How to Help Kids Process Anxiety into Growth

How to Help Kids Process Anxiety into Growth

By helping a child define and manage the anxiety associated with trauma, you can start laying the bricks of a path that leads to growth.

I’m a school psychologist and member of a school administrative team in Boulder, Colorado. Coming back from this year’s Winter break, we expected to be dealing with the omicron surge — we wondered whether we would have enough faculty to manage classes and knew we would need to work with kids and families returning from travels to keep everyone safe.

Then there was the fire.

My family lives in Louisville and the fire stopped about two-thirds of a mile from our house. Many in our community weren’t so lucky. Friends, family and the extended family of parents at our school all lost homes. This comes on the back of a year that saw a mass shooting at a local grocery store.

Interestingly, most people weren’t directly affected by either tragedy. Most people were safe from the path of the fire. Most people were not at the King Soopers grocery store that day. Even living in the immediate proximity of these disasters, there are times when everything seems so normal; there are times you don’t even notice the crushing weight of anxiety.

The same is true for kids: They may not be able to articulate the thoughts and emotions that accompany major events in the world around them like pandemic, natural disaster or man-made horror. And during the acute phase of these disasters is not the time to process complex emotions. Instead, it’s time for distraction — time to use any tool in your kit to take the child’s mind off the pain, fear, and uncertainty.

Eventually things will settle down. (They have to settle down, right?) And when you find calm, the question becomes what to do next. What is the step after distraction?

The answer can be guiding a child toward growth.

Professionals refer to the expansion that can follow trying times as posttraumatic growth. Of course, this growth can take time. Maybe it takes months or even years after traumatic medical events for a child to find the deepening of wisdom and meaning. That kind of long-term work is beyond the scope of this article. For now, what I’d like to talk about is that middle period — the time just after trauma that can set the stage for posttraumatic growth.

One of the best things you can do in this stage that follows trauma is to help a child understand it. Specifically, you can help a child understand the emotions associated with trauma — and perhaps even decide on strategies to manage these emotions in the aftermath of trauma or for use during the next challenge (for you and I both know that the next challenge may be all too soon).

Help a child explore which emotion was “driving” their experience during trauma. Was it fear or anger or sadness or grief or panic? Then help the child explore how “big” they felt these emotions — depending on the child, place the size of these emotions on a 1-10 scale, or have the child show the size with their hands, or use colors to represent the intensity of these emotions.

If you find that a child was feeling level 10 fear, you may want to work with the child to define strategies to manage the emotion back into a state that feels more comfortable, more controlled. Importantly, try to come up with strategies the child can use next time they’re feeling this emotion. Maybe start with deep breathing to create a somatic feeling of calm. Then work to discover a way for the child to express emotions, perhaps journaling or art or music or yoga.

Again, the goal in this stage that directly follows trauma is not to find the deeper meaning of traumatic events, but to release the pressure of the trauma itself so that it is less able to build, hidden inside a child. In other words, the goal of this stage is not to create posttraumatic growth, but to set the stage for it.

By helping a child define and manage the emotions associated with trauma, you can start laying the bricks of a path that leads to growth.