This week on Parenting, one mother asked for advice helping her daughter get over her health anxiety after a period of illness.
“My seven-year-old has been having a really bad time health-wise since March,” she told Moncrieff.
“This seems to have knocked her, and she has some subconscious anxiety.
“She’s now having crying episodes [but] never seems to know why she’s crying.
“They’re happening at school, at home, et cetera, with no trigger.
“She says she feel sad and doesn’t know why; she’s mentioned worries about death at other times and is very clingy – please answer this question for me.”
Crying unhappy kid girl sitting on the floor. Image: Anastasia Vishnickaya / Alamy. 5 March 2015Family psychotherapist Joanna Fortune said that while this little girl was the focus of the letter, her mother was likely still feeling the impacts of this health scare as well.
“When our children are sick, we feel that as parents as well,” she said.
“I don’t know how bad the health situation we are talking about, but even if it’s at mild to moderate level but it’s been rolling and repeated for months, that’s exhausting, that’s draining, and that is worrisome.
“As a parent, you’re also holding this, and I think this is a good place to start is really check in with yourself.
“What I mean by that is not go, ‘Yes, I’m worried’, and verbally reason yourself out, but really check in - ‘Where do I hold that worry? Where am I feeling it now? Are my shoulders stiff?’”
'Leftover emotional residue'
Joanna said that our bodies will "encode” distressing experiences, which could be causing the letter writer’s daughter to cry for seemingly no reason.
“When she says, ‘I don’t know why I’m crying’, and you say, 'There’s no trigger', what you’re saying is there’s no obvious, overt, visible trigger,” she said.
“But there is a trigger; it’s coming from deep within her.
“It’s whatever she’s holding, the leftover emotional residue of all of that anxiety and worry of being unwell.”
Woman holding hands with young girl in hospital. Image: RubberBall / Alamy.According to Joanna, Children in Hospital Ireland can be a great resource for play-based therapy for children in these situations.
However, she said that it might be harder to get an appointment over the summer.
“At home, I would say increase sensory play like slime, Play-Doh; messy, tactile play,” she said.
“If that’s making your skin itch thinking about it, just look at ways that you can contain it.
“You can wrap the table in a bin bag for example, you can put down bath towels.
“I have a couple of examples of this on short little videos on my social media that would be much easier to look at than try and verbally describe.
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“Those are there for sensory play, but also try body movement – think about dancing, swaying, chasing, spinning round and round, moving her body in lots of different ways.”
Joanna said that “rhythm and synchrony will activate the parts of our brain that we rely on for regulation”, and that frequently moving her body in this way will hopefully help this girl's nervous system to settle itself.
Main image: Young girl in a hospital bed, talking with her doctor and nurse. Image: Erickson Stock / Alamy. February 2011
