Cancel the content and find the feeling

By Gabby Goodier; Co-Founder of Same Page Co + Clinical Psychologist

4 minute read

I am always amazed that when I explain how to help a child cope with anxiety or a fear, monsters under the bed for instance, that my suggestion is met with, “really, that’s what you’d do?”.  Read on to discover my unorthodox, yet science-backed approach. 

What you need to consider

A key thing to consider when it comes to anxiety is there’s the CONTENT of what kids are anxious about: swimming, going back to school, not being able to do the monkey bars, monsters under the bed, which undoubtedly changes over a lifespan, right?  I highly doubt my now 3 year old will still be worried about monsters under the bed when she’s 12… and yet the FEELINGS STAY THE SAME.  

The more you can zoom out of the content and focus on the feelings the more you will be building circuitry that will be helpful for kids as they get older.  So what you want to try to remember is to… CANCEL THE CONTENT AND FIND THE FEELING.

One of the biggest things I think we all need to train ourselves to do is building the skill of differentiating content from feelings.  The more you hear what kids say in content, the more it activates your brain, your thoughts, your language and logic and naturally that’s how you respond. The more you can train yourself to hear and see the emotion rather than defaulting to rationalising the problem, the more you can activate your presence and are able to FIND THE FEELING.

Here’s an example of what this might sound like when you might try and reassure a kid out of the feeling and focus on the content…

“Sof you can go into ballet class, you’ve done ballet before, you’ll be fine… you loved it remember?”

What are you really communicating here? What you’re really saying is, don’t feel that feeling. And what kids will actually hear and learn is, I shouldn’t feel this way.

The same kind of thing goes for when you say, “there’s nothing to worry about”.. or “if you just thought about it this way you’d feel so much better”… or “you love footy – look, all your friends are here, just go join in baby”...

ALL of these are get-rid-of-anxiety strategies!  And they ALL INCREASE anxiety.

Why?  You can’t use logic to change your emotions.  Your feelings don’t need logic, your feelings, every feeling, needs presence.  It is the most important thing that your feelings need to feel more manageable.

How to cope with anxiety

So the opposite strategy of trying to reduce something or get rid of it is the idea of coping with it; coping with anxiety.  

How do you help a kid COPE with discomfort or cope with anxiety? The answer really applies to all feelings here… it's about your willingness to SEE the emotion, to tolerate it, to see it as real in a child, without (this is key) being swept up in it yourself.  And to do any of this, kids have to FEEL your presence and here’s why…

The scariest thing for kids is being alone.  Aloneness is the single greatest threat to a child and this goes back to evolution, to attachment.  And when a child feels overwhelmed with a feeling, worse than the feeling, is feeling alone in that feeling.

So all of your attempts to pull kids OUT of anxiety, what it ironically does is this…

Let’s say you said to a kid, ‘see, there’s no monsters, darling? There's nothing to be scared about.”  

The next night, when they worry that there are monsters again – remember, monsters is the content – their body remembers the aloneness in that feeling because an adult wasn’t able to connect to them with it.  Now the feeling is actually WORSE the next day.  And the more you try to convince them OUT of the feeling, the more ALONE they feel with the feeling. You’re encoding aloneness rather than connection here.  And we need to reverse that!

Why you’d never want to convince them out of a feeling

Here’s something else that is so important to keep in mind as to why you don't want to convince kids out of their emotions, even if you could.

Let’s say you’ve convinced a kid NOT to be nervous about soccer, you’ve convinced them OUT of the feeling… what you are then unconsciously wiring in the kid is self-doubt.  Because what you’re really saying here is… I know your body better than you do and I can tell you how you should feel.  Right?  Rather than them knowing and honouring the experience they are having in their bodies.  

So what happens when this is wired is that when kids get older they learn a self-talk that says, “I’m not really a good judge about the things that go on inside my body….  Intuition, gut instinct, I don’t really know what that is.  The things that I really learned is that other people have a much better sense of what is going on for me than I do”

Now I don’t know about you but the implications of what that means to my kids, as they get older, is really scary to me.  Peer pressure?  Being put in situations that ARE scary, but they tune out from and tell themselves they’re being silly?  That terrifies me as a parent.

So in the short-term these get-rid-of strategies leave kids alone and in the long-term it wires them for fears of their emotions and self-doubt.  

So what can you do instead?

You want to show kids that what comes after anxiety makes anxiety more manageable.  Their body feels supported.  Their body feels that you are there with them, while not spiralling IN their anxiety.

See our blog ‘How we unknowingly make anxiety worse for our kids’ for further help here.