When your child is in therapy or you are searching for an anxiety or OCD therapist, you might have expectations and assumptions about how treatment should go. Often those expectations and assumptions are inaccurate. I invited therapists Dr. Josh Spitalnick and Marti Munford from Anxiety Specialists of Atlanta, to sit down with me on the AT Parenting Survival Podcast to discuss the most common misconceptions they see among parents.
OCD comes in many disguises. OCD is OCD and it is treated as such, but it can be easy to miss new intrusive thoughts and compulsions. That is because OCD can morph and present in a completely different way. The best way to approach OCD is to educate ourselves and our kids in the many ways it can show up. It can help to learn about other OCD experiences and common OCD intrusive thoughts and compulsions. When you do this, you and your child will be able to catch new OCD struggles before it can grow big roots. Then you’ll approach it the same way you do with any other OCD theme using ERP, Exposure Response Prevention.
We are hearing more and more about how inflammation is implicated in many mental health issues including anxiety and OCD. But what does that mean? Are there ways we can see if our child is struggling with inflammation? Are there things we can change in their diet or lifestyle that will reduce inflammation?
I don’t know those answers, but I do know someone who does! That is why I invited Dr. Ann Kulze, a renowned physician and founder of the Healthy Living School to come and talk to us. Dr. Ann has been featured on the Dr. Oz show, Oprah and Friends Radio, Time, and WebMD sharing her expertise in this area.
OCD and Eating Disorders are often comorbid conditions, but beyond that, OCD can cause disordered eating. Many OCD issues including Emetophobia, Moral OCD, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Orthorexia, PANDAS/PANS and ARFID can impact our kids ability to eat. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I explore the various OCD issues that can overlap Eating Disorders and some that can be incorrectly diagnosed and treated as only an Eating Disorder.
Many of you know that we suddenly lost my husband due to a blood clot in 2021. It has been a bumpy journey with grief for me and my children since then. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I discuss how I’ve helped my kids with anxiety and OCD navigate grief, what I discovered about loss and my new children’s grief book.
Raising kids with anxiety or OCD is hard enough. But when you add chronic pain to your daily routine it can push you over the edge. Often we backburner our own issues. We tell ourselves that we don’t have time for our struggles. That we don’t have time to address our needs. We push through and do more damage in the end. But the truth is if you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t be able to effectively take care of your child. Helping a child with anxiety or OCD is exhausting and chronic pain will only add to that fatigue. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk to Dr. Andrea Durand, my go-to expert on all things pain related. She explores our relationship with chronic pain and discusses ways we can address the pain to minimize its impact on our daily lives.
We all want our kids with anxiety or OCD to use coping skills to deal with anxiety, overwhelm, and dysregulation. But what happens when they refuse to use them? In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast, I talked to my go-to expert on coping skills, best-selling author and therapist, Janine Halloran. In this episode, Janine and I discuss why some kids refuse to use coping skills and what approaches to use in order to help them embrace these tools.
Your kids have a predictable relationship with OCD. OCD gives them an intrusive thought or feeling and they do their part in responding. A key part in getting OCD relief is disrupting this predictable OCD loop. In this week’s Youtube video, I’ll teach them how to disrupt OCD compulsions to throw OCD off-kilter and start taking their life back.
OCD exposures, ERP (Exposure Response Prevention), is the go-to strategy when working on OCD. But what if exposures don’t seem to be helping? In this week’s Youtube video I talk about one of the most common reasons why OCD exposures don’t work and what to do to make this OCD approach more effective.
OCD wants us to take its threats seriously. It wants us to debate with it, argue, and come up with solutions to circumvent the issues it presents. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast, I explore how these issues can show up and how we can teach our kids and teens to not get caught in OCD’s trap.
Anxiety and OCD often make our kids push back on help. It might create an us vs them mentality in their mind. It might make them spin their wheels thinking about how they can avoid therapy, hide their compulsions or get others to give in to their anxiety or OCD. Unfortunately, this approach is a boomerang that only winds up hurting them and their long-term progress in the end. In this week’s Youtube video, I talk to kids and teens about how to be honest with themselves about their view of the help they are receiving. I encourage them to take the wheel and start steering their own journey while welcoming the support that surrounds them.
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.
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.
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