A Child with Anxiety and Obsession
I’m not a doctor. If I were a doctor, a brilliant, healthy little girl would be heavily medicated right now.
Obsession is one of the toughest set of symptoms for me to write about. A young girl who holds a very special place in my heart has had a crippling and painful go-round with obsessive thoughts and compulsions. Who we once saw as a worried child quickly turned into a child so wrought with anxiety that it left her vomiting, crying uncontrollably, and scrubbing her hands until they were raw.
I’ve lived in a psych ward before. I’ve seen all of this and I knew her prognosis was not good.
I heard a rumor that micronutrients, taken a few times a day and with great consistency could help manage the symptoms of obsession and anxiety. So, she began taking regular doses of EMPowerplus. It did not work–at least not like the magic pill I hoped it would be. The fears and repetitive, intrusive, demanding thoughts continued to plague her.
One day, as I was journalling about some of my own ‘Leftovers’ having been triggered into anxiety by a situation that reminded me of being small and hurt, I realized that I was, by writing it out, changing my own mind about how I was going to react to a certain set of thoughts.
When I write, I am first freely emotional and then deliberate and logical. Try it for yourself the next time you are filled with anxiety:
- Tell yourself the story that your body is reacting to. Be graphic and emotional and real.
- Read it back to yourself out loud and let the tears or anger flow.
- Breath
- Now, look at it carefully. How much of this are you certain is actually true? Are you certain? Is it happening right now? Is it something you must relive or is it okay to leave it in your past?
All well and good for a very self-aware adult, but, how do you get a seven-year-old to employ that kind of logic in self-healing? We built a chart in “excel” and asked her to fill in the first column with her biggest and most common intrusive thoughts or worries. She used colored stickers to show just how severe the symptoms were for her. Very visual, very unrestricted. (Some worries on some days got three red stars instead on just one!)
The logic is employed on the last column. After she acknowledged all of her pain and how she saw it, we reviewed the list with a simple True or False.
- Worry: My Mom Won’t Pick Me Up From School
- “Has Mom ever missed picking you up?”
- “No, but one time she was late.”
- “But she came for you?”
- “Yes, but I was scared and now I think about it all day at school.”
- “If she has never left you, is being left a true worry or a false worry?”
- It took a moment for her to respond as she thought it out. “False.”
- She wrote a big fat F in the column.
Not every worry was so easily proven false.
- Worry: Mom Might Die When I Am At School
- “Has your mother ever died when you were at school?”
- “No.”
- “Did someone else’s mother die when you were at school?”
- “No.”
- “Could that ever happen?”
- She searched for the right answer. “No?”
- “No is not the real answer. Sometimes people do die when their kids are at school so that is a true worry.”
- “That’s why I worry!”
- “Tell me what made that worry start.” There was some bantering and ‘I don’t knows’ and then some tears and then several weeks of red stars and big Ts in the last column.
- Then, understanding at last.
- “When mom was sick and she was puking she said she was gonna die.”
- “How old were you?”
- “6”
- “Did she stay sick?”
- “No, it was the flu.”
- “Does the flu kill moms a year later when the kids are at school?”
- “No.”
- Is that worry, based on how it started, True or False?
- She gladly marked the F.
Obsession is not simple. We worked, got the school involved, made concessions and stayed on top of it in a very deliberate way. There were strips of velcro taped under the lip of her desk so that when she heard,“ask the teacher, ask the teacher, ask the teacher, ask the teacher, ask the teacher, ask the teacher, ask the teacher, ask the teacher ask the teacher, ask the teacher or something bad will happen, ask the teacher or something bad will happen, ask the teacher or something bad will happen, okay, something bad is gonna happen!” playing in her head she could run her fingertips over the prickly and the soft strips and snap away from the thoughts without asking the teacher the sixteenth unnecessary question that morning.
I doubted somedays if we were doing the right thing, I wondered if sedation with medication would have been kinder. It took about four months to see results worth boasting about. Logic, extremely consistent micronutrition and a lot of compassion prevailed.
How do I know that the micronutrients played any role at all? During a school break, the family went camping and the schedule was a mess. No one noticed that the little girl had been missing doses of EMPowerplus until the crying and feverish hand washing and fear of germs started again. It seemed, all in a day, they were back to square one. It took three weeks to get to the point where the worry columns were all light blue and F again. What’s the connection between micronutrients and obsession? I haven’t a clue. But now, a healthy eight-year-old has skills beyond her years and a bright happy smile. When new worries come up, she works it out, and usually without help.
Was it an illness? Is she cured? I don’t know. Did her healing happen overnight? NO. But given her reaction after all this patience and tweaking to find what works for her, I have no doubt that she will continue to learn to manage the symptoms of anxiety and obsession without sedatives or psych drugs.
Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
