College DD is Driving me Crazy

[Anonymous]

This is interesting. I have a daughter with similar health anxiety. She does see a therapist on and off. I think you've gotten a lot of good advice. I'm really intrigued by the CBT poster just a few posts up. That seems REALLY constructive to me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:With someone really anxious who spirals and won't act you might have to take gentle action: research gyns near you and find the best reviewed, sweetest young woman gyn you can find, someone people gush about being kind, relatable, non judgmental. Show her all that information so she knows she will be safe. Then make the call with her.

Why? She doesn’t have a gyn problem. She has a mental illness problem. If not her worry about “infertility” if will manifest into someone else or another heathy issue she perceives to have.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PPs seem to be dismissing this, but the period issue and fatigue could be something, depending on how often she has a missed/irregular period.

She's tired because anxiety is exhausting.

While this is true, it's a good age to start going to a gynecologist and you should not dismiss period irregularity because fertility is not an important concern at this point.

She isn’t irregular though. She gets a period every month per OP. The cycle length varies up to 5 days which is within normal and still considered regular.

[Anonymous]

She is grasping at straws and turning them into sequias. This is mental illness.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PPs seem to be dismissing this, but the period issue and fatigue could be something, depending on how often she has a missed/irregular period.

She's tired because anxiety is exhausting.

While this is true, it's a good age to start going to a gynecologist and you should not dismiss period irregularity because fertility is not an important concern at this point.

She isn’t irregular though. She gets a period every month per OP. The cycle length varies up to 5 days which is within normal and still considered regular.

She is worried about it. She's not going to see the medical professional who can reassure her. It makes no sense to argue against a visit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PPs seem to be dismissing this, but the period issue and fatigue could be something, depending on how often she has a missed/irregular period.

She's tired because anxiety is exhausting.

While this is true, it's a good age to start going to a gynecologist and you should not dismiss period irregularity because fertility is not an important concern at this point.

She isn’t irregular though. She gets a period every month per OP. The cycle length varies up to 5 days which is within normal and still considered regular.

She is worried about it. She's not going to see the medical professional who can reassure her. It makes no sense to argue against a visit.

It’s a mental illness, not a gynaecology problem. She needs a trip to the psychiatrist.

[Anonymous]

I'm the "CBT poster" with the young adult son who has struggled with anxiety. I remembered some helpful online materials about anxiety and health anxiety.

https://cci.health.wa.gov.au/Resources/Looking-After-Yourself/Anxiety

https://cci.health.wa.gov.au/Resources/Looking-After-Yourself/Health-Anxiety

Reading these can help you act like a bit like a CBT therapist when your kid is dumping all their worries on you. My DS really started improving when *I* got with the program. I am the person he confides in about his anxiety and I was inadvertently making things worse. I realized this by accident one day, when we'd been on the phone for a while and he was really spiraling and it seemed like he was worse than he was at the beginning of our conversation, and I was starting to despair. And I said to him, "honey, we've talked about this for a long time and it doesn't seem to be helping. Let's talk about something else" and I started telling him about my day at work and a story about the dog and I asked if he'd seen some crazy thing on Twitter, and... it seemed to help.

I realized that talking talking talking about his worries was bad. That I was giving him an opportunity to perseverate. So now if he says he's worried about something, I let him say what it is, and then if it's one of his zero-value thoughts (my term for worries similar to infertility at 19--no way to know if you're infertile until you try to conceive and nothing to do about it until then, so there is literally zero benefit to thinking about it now), I basically ignore it. I'll say, "well, that sounds like something you've worried about before, " or even "that sounds like a zero-value thought". And then I change the subject. And if he can't switch gears and keeps coming back to it, I ask him what he's supposed to do when he's anxious, and we talk about the strategies his therapist has worked with him on. (The strategies are all about distraction.) And I help him make a plan to execute a few strategies. But we don't talk about the worry or do anything that makes it seem like thinking about it is a good use of time. It's like gray-rocking that part of his brain, lol.

This has helped SO MUCH.

(Sorry if this is a mess-- typing on my phone)