As you become more educated about anxiety and OCD, you most likely will start seeing it all around you. It can be hard to stomach seeing a child struggling with anxiety or OCD, especially if their parents aren’t aware of what they are truly dealing with.
OCD feeds off of compulsions, including mental compulsions. Often OCD mental compulsions are missed, even by the person that is doing them! Mental reviewing is one of those compulsions people do without realizing they are growing their OCD.
Effective communication is one of the most essential aspects of parenting a child with OCD or anxiety. When communication breaks down, our ability to support them directly becomes limited.
Nausea is front and center for SO many themes related to anxiety and OCD. Feeling nauseous when you are anxious is incredibly common. So it is not surprising that anxiety, and even OCD, hijack that sensation and make it a theme in and of itself.
We don’t just leave our childhood in the past. It comes with us, altering our lens of how we view life. This includes how we view and interact with our child’s anxiety or OCD.
Just because it is the holiday season doesn’t mean our child’s anxiety and OCD take a break. The holidays can stir up a variety of issues for our kids depending on their particular anxiety and OCD themes.
As parents we can be hard on ourselves. The parenting journey raising kids with anxiety and OCD can come with many ups and downs. Many of us blame ourselves when our child’s anxiety or OCD doesn’t get better.
We all want our kids to have strong sibling relationships, but often anxiety and OCD can get in the way. Siblings might feel targeted by the child with anxiety or OCD. They might be on the receiving end of aggression or they might just feel sidelined by how much attention their sibling requires.
We may not have full control over our child’s recovery around anxiety or OCD, but we can control how we show up to their struggles. This can be tricky when our mind is bogged down with what-if scenarios.
Anxiety and OCD can take a TON of resilience. So when we have kids who generally give up easily, this can impact how they handle their mental health struggles.
She was visibly shaking. Her hands were trembling and she was asking me to help. Her face was so pale that my own panic started to set in. This was the start of an anxiety attack.
Often when we have anxiety or OCD we hyperfocus on getting rid of the anxiety. We can view anxious feelings as the enemy. We might think that success is not being anxious 100% of the time. Success is not being uncomfortable. Success is being calm and content.
Raising a child with anxiety or OCD can bring with it so many struggles, including our own grief and overwhelm. It is easy, and tempting, to bury our own raw emotions around our child’s anxiety or OCD struggles. But honoring and processing our feelings is equally important.
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