Reply to College DD is Driving me Crazy

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[quote=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)[/quote]

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