How Did My Anxiety Manifest as a Child?

What a great topic, because for most of my life I didn’t know that I had anxiety. Reflecting now, it’s obvious.

When I think of childhood anxiety, I am always reminded of a running joke that my father and I share. Every time I go home to visit him, he’ll say goodnight to me several times in a row before we go to bed. That’s because when I was a child, I would do that to him, sometimes saying “goodnight” like, 20 times before I actually settled down. My father found this cute at first and eventually annoying, but what I’ve never told him is that I was saying goodnight a thousand times because I was scared.

I spent a majority of my childhood afraid of a myriad of different things, but one fear that overshadowed the rest was the idea of my parents dying. This was especially poignant because my parents got divorced when I was 3 years old. So I would change houses each week and not know what was happening with my other parent until I saw them again 7 days later. While there were some benefits (double Christmas and birthday gifts), there were undoubtedly some cons for me, which manifested as an anxiety of something terrible happening to my parents while I was with the other, away at school, or even asleep. I hated that I had no control over what happened to me or my parents. I even remember telling my mom that it was important to me that we say “I love you” every day before school in case she died during the day. As an 11 year old, I thought this was endearing. Remembering this as a 24 year old, it is bone-chilling.

Another vivid memory I have surrounds our DVR (how we recorded television before there was streaming services) being filled with the Ripley’s Believe it or Not show. I think I was about 8 years old at the time. My sister and brother loved to watch that show, so naturally, I wanted to join in. But one day we watched an episode that sent me into a month-long panic. It contained a story about a woman who had a wound and contracted a rare flesh eating bacteria while in the woods. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that this traumatized me. It felt like the carpet of security had been ripped out from beneath my feet -- How could such a terrible thing happen to someone? Things like that weren’t supposed to happen. That was all it took for me to spiral into a panic that my parents could barely calm me down from. I couldn’t sleep, I cried constantly, and I wouldn’t go outside.

A similar occurrence happened when I was in middle school and I saw an episode of 1,000 Ways to Die in which a woman choked on food while alone in her house. It had never occurred to me that I could choke and die alone. The thought genuinely terrified me, because I felt as if again, a security blanket had been ripped out from underneath me. From then and there my anxiety dictated that I was not going to eat. It felt like a switch had gone off in my mind – no more eating, we’re done doing that! I wish I was exaggerating. Any doctor would have told me this was an eating disorder, but my parents just wanted me to "suck it up."

I couldn’t get my throat to open up and swallow, and if I could, it would take me hours of meticulous chewing to get down a single slice of pizza. I remember crying from being so hungry, but so anxious of choking that I didn’t want to risk it. Eventually, with years of practice, I recovered and now eat normally. I would basically tell my body, which genuinely believed I was going to choke, that we were going to swallow and risk it. And I repeated this over and over and over again until I grew to trust my ability to not choke on every piece of food I put in my mouth. But no one helped me through that; no therapist, parent or teacher. It felt as though no one took me seriously at the time, so I just stopped asking for help.

When I recount these stories to my parents nowadays, they are shocked. They claim they had no idea the severity of my feelings, and I don’t blame them. I am not telling you these stories to villainize them.

Children are brilliant, but unfortunately they don’t always have the tools to communicate their feelings, or even a way of measuring how they are feeling. What feels obvious to me in self-reflection as a cry for help may have come off as a silly fear or bump in the road to my parents. So none of us knew that I was anxious or that there were tools to cope with the ways that I was feeling. I couldn’t have stood up to my parents as an 8 year old and told them how out of control I felt, because I had nothing to compare it to. To me, I was living a normal experience.

All this goes to say that if you are currently going through a journey with anxiety, try to find signs and evidence of how this has manifested throughout your life. It can help you realize patterns, which can be really helpful. If you are raising kids, pay attention to them, ask them how they are doing and really listen. If they seem afraid, distracted, or confused, believe them, and go deep with them. We can be their best teachers, and oddly enough, they can be ours.

Make sure you check out this helpful resource from the CDC about identifying childhood

anxiety and depression in children.

Xx,

Renee