MANAGING THE ANXIETY OF RAISING TEENS
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Before we get started, I want to tell you about my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0. Consider this, Mom 2.0 is able to step off the rollercoaster of painful emotions that comes with raising teens.
She understands the root cause of her anxiety, frustration, guilt, and sadness and is able to decide how she wants to show up as the mom she wants to be for her big kids as they navigate big challenges. She's learned a skill set that she can apply to any relationship, challenge, or opportunity in her life. She prioritizes her family without sacrificing herself.
Can you imagine this being you? I know it's possible and I know how to help you achieve it because I've been there and I've done it. Are you ready to get started? Join me in Mom 2.0. Now on to the show. Episode number 40.
Hello, my friends. Let's talk about anxiety today. It's the emotion I tend to talk to my clients the most about.
It almost seems like it's an inevitable part of raising teens, feeling worried and anxious about imagined worst-case scenarios and sometimes not so imagined. In last week's podcast, I was talking about our tendency as parents to check in with our kids on a regular basis, almost like a sonar or radar signal that we send out to be sure everything's okay with them. If you look up synonyms for radar, you'll find direction finding, scanning, and tracking.
That feels on point in terms of the way we check in with our kids in this day and age. We look out for where they are, where they're going. We're constantly scanning them for signs that everything's okay or that something's wrong.
And our imaginations are powerful, creative tools. It's our human ability to project into the future that has allowed us to evolve from cave people to humans living in modern society. We've dreamed of solutions for every conceivable problem or even inconvenience.
And with technology as advanced as it is today, we're finding solutions for problems we didn't even know we had. Who knew that we needed artificial intelligence to write for us, to create for us? Just think about how powerful we are as humans and the developments we've forged over thousands of years. The car was only invented 137 years ago, and now we have a probe that's traveled approximately 15 billion miles away from earth.
The first typewriter was invented only about 155 years ago, and now we have chat GBT, artificial intelligence that can write its own books, compose music, write computer programs, design art. Our own minds have created these advances, and it seems somewhat ironic that our own minds are finding ways to replace themselves through artificial intelligence. But more to the point, our minds are powerful.
You and I may not be designing spaceships or AI programs, but the core function of our brains is as powerful as any of those people who have created those technological advances. Whether you realize it or not, your mind is continuously evaluating the world around you and making decisions, whether consciously or unconsciously. Our motivation to make these decisions is inspired by something Maslow called the hierarchy of needs.
Think of this hierarchy like a pyramid. At the most basic bottom level, we need food, water, shelter, and rest. On the second layer, once those needs are fulfilled, we need safety, security, and health.
As you move up the pyramid of needs, you go to love and friendship, then self-esteem, and finally, self-actualization. So as parents, we want this entire pyramid for our children. We've spent their entire life so far trying to give it to them, everything from food and shelter to helping them reach their full potential.
All of the decisions you've been making for years about where to send your child to school, how and how much to support the extracurricular activities they're pursuing, what extra help you've given them, all of these decisions have been our attempt at helping our children achieve the most ambitious goals of attaining self-esteem and self-actualization. When developing this hierarchy in the 1940s, Maslow actually said he thought only 1% of the adult population had actually achieved self-actualization. That's a pretty appalling statistic when you think about how hard we've been working to help our kids reach their full potential.
I guess we could also argue with Maslow that his definition of self-actualization might not actually match what each of the rest of us would define as self-actualization. But I wonder, do you think you've reached your full potential yet? I just turned 50 and I feel like I still have potential left to fulfill. So does it ever really stop this effort to seek self-actualization? But I mention all of this because we put so much pressure on ourselves as parents to help our children attain all of the needs up and down this pyramid.
We've brought these children into the world and for years we've practiced the belief that it's our job to keep our children safe, happy, healthy, and moving towards reaching their full potential. And so if we think that any of the levels of the pyramid are in jeopardy, we worry. This has always been true as we've parented our kids, but now as our children seek independence and pull away from us, test boundaries, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to take the lead when it comes to keeping them safe, happy, healthy, and reaching their full potential.
Safety? Our kids may have a very different view of the consequences of their actions than we do. They may be less risk-averse or motivated by factors like peer pressure or any number of other influences. Can we keep them safe anymore? Then there's their health.
Physical health is one thing. We may have difficulty getting them to the doctor for a checkup unless they think something's really wrong. But then there's also mental health, an increasing and alarming challenge for teens and young adults today.
Is it possible for us to keep our teens healthy? Happiness? I know for sure this one as a parent is out of my control. There are moments when I think I get something right and I see my boy smile or I have the privilege of being near them when they're particularly happy about something. Do I get credit for this happiness? Definitely not.
And is it possible to make them happy when they're not? Achieving their full potential? We've been working hard at this one for a long time as parents. Now that college is looming or maybe now that they're in college, how much of this is up to us? Can we help them self-actualize? In response to these questions, you might be thinking no and yes. And here's the conundrum we're in as parents because even though we think that it probably is and should be up to our kids to take charge of their safety, health, happiness, and success, we're not entirely sure that they're ready for the challenge without us there as a safety net.
Last week I explored whether this might be in part because we've developed the habit of helping them and being there to support them in all aspects of their lives. It's such an ingrained habit that it's hard for us not to step in. Even if we intellectually think that our kids are probably capable of doing things on their own, we still want evidence to take ourselves off the hook for worrying.
When we talk about wanting our kids to be safe and happy, we take for granted that this is obvious. Like of course we want those things. Have you ever thought about why you want those things? It sounds like an odd question, I know.
And maybe you're thinking because I love my kids and I would do anything for them. Okay, so love makes you do those things. But think about what that means.
Love makes you do those things. The love you feel. Let's really explore this.
What does love feel like to you? Think about your child and think about what makes you love them. You may be thinking of a long list of traits, things they do, stories you have about them, or you may just be thinking how lucky you are to be a mom. Sometimes I say to my boys, thank you for choosing me.
It's a privilege to be a mom and to be responsible for raising these beautiful humans. One of the reasons gratitude journaling or a gratitude practice like writing the top three things you're grateful for at the end of the day, the reason this is so powerful is because channeling these thoughts about what makes you feel grateful allows you to channel and focus on that feeling of gratitude. In any given moment, we're probably experiencing a wide range of emotions.
For example, you can be feeling love and anxiety at the same time, along with three or four other emotions. But when you focus on why you're grateful, it strips away the thoughts that might be creating any other feelings you might be having and allows you to be present with your gratitude. So right now, I want to invite you to channel your love for your child.
Focus on all of the reasons you love your child and then experience what that love feels like in your body. I feel love throughout my heart and my belly. It feels warm and pulsing.
I almost imagine I can feel my heart beating. My head feels light. I notice I also feel gratitude.
My breathing slows. I want to take deep breaths, almost to breathe in more of the feeling of love. It feels like a wonderful place to be.
It's not hard to see why from this place of love, we would do anything for the person we love, in this case, our child. We're so invested in this person. And ultimately, because of all of the beautiful thoughts we have about who our children are and what they mean to us, these thoughts we have fill us with so much love.
It's almost intoxicating, and we want more of it. And with our kids, because the love we have for them often means we make a commitment to do whatever we can to support them, we take on this responsibility for their safety, health, happiness, and success. We tell ourselves that their happiness is our happiness.
How often have you said to yourself, I just want him or her to be happy? And so look what we're up against. Safety. Our kids are increasingly in charge of their own safety.
Health. All we can do is offer support. They have to be willing to take it.
And ultimately, there's only so much we can do if something's really wrong. Happiness. It feels like they aren't happy so much more of the time, or at least not happy around us.
We have no power to make them happy anymore. Success. We've given them all of the tools and the support, the lessons and the schooling that we could give them.
Whatever they do with all of that is up to them now. But just because our kids are increasingly in the driver's seat doesn't mean that we've let go of our responsibility to help them achieve their hierarchy of needs. In fact, I can imagine I will always feel an instinctual level of responsibility to help my boys be safe, happy, healthy, and successful.
I'll always want those things for them. So here's the crux of the problem. We still have the goal, but we have no power to achieve it.
This is the definition of powerlessness. The lack of ability, influence, or power. It's not that we want control.
We're not looking for power. But we do want some assurance that our kids aren't going to make a disastrous mistake. The problem is they are in the driver's seat, and they take action and make decisions based on their own thoughts, wishes, and feelings.
And here's the even worse news. The rational part of a teen's brain isn't fully developed until the age of 25 or later. Studies have actually shown that teens' brains work totally differently than our adult brains in the context of decision making.
So as we observe the choices our kids are making, it's actually been scientifically proven that our kids are likely to make decisions that are different than the ones we would make for them. They're guided by emotions, or their amygdala, if you really want to get technical, rather than their frontal cortex, which controls emotions, impulses, and allows us to problem solve and plan. Our kids are making rash decisions from a biological, emotional standpoint.
They're not thinking about consequences, but rather acting much of the time, or I should say reacting, based on how they feel in any given moment. So the battle of wills we're undergoing with our kids, for even basic concerns over their health and safety, we're not just going crazy. They really are making decisions that are likely not what we want them to be.
Because look, we're thinking ahead. We're evaluating the pros and cons, and our view of the right path or the right decision from not only the standpoint of experience, but a fully formed frontal cortex. Our powerful frontal cortex, which doesn't only help us look ahead to plan out the safe, rational choice for our kids, but which also looks ahead to develop a very detailed worst-case scenario of our kids' actions when they don't take advice.
Is it any wonder we experience so much anxiety during this stage of life? I mean, seriously, I meet with so many clients who beat themselves up for not having a better handle on their anxiety. It becomes like a boogeyman that we're afraid of. Like, on top of all of the stress of raising teens, we find ourselves debilitated by anxiety that is spinning in a terrible loop, thinking about tragic outcomes, and then we beat ourselves up for it.
So let's first normalize the feeling of anxiety. Anxiety is emotion like any other emotion, like love, hate, joy, grief. It's just an emotion.
It's defined as a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. That definition seems to encapsulate the teen years pretty perfectly. Worry, unease, uncertain outcomes.
This type of anxiety is something that everyone experiences throughout the course of their life for a variety of reasons, but we tend to also think of anxiety in terms of mental health. Call it anxiety with a capital A. An anxiety from a clinical standpoint can manifest itself by excessive apprehensiveness, avoidance behaviors, and physical symptoms like increased heart rate and muscle tension. I don't know about you, but I've had times with my boys where I've experienced severe symptoms of anxiety, although I've never been diagnosed with anxiety.
My heart's raced. My muscles have tensed. I've shut down in the sense of not being able to face the day because I've been overwhelmed by my worry and anxiousness.
You are the only one who can know whether your anxiety requires medical treatment, and certainly I know many of us at this age are on some form of an anxiety or anti-depression medication. These and other treatments can help manage the more difficult physical symptoms of anxiety, but when it comes down to it, the cause of anxiety is our thoughts. Don't get me wrong.
Some of us may be genetically predisposed to anxiety. Again, there's an important role for medical treatment here, but whether or not you're on medication, understand that the role your mind plays in creating the emotion of anxiety is the source of finding your power again. First, let's stop judging ourselves for feeling anxiety.
I think sometimes we beat ourselves up as moms, like somehow we should be handling all of this better, like we should be tougher. Our kids look at us like we're crazy, overprotective, that we don't understand. We're ruining their lives by being too strict or too demanding.
We're not going to get a pat on the back right now from our kids for doing our best as moms, so I really want to encourage you to do that for yourself. Sometimes we just have to give ourselves the grace to know we're doing the absolute best we can in any given moment, and sometimes the best I can give is not what I would have wanted in retrospect, but in the throes of anxiety, it was the best I could do. The landscape of our lives is changing, uncertain, and largely out of our control.
This is a huge contrast to the life we've been living with our kids up to this point. It's going to take an adjustment. You're going to worry and feel uncertain sometimes.
Anxiety is a normal human reaction to uncertainty, and think about what that human reaction is. It's a series of sensations in your body. We experience every emotion in this way.
Anxiety isn't something tangible. It's not something you can see, but it's a physical series of vibrations that you can describe. Consider what anxiety feels like in your body in the same way we just did with love.
The next time you experience anxiety, name the emotion. This is anxiety, and try to sit with it. Write down the sensations you're feeling.
Maybe a tightness in your chest, a headache, a pit in your stomach, heart heavy or racing. If you close your eyes and try to see an image of your anxiety, what color is it? Does it move? Is it hot or cold? Just experience this feeling, and as you do this, you'll notice a few things. First, the feelings are uncomfortable but not painful.
Remind yourself this is anxiety. This is what anxiety feels like. You may already have an experience with anxiety, and often because it's an emotion we don't like feeling, we fight against it.
Think of it like anxiety is pushing against a door and we're trying to close it and keep it out. We're both pushing against the door on opposite sides. We're trying to keep the anxiety out and it's trying to get in.
It's physically exhausting to push against emotion, to fight it, which is why we can tend to feel so exhausted in the midst of it. We don't want to feel this way, so we're beating ourselves up for feeling bad and trying so hard to stuff it in a box and make it go away. We often also try to solve the anxiety by trying to fix the situation.
How many times have you imagined a worst-case scenario for your child, some outcome you absolutely want to avoid, and so you find yourself constantly reminding your child, be careful, don't forget, be safe, or they're doing something you don't want them to do and so you punish them or you yell. We act from anxiety and ultimately push against a brick wall because our kids are going to do what they're going to do, so we can't fight our kids and we can't fight our anxiety. Are you starting to see why you feel so terrible if anxiety is a regular part of your experience right now? So what if, and let's just imagine for a moment, what if we could learn to become friends with the series of sensations in our body that we call anxiety? What if we could start to notice that anxiety was creeping in on us and not make it a problem that you have to fix, just for a few minutes to sit and notice this is anxiety, nothing has gone wrong, it's just a vibration in my body.
What if anxiety like love and joy and peace, what if it's just part of the human experience of life and there's nothing wrong with you that you're experiencing it? In fact, once you've settled into the emotion and you ask yourself why you feel it, it's understandable, right? I feel anxiety because when I see my child struggling in school, I fear they're going to fail. I feel anxiety when my daughter doesn't pick up her phone and I expected her home an hour ago. I feel anxiety when I suspect my son's doing drugs and I worry he'll get hurt or addicted.
We observe what our child is doing and we worry about their future. We want it all to turn out okay. Is it any wonder that we feel anxiety? But this emotion is not coming from what our kids are doing or not doing.
We're observing their behavior, their words or their actions, and we're interpreting them in a way that makes us think there's a risk here. We might be observing big obvious signs of danger or we might just be noticing something's off but they're not telling us what's going on. Your mom radar is constantly pinging off your child looking for danger because it's been your job for almost two decades, maybe more, to keep this human safe.
We don't turn off that radar just because our child has decided they want to be independent now. Our beautiful minds can craft some devastating scenarios and if there's even the remotest possibility that one of these scenarios could come true, we would do anything to avoid the pain of it. So we push and we nag, we try to control and keep them safe to keep them on the right track because we think we know better and maybe we do.
So I'm not saying that you don't guide or that you shouldn't remind or that it's not appropriate to help but just notice the type of guiding, reminding, and helping you do when you're in the throes of anxiety. Speaking for myself, I definitely do not show up as my most effective self or parent when I'm on the verge of panic or frustrated and angry because I'm desperate to keep my child safe. Anxiety is a normal human emotion but perhaps it's one that we shouldn't be so quick to react to because that anxiety brings with it a certain pressure to act to try to fix the situation and maybe there is a need for you to but I want to invite you to act from love rather than anxiety.
Anxiety drives us to react, to push against, to try desperately to change our team. Anxiety comes from a place of being right that we know best and our kids are on the brink of doing something terribly wrong. I get that this is our gut reaction.
We notice the anxiety creeping in and we don't even realize that it's coming from a series of thoughts painting a terrible, very bad, worst case scenario in our mind but what if you could notice the anxiety and take a breath. Say to yourself, this is anxiety and I'm experiencing it because of a story in my head about all of the things that can go wrong. Sit with that anxiety and don't react.
This is a practice so don't beat yourself up if you find yourself reacting despite your best intentions but the next time you feel anxious, try again. Take a breath. Name the emotion.
This is anxiety. Experience the emotion in your body instead of reacting. Then once the feeling has subsided, ask yourself, what would I do from love here? Love would acknowledge the possible dangers and pitfalls of the situation but love would also acknowledge that your child is operating from a different manual than you are and maybe, just maybe, they're also right about what's best for them and perhaps not as off course as you think.
We think we know what could go wrong but what if we're wrong about that? Love acknowledges that our child is also doing the best they can right now. Love might still gently remind or offer advice but without the need to control, without the panic of needing desperately to change the situation, love sees your child for who they are and not for who you want them to be. Love sees you for who you are.
A mom doing the best she can. You're not alone in this and you're doing an amazing job, mama.
Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program mom2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
