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Anxiety
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Child with needs: what can we do?
28 Apr 2006 by Rod Smith / No Comments
Reader Query: Our son is 7 and the youngest of two. He is going through a terrible patch of feeling unheard, unloved and unequal. He is very intelligent and confident which is extremely over-powering. His demands cannot be met because he has overstepped all his boundaries. He has a heart of gold and a soft inner personality but his outer appearance is tough and strong. He is crying out for help and so are we, especially me, his mother with whom he feels he can just be himself and it gets very out of control. I find myself trying to escape him, which torments me because my two boys are MY LIFE. My husband says he needs to know where he stands, find where he belongs in life, and, once his confidence is up again, he will excel because he has leadership qualities! The boy has just overcome shingles and was very ill. I am certain it was due to stress, although I could be wrong. Please help. (Letter edited)
Rod’s Reply: I found your letter moving. Please seek face-to-face help with a pediatrician. Consider a personal journey to a place where your children are part of, but not YOUR LIFE. Some space between you and the boys might benefit everyone in the family.
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Triggers – hit hardest in intimate relationships
17 Apr 2006 by Rod Smith / 1 Comment
Have you had feelings come over, even overwhelm you, that you recognize from childhood? Has background music, the whiff of a particular perfume, seemed to emotionally cripple you? Unresolved childhood traumas will almost certainly visit victims as they get older.
Sadly, it is in intimacy that negative associations of childhood most strongly stir. It is in the beauty of loving relationships that the memory of an inappropriate or abusive moment tugs eerily from a distance. A forced closeness years ago now hinders you when you long for adult intimacy. It is in love that the traumas of childhood raise ugly heads. So intricate is our human makeup that intimate connections stir positive and also negative memories. It’s negative triggers that are indiscriminate, often unyielding, forming debilitating links to the hidden pain of our lives.
Tensions with a spouse might have nothing to do with the spouse but with what’s unresolved from our adolescents. We fight yesterday’s battles today, with the “wrong” person. The conflict is an attempt to settle childhood scores. There’s benefit to discovering relationship struggles often have their origins a generation from where we might seek resolution. Examination, prayerful consideration of our bundle of triggers can defuse them and peace might be found.
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Responsive people can help heal relationships
31 Mar 2006 by Rod Smith / 4 Comments
Are you a responsive person (as opposed to a reactive person)?
1. Responsive people can function within life’s many tensions without becoming overwhelmed.
2. They can see possibilities within problems.
3. They are extraordinarily flexible and they can be very playful.
4. They shape their emotional environment, bringing calm and creativity to their context, rather than assuming the anxieties of those around them.
5. They initiate creatively rather than react defensively and can be objective and consider implications for everybody involved.
6. They see the immediate and the long-term effects of decisions.
7. They see the whole picture and how the whole moves and changes; they do not see only parts, but also how parts influence and impact each other.
8. They do not recruit others to be on their side when conflict occurs.
9. They are not “either / or” or “black and white” thinkers but can see many alternative options and possibilities when reactive people think there is none.
10. They place thinking above feeling: feeling is consequent to the thinking, not the reverse. -
Reactive people tend to damage relationships….
31 Mar 2006 by Rod Smith / 3 Comments
Are you a reactive person or a responsive person?
Get out of the middle!
Reactive behavior is characterized by:
1. Rash, knee-jerk decisions; being anger-driven, living with a “short fuse.”
2. Getting other people rallying for a cause, stampeding to get your way.
3. Being highly subjective and self-protective.
4. Running in the other direction.
5. Being easily hurt, insulted, or damaged.
6. Being humorless or seeing humor as a waste of time.
7. Developing a conspiratorial tone with others.
8. Saying, “People are saying…… about you.”
9. Over-functioning (doing things beyond your responsibilities).
10. Under-functioning (avoiding your responsibilities).
11. Giving unsought advice and expecting it to be followed.
12. Doing things for others that they can do for themselves.
13. Remaining surprised and innocent after causing much disruption.
14. Being vindictive.
15. Trying to get people to take sides.
16. Being unable to see beyond survival, feeling threatened at every turn.
17. Feeling overly responsible for others.
18. Feeling no other person, except you, knows what is right or good. -
I am having anxiety attacks while driving. What can I do?
15 Mar 2006 by Rod Smith / 25 Comments
READER WRITES: I have been suffering with anxiety attacks for about 12 years now. The strange thing is it seems to affect me mostly when driving my car, especially if I get stuck in a traffic jam. I get really anxious and start to get all the symptoms of a panic attack. The trouble is it affecting my life and narrowing down my routes, as I won’t go on certain freeways in case there is any kind of hold up. I am not afraid of flying or of elevators, escalators. It is only when I drive and I am a fairly good passenger. Is there any kind of cure of this phobia, which seems to be ruling my life now?
ROD RESPONDS: Twelve years is a long time to suffer anything. It is when seemingly irrational fears impede functioning that face-to-face medical help becomes necessary. Please, seek it. My therapeutic counsel would question you about the frequency and the intensity of the episodes, which I’d have you describe in great detail. I’d ask you for a painstaking process of self-monitoring with the view to identifying commonalities that predicate your most intense attacks. Having encouraged you to write these observations, I’d suggest you’d be able to identify ways to accommodate, rather than expel, the anxiety from your life altogether.
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Verbal log-jam
When I was a boy I’d endlessly practice the fluent delivery of my name but it seldom flowed easily from my lips. As if it was new news to me, adults pointed out my stutter. Perhaps they thought I was beginning, at that precise moment, for the first time in my life to spit from the mouth, twist at the neck, jig my head back and forth trying to expel some inane statement log-jammed between my gut and my throat.
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Life in our beloved 122
If the inside of a house (outside, too, I suppose) is a metaphor of the lives of the people who live in it – which is something I once read somewhere – gosh, are we in trouble. Our house is a mess.
I consistently clean it room by room, thinking often of the legend that the Golden Gate Bridge that says there’s some guy constantly painting it. I feel for him. While I am sure the view is wonderful I must believe that the poor guy whose doing it daily from one end to the other must find the wind and the weather quite a challenge.
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Being a white South African can come with complications
Being a white South African reared under Apartheid is no simple matter. It permeated everything for me. While I do not pretend to have been a political activist, I was always cognizant that my privileges, simply a result of being born white, were unmerited, and most unfair especially when enjoyed at the expense of others who were not. I think this unsettling truth (for I took advantage of my station in life) was somewhat of a companion to me from the age of about six or seven.
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Location, location – remembering winter in August
We live very close to our school and church, so close we can hear the school bell from our kitchen and the church bells in my bedroom.
Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.
I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.
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Ready to adopt?
If you wait until you are ready to adopt a child you never will because you will never be ready. The baby, and only the baby, will make you ready. Reading the right books will be helpful, but “ready” magically comes upon you when a real baby is sleeping in your arms or crying in the middle of the night. If you are not ready to change diapers – and I always am amused at the big deal about this non-issue – being unprepared will last only as long as a clean diaper.
Life inside the Smith household
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