Focused Family Therapy.  With each because you use, the nervous system relaxes more.  See how many reasons you can come up with.

Example:

“I can understand why you would be scared to go to school when your worry brain is pointing out all the things that could go wrong BECAUSE Your worry brain is saying, “it’s not safe to go to school”, BECAUSE your worry brain is pointing all the things that could go wrong, BECAUSE your worry brain is thinking about all the bad things that might happen.”

Remember: You CAN’T reason with emotions.  You need to connect with the person first. See my blog post: How to support your children and spouse when you really don’t want to

Step 4: Shift

Your child is stuck in their head and in their thoughts, and their body is quite likely to be tense.  When we are tense it’s hard to make a shift in thoughts.  Here are 2 ways to help your child shift – there are many ways – you can be creative.

Activity One

Clench your fists really tight, then let go. Now let’s take 3 deep breaths (in through the nose and out through the mouth), lift our hands up to the sky and then to the ground, rub your hands together while counting to 3, rub your thighs while counting to 3 and then think about a couple of things that make you happy – petting the cat, playing Minecraft, sitting with mom.

This shift is taken from the book When My Worries Get Too Big! A relaxation Book for Children Who Live With Anxiety by Kari Dunn Buron.

Activity Two

3 things – Say aloud 3 things you see, 3 things you hear and 3 things you feel (by touching), then you reduce that to 2 things you see, hear, & feel.  Then 1 things.  You can make this activity 5 things or 7 things – it’s whatever works.

Step 5: Encourage Connection to the Wise Brain

Once emotions have settled, then you can engage the part of brain that looks at reason.  Emotion does not care about reason.  If you’re having a tough day, and I try to use reason and tell you to relax and that your problems are no big deal, i’m doubtful that you will relax.

  1. Explain to your child about different parts of the brain that you learned about in step 2. You can give the names worry brain and wise brain if you want, or your child can give them a name (e.g. scaredy squirrel brain and batman brain).

If you want, you can use a book to guide you both.

  • When My Worries Get Too Big! A Relaxation Book for Children Who Live With Anxiety by Kari Dunn Buron
  1. Now let’s say your child is fearful about school. Ask your child, ‘your “worry brain” has a lot to say today, and what does the “wise brain” have to say about going to school?’  Perhaps wise brain will tell your child that school is safe, my teacher is nice, I like my friend Haley, it’s hard for the first little while at school but then it gets better, today I have gym – I like gym.

(NOTE: If there’s bullying involved you’ve entered a different territory – then we need to listen to the worry mind and do some problem-solving with teachers and coach our children for those situations.)

  1. What thoughts make you feel better? The worry thoughts or the wise thoughts? Remember that worry is a choice – imagine that worry is in one hand and wise/calm thoughts are in the other. Remember we need to bring BOTH into each situation, not just the worry thoughts.

There are numerous creative strategies to engage the wise brain.  If you like lots of examples, get the book:

  • Freeing Your Child From Anxiety

Step 6: Action – Taking Steps to Overcome Fears

If your child sees a therapist, they will help you create a ladder or scale of steps for your child to overcome their fears.  If I’m afraid of dogs, the worst thing you can do is bring a dog and put it next to me.  That is traumatizing and overwhelming.

Start small – you might find that the first step is reading a positive story about dogs or looking at a video of a dog doing adorable things.  Your child will guide you.  This is what a therapist will call Exposure.  You need to stay on each step of the ladder long enough for anxiety to both rise and calm.

What About Medication?

Sometimes medication is necessary to help a child.  A lot of research has shown the benefits of medication and therapy used together.  Not everyone agrees with medication and not everyone benefits from medication, but many people do.  You don’t need to start with medication, but it’s important to consider it if therapy isn’t working on its own.

These steps may look like they will take a long time.  Like trying any new things, it will take longer at the beginning, but after some practice it can be done in a few minutes.

Resource List:

  • Scaredy Squirrel by Melanie Watt (great for kids who are scared to go places)
  • When My Worries Get Too Big! A Relaxation Book for Children Who Live With Anxiety by Kari Dunn Buron
  • Freeing Your Child from Anxiety by Tamar E. Chansky

How Psychotherapy Can Help: Encountering a Great White Shark

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I recently saw this photograph by Pascal Kobeh in a shop nearby and was struck by what this photo captured.  Here was a scuba diver and here was a great white shark just looking at one another.  What was going to happen next? Perhaps nothing or perhaps the scuba diver would get eaten.

That shark is huge! And look at all the scars.  What emotions is that scuba diver feeling? Scared or calm? He or she is holding something – is it a weapon? What is the shark doing? Showing curiosity or surmising the best way to eat the scuba diver?

When I looked at this photo I couldn’t help but look at it in a symbolic way – what are the great white sharks in our lives? Sometimes it’s certain emotions – I’ll feel anything but that emotion. Sometimes it’s fear of a past event – I’ll talk about anything but that/the past is the past.  Sometimes it’s fear of the future – if I do that then I’ll fail/be destroyed/decimated.

In therapy, there can be a fear of exploring old wounds or facing our fears.  Those fears are often valid – if you’ve been bitten by a shark would you go back in the water? If you’ve heard stories about dangerous encounters with sharks, shouldn’t you be afraid? And yet often, those fears hold us back from getting what we want from life.

I remember when I went to my first talk therapy session, I thought, “What is the point of going into the past? It’s over”.  Why go into past, isn’t it better to move forward? In therapy, we don’t delve into past issues unless they are relevant to an issue that you are having right now. Many times, those shark bites of the past continue to impact us without even realizing it.  Many times, they impact how we parent and the relationships that we have.  Would you want your child to go into the ocean if you had been bitten by a shark? Very unlikely. But where does that leave your child if she wants to explore the ocean?

My guess is that this was not the first time the scuba diver had been in the water. I would guess that this scuba diver had been in the water many times before this photo was caught. My role as a therapist is to be your guide as you go back in the ocean.  I will help you face your fears.

 

The photographer’s explanation:

The shoot in search of the great white shark took place off the coast of Mexico on the Pacific side, in the waters of Guadalupe Island. This shoot aimed to demystify the terrible myth of the white shark and show that in good conditions, encountering one can be a serene experience characterized by mutual respect and curiosity.

(Image copyright Pascal Kobeh, photographer)