Therapy for fears and anxiety can be very new to families. Oftentimes, families have learned how to avoid coming into contact with feared situations or objects to minimize their children’s anxiety, so the idea of deliberately planning to have such contact can be scary for parents.
While your child may indeed experience some fear of discomfort during this intervention, one of our goals will be to use your child’s fear or anxiety as a cue to step back just a little so that we can set up the situation so that they can be exposed to it without feeling a lot of discomfort. The goal is for your child to practice a different response to feared situations or objects so that they can be in these situations and be able to cope better. Practice being in the situation can help your child to experience less anxiety and fear so that the anxiety and fear doesn’t interfere with life’s activities for either your child or your family.
What we will do in therapy
What we will do in therapy is try to infuse humor into your child’s experience with the situation or object that currently results in anxiety or fear. The therapist will try to develop a humorous routine for responding to feared objects or situations.
We know that ultimately what you want is for your child to be able to resolve their fear or anxiety. It may be tempting to try to show your child that you are not afraid, with the idea that this may model for them that they don’t need to be afraid. That is a very good parenting instinct when you encounter potentially anxiety-provoking situations in the world that you don’t already know your child is afraid of, as you avoid giving cues that a situation is scary. However, once your child is already afraid of the situation or object, we need to try to find a way to have them practice a new response – and we will try to do that through play and humor. So we are going to practice pretend fearfulness for a long time before we move to practicing a matter-of-fact response to the feared object or situation. All the while, your child will be getting practice being around the feared object or situation without experiencing fear, which is going to make that a more likely response in the future as your child learns that the object or situation is not actually that scary anymore.
What will you do in the therapy room
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- You will be in the room with us as we do this. You might be wondering, “But what should I do?”
- If your child approaches you, try to respond similarly to the way that you see the therapist behaving. I the therapist is pretending to be scared, you pretend to be scared too.
- Don’t worry about trying to direct your child, or if it looks like your child isn’t doing what the therapists wants or needs them to do. If the therapist wants you to step in for something, they will let you know.
- We try to make this fun and not scary for your child. If you feel your child is getting distressed or scared and we are not already picking up on it, please interrupt us and let us know! We do not want to make a child feel distressed.
- Be patient. It may take awhile before we move from practicing being very silly to a more even-keeled response.