Hi, everyone! My apologies for still not posting as frequently as I'd hoped. If you read my April update, you'll know that the past month has been pretty busy. Even though a lot of the other excitement has calmed down, I'm currently working on some pretty intensive exposure therapy, and its taking up a large amount of my time. Even when I'm not working on it, I'm often too tired to really have the mental wherewithal to write posts for this blog. But I hope that this will make up for it a little bit. Its the second post in my journal series. If you haven't read the first, or the post I made about the series, the premise is this: I take an entry from my journal that I would like to publicly talk about, and I expand on the entry. This means giving more background information and talking about the entry in a way that I believe will be beneficial to other people. With that all being said, this post is about something that I honestly just realized about myself; that I am a snowplow parent to my anxiety.
"I've come to the conclusion that I am a snowplow parent to my anxiety. Even though I hate it and yell at it and scream at it, when it yells and screams at me, I generally do everything in my power to remove the reason for why its yelling and screaming at me, because I hope that by removing the obstacle, it will not have a reason to yell and scream at me again. Of course, this doesn't work, and its highly unproductive and useless, but I still do it all the same."
You're probably familiar with the term "helicopter parent." It's been pretty popular for years and many parents have been accused of acting like that. A helicopter parent essentially follows their child around constantly, hovering over them like a helicopter, making sure that they are safe from the wide world. A snowplow parent takes all of that a step further. You might have heard the term recently in reference to the college applications scandal that's been in the news. Snowplow parents basically remove all obstacles in their child's way, similarly to what a snowplow does. They overprotect their child to the degree that their child never learns to deal with hardship--because they've never encountered it!
So how does that apply to my anxiety?
You might know that I've been using acceptance and commitment therapy since, oh, October of 2018. I'm not going to go into an in-depth explanation of acceptance and commitment therapy, as its not really relevant here. However, know this: a lot of information in acceptance and commitment therapy is given through metaphors. One of the metaphors that I recently learned about is treating your anxiety like a child instead of a big scary monster. Its probably easier to treat your anxiety with loving kindness, even when its acting out and screaming, if you see it as a child, instead of something that's big and scary. But that's not entirely the point. Basically, I was asked to personify my anxiety as a child. The exercise asked me about my parenting style--when my anxiety child is yelling and screaming, do I respond in kind (As in, do I yell and scream back)?
Anyways, I was meditating today, when I had the thought that, quite apart from my reaction to my anxiety acting up (although I suppose that this is part of my reaction), I act like a snowplow parent to my anxiety. Over the past 5 years I have become increasingly more isolated from the world. And this is because whenever my anxiety takes offense to something and starts yelling at me, I generally try to prevent it from happening again by removing myself from that kind of situation. When one of my classmates mentioned throwing up, I switched classes so that I didn't have to be near them. When my IBS began developing and I kept getting migraines and panic attacks, I left regular public school, even though I was only halfway through 8th grade. When one of my classmates asked about my digestive noises (from my IBS) at one of my class meetings in 9th grade, I blushed, lied by saying that I hadn't eaten breakfast and I was hungry, and then begged my teacher to let me do one on one meetings. When my long panic attacks began reappearing, I stopped going to the one on one teacher meetings and to essential doctors appointments too.
Of course, this has done little to actually stop my anxiety child from screaming at me on a regular basis. All it has done is isolate me and prevent me and my anxiety child from learning to deal with the stress brought up in situations like that. In my attempt to protect my anxiety child--and myself as well--from the hardships of life, I actually made it that much less prepared to deal with said hardships by refusing to give it any practice.
In conclusion, I am a snowplow parent (or maybe just a really intense helicopter parent) to my anxiety.
So how do I fix it?
Well, truthfully, I don't think I have a 100% guarantee on anything that I try, but recognizing that this is A) something that I do and B) something that is actually harmful to my wellbeing, seems to be a good first step. Understanding that my attempts to protect myself and my anxiety child from the difficulties of the world have actually made me less prepared to deal with them and less likely to take risks is progress. After all, pretty much everything you do in life comes with a little risk, and if I can't let go of my instinctual barrier, I'll literally just stay in the same place, stuck, for the rest of my life. And I don't know about you, but that doesn't really sound pleasant.
But what should my next step be, now that I've recognized that this is a problem? I think I'm already on a pretty good track, what with all of the acceptance and commitment therapy and mindfulness that I've been doing. Learning to live in the moment and to accept everything that comes with it, even the unpleasant things, seems like it should help me become a little more relaxed and less overbearing parent to my anxiety child. I'm going to work on that the next few weeks in addition to the other things that I've been doing. With any luck, I'll be back then with an update on how things are going. Again, it all depends on how exhausted I am from exposure therapy, but I'm going to make it a goal that I will come back and update everyone on how I'm doing with my goal to not be a snowplow parent to my anxiety.
I hope that this post is helpful in some way to other people. Perhaps it will help you recognize whether YOU have been being a snowplow or helicopter parent to your anxiety. I wasn't so lucky; it took me years to realize this and by now, its going to take a lot of work and effort to get my life back on track. But I hope that someone out there reading this will recognize the truth of what I'm saying and perhaps realize this before your anxiety parenting style has derailed your life.
Love always,
Sam
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