Fears in teenagers: what are they, and how to help cope with them?

Why do these “bad” feelings remain in the memory for a long time? What is an unfinished action?

The best prevention of the consequences of stress for both adults and children is to allow them to talk freely about what happened, express their feelings and thoughts, and give free rein to spontaneous, even contradictory, reactions and experiences.

Psychologists know: it is necessary that a child or an adult can freely “pour out his soul” (as poets used to put it), reveal what worries him, find a form for what may have dimly flashed in the mind, heart or impulse ran through the body in time of a stressful episode. Careful attention to small fragments of memory is necessary so that “unfinished, temporarily stopped” actions receive their identification and their place for “unfolding and completion” (naturally, in the form of a game, story or fantasy performance). The spontaneity of recognition, expression of one's feelings, a trusting attitude towards the world and the hope that the world will accept these feelings and treat them kindly must be restored. He will not say: “Your feelings are wrong,” but, on the contrary, will give support with words and actions in a certain (phenomenological) way. The situation can be considered complete when such complementary support opens the way for the expression (outburst) of feelings. In many cases, the victim does not formulate his thoughts and does not give space to his feelings, since there is no person perceiving (listening to) these feelings. Or, on the contrary, he fears rejection, condemnation from those around him, and therefore maintains external calm for the sake of loyalty.

Education

Elena Yurievna Petrova

Webinar

WEBINAR: Working with the consequences of psychological trauma

Participate

We will give an example of such a phenomenological message for an adult below. Perhaps the form will seem too naive to the reader, but a stressful situation is often not the case where complex philosophical reflections or paradoxical proposals are appropriate. For example, a friend or loved one can confirm: “Yes, the situation was difficult,” saying that, yes, the person was very stressed or angry at that moment. That is, to give respect and RECOGNITION to a person’s experience at the level of his phenomenology of feelings, impulses, impulses experienced during a difficult stressful situation (trauma). A friend will refrain from false consolation tactics: “Just forget and don’t think about it: it’s all over” or “don’t be so afraid and worry, because everything ended well!” Such remarks seem supportive and reassuring, and their structure tells the person: “Your feelings are wrong, replace them.” It’s amazing how often, in a stressful situation, loved ones confuse support with “silencing spontaneous feelings”! If the situation was really difficult, it is better for the child or adult to express in a calm and friendly atmosphere what they really experienced at that stressful moment.

REASONS FOR CHILDREN'S FEARS

It is normal to be afraid of something, depending on your level of development. This is how the child learns to cope with his fantasies and develop defensive reactions against them. But not all of these fears must necessarily arise: many of them appear due to the incorrect behavior of adults against the background of the highly impressionable child with a rich imagination. The baby’s baggage of life knowledge and experience is still too small to be able to explain certain phenomena logically. Therefore, he turns on his imagination, sometimes comes up with them for himself in the most terrible colors, is impressed and becomes fixated. Such situations develop unfavorably for the child, preventing him from living a calm and happy life, sometimes leading to neuroses.

To avoid this, it is important for parents to know what reasons can provoke the emergence of unnecessary fears:

• Specific cases. For example, a baby may be terrified of wasps or dogs if he was once bitten by a wasp or dog. Or be afraid of confined spaces if you once got stuck in an elevator. But if he has never encountered this, he will have nothing to fear.
• Education on constant strict prohibitions or threats. (“You can’t walk through puddles! You can’t eat so much sweets!”, “If you don’t go to bed, I’ll call a policeman! If you don’t finish your soup, the evil wolf will drag you away! If you don’t listen, Baba Yaga will take you away!”).
• Limitation of the child's motor activity. Fearing that the baby will be injured, the mother does not allow him to run, jump, or climb trees. Unable to find an outlet, energy can cause increased anxiety and the appearance of phobias.
• Lack of communication with peers. Social limitations also lead to distortions in mental development.
• Conflicts with peers, ridicule from them.
• Frequent conflicts between parents. The baby is afraid of becoming the cause of them and feels like he is the culprit of family discord.
• The fears of the parents themselves. If the baby is shown (even by accident) his mother’s fear of mice or centipedes, then the child will most likely follow her example.
• Hyperprotection in the family. The child will grow up insecure, irresponsible, unable to make decisions, and not adapted to everyday life. He will be frightened by any difficulties, because he is not used to them. A person will grow up infantile, and this often gives rise to all sorts of fears, as a reason to once again experience the care of adults.
• Growing up in a single-parent family, when the mother has to take on the role of head of the family. Exhausted, constantly tired from endless worries, irritated, the mother does not give the child the much-needed feeling of harmony, calm and security.
• Neurosis. This is a mental disorder that requires drug therapy. Against the background of neuroses, all kinds of phobias often arise, and chronic fear can develop into neurosis. Therefore, you cannot leave the little boy without attention and support.

Two strategic goals in the work of a psychologist in connection with some manifestations of PTSD

When working with PTSD, two areas of work open up for a psychologist. The first direction is to identify the nature of excess stress in a person and help cope with stress. The second is to explain to parents or loved ones how to replace components of communication that are harmful to the victim with more effective and beneficial ones for everyone. These areas go well together and can be discussed in detail. First, the psychologist may present some ideas about how to help a person who has experienced stress in the past and now has signs of PTSD. Then, discuss what and how loved ones can do to support the rehabilitation process and prevent PTSD in the event of stressful (traumatic) situations in the future.

THE POWER OF IMAGINATION

Separately, it is worth mentioning the role of fantasy in perpetuating fears in children. Prolonged experience of fears, their transition into phobias is typical for children who are anxious, suspicious, unconfident, impressionable, pessimistic, dependent and susceptible to influence. It is in such cases that innocent childhood fantasies quickly acquire obsessive chronic features.

And children, especially in preschool age, fantasize for any reason (this is a natural stage of their psychological development): heard a scary fairy tale or horror story from a peer, watched a scary cartoon or movie, read a book with a terrible plot, played a bloody computer game, heard something in the conversation of adults. Even cats fighting in the yard can cause fear.

A developed imagination works continuously. Frightening shadows from a lamp, curtains, blankets, the ominous light of the full moon, mysterious sounds outside the window - these are the colors in which an impressionable child perceives the world. And so his life is filled with ghosts, werewolves, aliens, monsters and monsters...

Do not read bedtime stories to such a child with evil characters and protect him from watching TV in the evening. And the fact that he still watches should not cause any negative emotions. Let it be good cartoons or educational programs.

Goal two. Working with parents. What and how can parents do?

What can a psychologist advise loved ones if an unpleasant episode once happened to a child or adult, and they want to help as much as possible with good mental rehabilitation after this episode? Obviously, you need to somehow talk to the person and let them talk, even if it’s a child (especially if it’s a child). If it is known for sure that a difficult situation has occurred, it is useful for loved ones to show respect for emotional reactions and responses to the stress factor. I can assume that often close people act in relation to those who find themselves in a really difficult situation, using tactics familiar to them from childhood in relation to a completely different category of experience. If they are used to calming overly nervous relatives, it seems to them that, by analogy, they also need to calm those who have experienced real stress. This tactic denies the reality of the experience, and we know that the first basis for rehabilitation is for the person to be supported in the reality of his existence. Including in the reality of lived experience.

How to talk to a child after suffering stress? How to talk to a child in a situation where he is directly experiencing stress? The answer is straightforward: acknowledge the fact of stress and acknowledge the full range of feelings that the child exhibits. If the basis of these feelings is, in addition to the relevance of the emotional response to the current situation, the additional unpleasant effect of anxiety generated by PTSD, then a position of respect and acceptance on the part of loved ones is doubly necessary. This receptive and phenomenological action creates a platform for the disclosure of experience and its processing. By the way, processing can happen without the help of a psychologist. For example, if parents encourage spontaneous expression of feelings, the child may express feelings during spontaneous play. Or he may, during a night's sleep, see, concretely or in symbolic form, an old traumatic episode. Often the dream itself does the work of symbolization, identification and response; it can provide a place and form for the work of completing unfinished actions by the psyche. The work that they forgot to do during the daytime. And then, fortunately, you won’t even need the help of a psychologist.

TYPES OF INSURANCE

In psychology, fears are generally divided into age-related and neurotic. Age-related ones arise in most children at a certain age, as a reaction to mental and personal development. Their main characteristic is transience. They usually do not have pathological severity and disappear as the child develops.

Neurotic ones most often appear against the backdrop of a psychotraumatic situation and can become fixed in the child’s mind for a long time, adversely affecting the formation of the character and personality of a growing person. Such fears arise more often in children who are emotionally sensitive, lack self-confidence, anxious, and have a rich imagination.

In a deeper understanding, fears are divided into the following types:

• By the nature of occurrence: situational and personal. Situational is associated with the occurrence of a dangerous situation (for example, falling and getting injured), personal is determined by the characteristics of the child’s psyche (shyness, uncertainty) and often occurs in an unusual environment, a new team.
• According to the degree of reality: real and imaginary. Real fears are most often situational; imaginary fears are associated with the characteristics of the child’s psyche.
• According to the depth of the course: acute and chronic. Acute fears arise in a certain situation, chronic fears occur in children with a predisposition to anxiety.

Parental influence on emotional processing after a stressful episode and on the recovery process.

As we see, the actions of loved ones towards someone who has experienced stress play a decisive role in how the process of recovery after the incident will occur. As we have already discussed, you should not simply expect that if you do not mention the troubles you have experienced, they will somehow disappear from your memory. Helping and supporting a person in a stressful situation requires from the person providing support not only goodwill or sympathy, but also a certain mental attitude. I remember a conversation with an interlocutor who talked about his mother and her reaction to stress: “My mother is a very impressionable and emotional person. As a child, I knew for sure that if I told my mother, for example, that I had cut my finger and was bleeding, she would begin to worry and worry so much that she would become simply scared for her. And therefore I tried to solve all my problems on my own. I did it so that my mother wouldn’t find out about them.” Another example points to the possible negative role impressionable relatives can play in dealing with a child or adult who is in a stressful situation: “When my grandmother saw me fall out of the tree, she became so worried that she had a heart attack.” . It is clear that under these conditions the victim received little attention to exactly what feelings he experienced at different stages of his relationship with the tree - what did he feel, what made him climb the tree, how did he experience the loss of balance and the fact that he did not cope with the task? It turned out that the child’s stress became aggression for the grandmother and for her health, a system of relationships was created in which there is a place for blocking feelings, shame and guilt.

The third case illustrates how the feelings of an adult capture the emotional experience of a child into their flow. I remember working with blocking feelings that were a consequence of shock trauma. Anya says: “I was 6 years old. I really wanted to be as dexterous as the boys. I climbed a tree and then realized that I couldn’t stay on the branch. And she began to slide off her to the ground. I was plump and not very dexterous. Then my mother saw me and rushed to me in horror. I fell to the ground. Mom grabbed me in her arms and ran home, then to the doctor. I didn’t even have bruises, but I was terribly scared and this episode resonates with some kind of indescribable tension throughout my whole body.” A detailed analysis of the situation showed that in the episode there were two completely different events that “stuck together” into one block, and therefore created the preconditions for recording the shock experience. There was the first episode in which a girl, out of excitement, climbed a tree, could not stay on the branch and deftly (“even without bruises!”) slid to the ground. It was a complete action with good contact with your body and with the physical world: with the tree, with gravity and with the earth. Such an action required the integration and completion of some new communication with surrounding people in the episode. The girl conquered her fear and coped with a difficult physical task. She did it not for the audience, but for herself. This was her process of recognition, positive emotional evaluation, joy, experiencing victory or other strong feelings. However, for mom it was a completely different episode. The mother saw her daughter falling from a tree, drew a picture of the terrible consequences (spinal injuries, bruises, disability and other horrors) and experienced an affect of horror. When the mother began to interact with her daughter, the strength of feeling on the part of the mother literally captured the girl. And this force (the horror experienced by the mother) interrupted the flow of the child’s own emotional process.

During the consultation, I initiated a small play episode, which played a crucial role in ensuring that rehabilitation proceeded freely and new creative and adaptive processes could be launched in Anya’s soul, so that the girl could return to a free flow in her emotional life. A dialogue took place in a metaphorical, playful form that should not be carried out in real life. After a careful and detailed reconstruction of the sequence of events, the therapist found it useful to invite the interlocutor to play a short rehabilitation scene in which Anya told her mother: “Mom, this is your fear and horror! I feel good after this episode with the tree. I fell smartly and I'm proud of it. Horror is not my emotion. This is your fear. Therefore, take your fear back and do with it what you want. You can throw it in the trash. Or you can remember. But this is your fear, not mine! This game had a healing effect, since blocking one’s own affect and being overwhelmed by horror turned out to come from the horror of another person, close and dear. The girl was involved in experiencing her mother’s horror and interrupted her own experiences and feelings. She was frightened by her mother’s reaction to the situation and, through “merging,” maintained her fixation for many years.

The fourth type of situation that I would like to briefly mention is the situation of parental anger. There are circumstances when an adult is so angry with the child himself for his carelessness or with another adult who caused the child’s stress that he forgets about the feelings of the victim and focuses on the educational process or on anger towards someone else.

AGE FEARS

Children's fears that arise at a certain age are an indicator of the normal mental and mental development of the child. In the absence of provoking conditions, they replace each other without having a negative impact on the child’s psychological state.

• From birth to one year.

Natural fears - fear of loud sharp sounds, strangers, changes in familiar surroundings, fear of heights, separation from mother.

• 1-3 years.

Added to this is the fear of injury (due to increased physical activity), natural phenomena (thunder, strong wind, thunderstorms), and the fear of being unloved and unwanted by parents. There may be a fear of falling asleep due to nightmares (in very impressionable children), constipation, as a response to the fear of losing part of oneself (in the form of intestinal contents). Often children of this age are frightened by significant events (divorce of parents, death of loved ones, the appearance of a younger brother or sister).

• 35 years.

Fears in children of this age are often associated with the awareness of the finitude of life and the arrival of death. They may be afraid of serious illness, attacks by bandits, bites of poisonous insects, fires, floods, confined spaces, darkness and the monsters living in it, monsters, kashchei and other evil creatures.

• 5 – 7 years.

The fear of the death of their parents is added, so children can be afraid of everything connected with this: if mom didn’t call, was late at work, got sick. Moreover, the fear of death is not related to whether one of the relatives or acquaintances died during this period or not.

Schoolchildren's fears are associated, for the most part, with asserting themselves in a group of peers and in front of their parents: fear of not being as beautiful, fashionable, successful or slim as others, fear of bad grades and punishment for them, ridicule, fear of going to the blackboard or writing test work, loneliness, the collapse of your plans. All this can transform into a fear of dark places (attics, basements, tunnels).

The most effective methods of psychotherapy in combating fears in children:

Fairytale therapy.

The psychologist, together with the child, comes up with a story about the fear that worries him, and through fairy-tale images they help him find a way to overcome it. Reading fairy tales also helps. It is necessary to select fairy tales in such a way that they correspond to children's fears. They should be served in such a way that the child can feel brave and strong.

Play therapy

. Play is the dominant activity in childhood. Playing in a psychologist's office is as safe as possible, and this helps the child gain new experience in coping with his fear.

Sand therapy.

Children love sand; it attracts children like a magnet with its ability to take different shapes. Working with sand is an excellent tool that helps realize a child’s hidden resources. Sand is a way of manifesting the inner symbolizes the psyche.

Dance movement therapy.

This is a method in which dance acts as a tool for psychocorrection of various kinds of psychological difficulties. Dance has the ability to integrate emotional and physical states. This is a pleasant and exciting method of working with children's fears.

DIAGNOSIS AND CORRECTION OF CHILDREN'S FEARS

A psychologist diagnoses children's fears to identify the cause that caused them. After all, only by finding and eradicating it can you win this fight.

Depending on the child’s age, inclinations, and skills, he may be offered:

• draw something on a given or arbitrary topic (the psychologist looks at colors, sizes, arrangement of parts of the drawing, plot, clarity of lines and details, etc.);
• sculpt something - according to the same principle;
• come up with a fairy tale (or finish the one proposed);
• have an open conversation about the problem (for this, the adult must first inspire confidence in the child).

After this, corrective work with the baby is necessary to solve the problem. It may require from 3 to several dozen sessions. Correction is carried out in various forms - depending on the inclinations of the child himself, his age, the degree of neglect of the case, etc.:

• Fairytale therapy. Experiencing the plot of specially selected fairy tales, the child feels brave, strong, and learns to overcome emotional stress.
• Play therapy. The game immerses the child in a traumatic environment in an imaginary world. This way the fear looks much weaker and is easier to correct further.
• Drawing. The kid draws his fear, examines it with the help of a psychologist to the smallest detail, makes it funny, destroys it.

In each specific case, these techniques can be supplemented by others:

• dance therapy;
• aromatherapy;
• music therapy;
• uvetotherapy;
• art therapy;
• sand therapy, etc.

The emergence of fears in a child is an inevitable sign of his development. But when they take on stable, obsessive forms and interfere with full development, rest, and self-realization, adults should come to the rescue: parents or psychologists. And often correctional work requires considerable effort from both. But our children's mental health is worth it.