There are many times when the actual theme of our child’s anxiety or OCD can undermine their ability to get help. How are we supposed to help our kids (or clients/patients) when the very nature of helping is triggering their anxiety or OCD? In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I explore the most common ways anxiety and OCD themes get in the way of helping and what parents and therapists can do when it happens.
Teaching our kids to trust their gut instinct can be a lifesaver. But what do we do when anxiety or OCD feels like gut instinct? What if intuition is really their OCD magical thinking in disguise? In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I explore the differences between gut instinct and intuition vs anxiety and OCD.
So many parents ask me, “How can I stop my child’s compulsions?” The quick answer is, you can’t. You can stop your participation in them, but you can’t force your child to not do compulsions. And even if you can, it isn’t going to bring your child long term success. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I address this common question and explore what parents can and cannot do to help their kids with OCD.
I get this question so often I thought it deserved a whole podcast. One of the first things OCD therapists often teach parents is how to pull back their reassurance. This can make a parent feel very uncomfortable and I get it. I have kids with OCD myself. Parents want to know they are doing the right thing, especially when everything feels counterintuitive.
The best ways to directly help our kids with anxiety or OCD is through effective treatment, but there are some side dishes that can aid in their progress. When we help others it can improve self-esteem, mood, and purpose. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast, I discuss how having our kids help others can actually help them as well.
Compulsions are often missed by parents and therapists not trained to treat OCD. Sometimes our kids will be doing something right in front of us and we’ll miss it. It is easy to do when OCD has a million different disguises. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I explore some commonly missed compulsions and what to do when you accurately spot a new weed growing.
Having a child with anxiety or OCD can be a challenge, but when it impacts eating, it can become a major health issue. Many kids with anxiety or OCD struggle to eat for many different reasons. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I explore common core fears that drive restrictive eating and what you can do if your child has ARFID (Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder) or is working their way towards it.
Working on anxiety or OCD is like lining up dominos. Without certain pieces, you aren’t going to get too far. One of the first dominos is trust and communication. Without trust and communication, helping our kids with anxiety or OCD is going to be an uphill battle. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I explore how parents can improve their trust and communication to set their child up for long-term success.
OCD is not always about a fear, sometimes it is about a feeling. Kids with OCD can have intrusive feelings around disgust. They can have issues where things don’t feel just right. They can be hyper focused on bodily sensations like their breathing, blinking, heart rhythm and bladder. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I explore how these types of OCD themes show up and how to do ERP (exposure with response prevention) with this type of issue.
When kids have Moral OCD, intrusive thoughts they are a bad person, it can be hard to discipline and set boundaries. It can also hit their self-esteem on a level that makes it hard to manage. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk to parents about how to navigate the minefield of discipline, redirection, self-esteem and boundary setting in kids with Moral or Scrupulosity OCD.
Our kids with anxiety or OCD will often have moments of fear and avoidance. What we do in those moments can have a big impact on their long term success. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk about how to turn some of those fearful moments into an opportunity to sit in discomfort and walk towards fear.
We are only one piece of the puzzle in our child’s long term success with anxiety or OCD, but our attitude is something we have full control over. How we show up to our child’s struggles can have a big impact. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk about our parental attitudes and how to shift them while having self-compassion.
Often our kids with anxiety or OCD have BIG emotions. These emotions can be exhausting or overwhelming for us to handle. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk about how to shift our perspective when these big emotions show up and how to turn a dark moment into an opportunity for growth.
As parents we want to encourage our kids with anxiety or OCD to move towards their fears and discomfort, not away from them. But how do we do that? In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk about the small steps we can take to help our kids move towards their fears. I also talk about effective ways to offer encouragement and instill the feeling of success.
Puberty is hard enough, but add anxiety and OCD to the mix and UGH! In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk about the good (yes there is some good), the bad (oh yeah, there is that too) and the ugly (plenty of that) when kids with anxiety or OCD enter puberty.
