One strategy I use when providing therapy for anxiety is to help you understand your unique way of experiencing anxiety.  What thoughts do you tend to have?  What physical feelings do you have?  How does it start and how does your anxiety end.  Knowing this can help you realize there is often a pattern to how you do anxiety.  Knowing there is a pattern to your anxiety can actually help you calm yourself faster.  Even though it feels bad to be anxious, you can at least remember when you’re in it that if you there is a pattern to it, there is a pattern to it ending too.  Many of my clients with anxiety notice that their anxiety tends to end in a predictable way, which gives them some comfort.  

The other useful thing you can do once you understand your pattern of anxiety is to realize that while you can’t control having anxiety at first, you can take some comfort in knowing it’s a familiar pattern.  I know this sounds odd but it might go like this:  “While it sucks to be feeling this way, this is something I do when I’m in a situation like this.  I also know that since this is my unique pattern for doing anxiety I can trust that it will end soon”.  Thinking of it this way has allowed many of my clients with anxiety to get over it faster.  Rather than trying to stop feeling anxious (which is pretty much impossible), you “sit with” the feelings and accept them as just a temporary state.  Doing this helps you relax sooner than you might normally be able to.  You can start to accept the anxious feelings and symptoms as just something you tend to do when you are stressed or worried.  You can see it as a type of coping mechanism you developed over time, even if it’s overdoing it at times.

When I provide therapy for anxiety issues with my clients, I often tell the story of how I discovered this process (some other smarter therapist discovered it way before me I’m sure).  I had a client who came for therapy for anxiety issues and one of the things that brought up his anxiety was traveling.  He worried about forgetting something important like his passport, or leaving something plugged in at home.  He had a difficult time settling down for several days before he left for any trip.  I asked him to describe the specifics of his anxiety and a pattern began to emerge.  I accidentally suggested that if there is a pattern to what he feels when he has anxiety perhaps there is also a pattern to when it ends?  He said, “Yes, it tends to end when I’m in the car driving to the airport because once I’m in the car there is nothing I can do about those things”.  When he realized this, he seemed to visibly relax.  Two weeks later when he came back after his trip, I asked him when his anxiety started to go away.  He happily told me it went away the day before the trip.  Somehow, knowing that it was going to go away as predicted made it easier to let it go sooner.

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How do you know if your child has anxiety?  There are a few signs that are common to teenage anxiety that I have seen in my counseling practice.  This can vary by age.  Older teens can show anxiety,  or hide it better, than younger teens and children.  Some of the signs I see are avoiding speaking up in groups,  avoiding social situations such as sleep overs, avoiding interacting with authority figures such as coaches, teachers, or aunts and uncles they are less familiar with.  Body language can also be a clue.  Anxious teenagers tend to hold themselves in such a way as to make themselves smaller.  They literally make themselves shorter by scrunching down their posture and tend to cover themselves almost as in a defensive posture. Think arms crossed over their chests and avoiding eye contact.  They don’t stand in ways that look assertive.  This may mean they don’t stand or walk with a confident air.

Anxious Behaviors

Anxious teens often decline invitations to do things with new groups of kids or go to places they are unfamiliar with.  They may say they are not interested in going to summer camps, joining activity based school clubs, or field trips because they get uncomfortable in situations where they don’t know what to expect or who they might have to interact with.  Anxious teens often don’t like to be called on in school or singled out even in good ways.  

Anxiety can be overcome with counseling.  The general strategy is to help the teen visualize what they will be doing differently when they are no longer anxious.  A counselor for an anxious teenager will help them develop a very detailed picture of themselves when they are more confident so they can see it themselves clearly in various real scenarios.

Next Steps

The next step is to help them identify very small, but do-able, things they can start doing differently.  This could be, for example, choosing to walk more confidently into the school building one day, even if they don’t do anything else differently the rest of the day.  Then the counselor would build on this one thing and add another positive behavior to it.  Pretty soon, the anxious teenager is noticing other times when they were more confident. They start seeing themselves gaining confidence and trying new things.  

If your have a child with teenage anxiety, counseling is a good idea.  It can help them overcome it more quickly and feel confident to try new things and gain new friends and experiences.  

Gary Watson is a Solution Focused Therapist in Grand Rapids Michigan.  He provides counseling for couples, counseling for teenagers, and adults.  He provides counseling for anxiety, depression, stress, college and work stress, and relationship problems.  For more information, please visit the website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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