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Coping with Fear in a Fearful World
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Alpha-Omega
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Jul 30, 2003 16:56 PDT
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"All we have to fear - is fear itself" - FDR
Coping with Fear in a Fearful World
By Jim Moore
It's going to take a lot more than duct tape and plastic sheeting.
As we look around we see - or maybe we don't - an American society that
is becoming slowly paralyzed by fear. Not panic, but a creeping,
disabling anxiety that eats at our spirit and at our health. The economy
is sinking because businesses are afraid to invest in the future.
Instead, they're laying workers off by the hundreds of thousands. Those
unemployed workers, fearful for their families, add to the growing
national anxiety. Those who aren't laid off - fear they will be.
September 11. Anthrax attacks. Korean nukes. Iraq war. Orange alerts.
Taunts from Osama bin Laden. A world polarized by pro-war and anti-war
sentiments. We've been fed a steady diet of fear for over a year and a
half ... and it only gets worse.
What's a person - especially a parent - to do?
Anthony Lepre started feeling awful almost as soon as Tom Ridge put the
nation on high alert for a terrorist attack last week. The normally
well-adjusted Los Angeles chiropractor started tossing and turning
instead of drifting off to sleep at night. He awoke in the middle of the
night short of breath, his heart pounding. And the sound of his
telephone seemed a sure sign of bad news.
By midweek, according to Newsweek magazine, he was rushing off to Costco
to stock up on fruit juice, bottled water, peanut butter, canned tuna
“and extra food for my cats Monster, Monkey and Spike.” He also picked
up a first-aid kit, six rolls of duct tape and a bulk package of plastic
wrap to seal his windows.
“The biggest problem was that I felt helpless,” he says, “completely
powerless over the situation.” The health-conscious 46-year-old even
found himself chomping pizza and sweets, figuring a few treats would
help him “forget about the situation for a while.”
In many ways, things are worse than they were in the fall of 2001 just
after the World Trade Center attacks. People who lived through that, up
close and personal, and who decided to tough it out - have now changed
their minds, even though there has been no repeat of 9-11.
Thirty-five-year-old Kateria Niambi, a lifelong Brooklynite who works as
a marketing director in lower Manhattan, never thought of leaving New
York during the grim fall of 2001. Yet she recently bought a house in
suburban New Jersey and now plans to pack up her two daughters and move.
“It was like, ‘Where can I go that my kids will be safe?’ ” she says.
It's been a whole generation now since Vietnam, and another generation
since Pearl Harbor and World War II. This present generation has not
known fear like those in the past. It's a whole new experience - and
it's disabling.
Today about 5.2 million Americans suffer from PTSD and recent traumatic
events may well have caused that number to spike.
A post-Sept. 11 study done for the New York City Board of Education
found that 10.5 percent of schoolchildren in the city show multiple
symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. Among adults, a
New York Academy of Medicine survey in January found that 40 percent to
45 percent of New Yorkers have at least one symptom of post-traumatic
stress. Nearly 6 percent of Americans outside of New York City reported
post-traumatic stress symptoms six months after the attacks according to
a University of California at Irvine study.
Some 11 million Americans (mostly women) suffer from phobias. Some
phobias are general, others specific, but they’re all tenacious — for
unlike names, our fears are never forgotten.
Bombarded with daily bad news, these figures are soaring. For the
world's only so-called "super power" we certainly don't feel very much
in control of things.
Even before September 11, drugs like Prozac, an antidepressant, and
Xanax, which calms anxiety, had become staples in the medicine cabinets
of millions of Americans.
In 2001, spending on antidepressants reached $9.9 billion — up from $3.8
billion five years earlier—and $715 million on benzodiazepines such as
Xanax. In the two weeks after planes hit the World Trade Center,
prescriptions for alprazolam (generic Xanax) spiked 9 percent nationally
(and 22 percent in New York) before gradually falling back to pre-terror
levels.
“Medicine’s job is not to prescribe at the first sign of anxiety — it is
to prescribe at the first sign of disease,” says University of
Pennsylvania medical ethicist Arthur Caplan. “Worrying about terrorists,
war, a lousy economy and losing your job is not a disease. It’s normal.”
And yet we are turning to drugs in the illusion they'll make everything
okay. Prozac-like drugs can cause nausea, sedation and sexual
dysfunction. Drugs like Xanax can cause mild amnesia and impairment of
physical coordination. Some people can also become dependent on Xanax,
with severe withdrawal symptoms like panic and shakiness, even seizures.
Pills also have different effects on different people. Xanax-like drugs
work in 70 percent of patients; drugs like Prozac work in somewhat less.
What kind of shape will our nation be in, emotionally and mentally, to
keep up our morale if we're all sedated, nauseous, memory-impaired, with
our physical co-ordination in shambles? Not to mention we're walking
around - still in a panic - shaking and suffering seizures?
Such a population is ripe for defeat.
President George W. Bush could do a lot worse than to start imitating a
Democrat, a very specific Democrat. Sixty years ago, President Franklin
D. Roosevelt faced very similar times. We were at war, suddenly and
without warning after Dec. 7, 1942. We had just come through what we
mistakenly thought was "the War to End All Wars" (World War I). The
Nazis were continuing to over-run Europe and in alliance with Italy and
Japan, it looked as if the Third Reich was about to take over the world,
America included.
Roosevelt took to the airwaves with his famous fireside chats, calmly
telling the American people what was happening on far-away battlefields
and what we could do about it. From those reassuring grandfatherly
conversations with the American people came perhaps his most famous
quote: "All we have to fear is fear itself."
Of course, we lived in a more naive time then - before Dallas,
Watergate, Vietnam and Iran-Contra - and had more faith in what our
government told us. Then, unlike now, we ourselves were not generally
regarded as "the enemy." Roosevelt's moves toward a police state were
conducted in secret, where today they are very public and in our face.
We fear not only "the enemy" but our own government as well, for what it
is doing to our Bill of Rights.
We need that reassuring voice from Washington to offset the incessant
drumbeat of "imminent and spectacular attacks of mass destruction",
Orange alerts, bio-warfare, nuclear suitcase bombs, dirty bombs, duct
tape, on and on.
Whereas the Roosevelt approach at least seemed to be more open and
public, today our government tiptoes around in utmost secrecy. We, the
public, have neither the "security classification" nor "the need to
know." And so we are left to fear the unknown.
And yet we are coming to realize, probably far more than we did in World
War II, that our government in reality is powerless to protect us. We
must protect ourselves and our families in our own way, with our own
limited resources.
Problem is, we have less to do it with than we did 50 or 60 years ago
before we announced "the death of God" and we had something greater than
our own two feet to stand on.
True, there was a spike in church attendance after 9-11, but it didn't
last. The scandals of pedophiles in cleric's collars seemed to reinforce
the idea that even our religion had become a false refuge.
And so we have understandably become fearful. Oklahoma City and New York
and Washington have guaranteed that. So we find ourselves afloat, not in
just a sea of fear, but a raging ocean of it, with the winds howling and
the tsunamis visible on the horizon.
As Drs. Afton Hassett and Leonard Sigal of New Jersey’s Robert Wood
Johnson Medical School wrote recently, we’re living in a “chronic
heightened state of alertness and ... helplessness,” prompted by a
“poorly defined ... danger that could strike at any time in any form
without warning.”
“The psychological state of fear affects us biologically,” says Los
Angeles psychiatrist Carole Lieberman. “People who are anxious drink and
eat more. They have more accidents. They’re more likely to get colds or
suffer heart attacks.”
In short, as University of Michigan neuroscientist Stephen Maren puts
it, a brain system designed to keep us from getting eaten is now “eating
away at us.”
The danger we face may be more from what our fears do to our health than
what Osama bin Laden, Iraq or North Korea may be able to do to our
bodies. Clearly, the events since 9-11 have become a major health issue
as well as one of "national security."
Time Magazine, Jan. 12, 2003:
It's not just that people tend to be depressed because they have a
life-threatening illness or that depressed people smoke, are too
lethargic to take their medicine or aren't motivated to eat right or
exercise. "Even when we take those factors into consideration," says Dr.
Dwight Evans, a professor of psychiatry, medicine and neuroscience at
the University of Pennsylvania, "depression jumps out as an independent
risk factor for heart disease. It may be as bad as cholesterol."
Heart disease is one of a long list of illnesses that worsen with
depression. People with such afflictions as cancer, diabetes, epilepsy
and osteoporosis all appear to run a higher risk of disability or
premature death when they are clinically depressed. The effect is
potentially so significant that the medical profession has begun to
focus serious attention and resources on trying to understand what's
going on. At a national conference in Washington in November, Evans
served as co-chairman of a meeting, sponsored by the nonprofit
Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA), to get a better handle
on how widespread the problem is. For two days, experts in cancer, aids,
heart disease, diabetes and other diseases, along with patient
advocates, listened to the evidence linking depression with one illness
after another.
While this article will certainly never receive the circulation that a
presidential fireside chat would, hopefully it will plant a seed of
information and common sense with which to fight those fears that
threaten our health, our minds, our emotions and our very souls. So feel
free to pass this along by e-mail or web site: spread the word.
First, let's look at what fear is. Let us dissect it into something
smaller than that fearsome black shadow that keeps our children awake at
night with nightmares and afraid to go to school.
We fear the unknown far more than we fear the known.
That means we can combat fear with information, with planning, with
careful intent. This does not mean staying glued to CNN, nor does it
mean cleaning the shelves bare of duct tape. Television is only adding
to the fear, reinforcing it, repeating it, building it up into a
crescendo that nears panic - all for ratings. You'll not find the
comfort of a fireside chat on CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS or NBC.
What is fear?
We are going to have to deal it with as adults and, more seriously, as
parents, so it becomes important to know just what fear is so we can
reassure our children ... and ourselves.
Fear is normal and fear is a reaction designed to protect us from
danger. Let us first look at what fear is - and then look at what those
dangers are, real or perceived.
The following comes from the latest issue of Newsweek (Feb. 24, 2003),
which popped up on my browser just as I was uploading another article on
how to use the Creation Healing Code to defeat fear and promote healing.
Twenty years ago no one knew how fear conditioning worked. But by
surgically removing discrete parts of rodents’ brains — and performing
the same simple conditioning experiment — researchers have detailed the
underlying mechanisms. The fear system’s command center is the amygdala,
a small peanut-sized, almond-shaped structure that rests near the center
of the brain and is elaborately tied to other regions through nerve
fibers. A rat lacking an amygdala won’t freeze at the sound of a tone,
no matter how often the tone is paired with a shock.
An activated amygdala doesn’t wait around for instructions from the
conscious mind. Once it perceives a threat, it can trigger a body-wide
emergency response within milliseconds. Jolted by impulses from the
amygdala, the nearby hypothalamus produces a hormone called
corticotropin releasing factor, or CRF, which signals the pituitary and
adrenal glands to flood the bloodstream with epinephrine (adrenaline),
norepinephrine and cortisol.
Those stress hormones then shut down nonemergency services such as
digestion and immunity, and direct the body’s resources to fighting or
fleeing. The heart pounds, the lungs pump and the muscles get an
energizing blast of glucose. The stress hormones also act on the brain,
creating a state of heightened alertness and supercharging the circuitry
involved in memory formation.
“The amygdala tells the rest of the brain, ‘Hey, whatever happened, make
a strong memory of it’,” says James McGaugh, a neurobiologist at the
University of California, Irvine. “It makes a strong correlation between
the significance of an event and the remembrance of it.”
Like any aggressive defense establishment, the amygdala and its army of
stress hormones can divert resources from other critical uses. It can
also cause extensive collateral damage.
Consider the experience of Elizabeth Brace. She was 37 years old and
living in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., in 1994, when a powerful earthquake
struck 100 miles away in Northridge. The temblor didn’t knock her house
down, or even break her dishes. But it jolted her out of bed and sent
her running, terrified, to pluck her son from his crib. When she didn’t
come back, her husband went to the child’s room to find her face down on
the floor, bleeding from the nose and mouth, dead. By all indications,
the quake had scared her to death.
Harvard neurologist Martin Samuels collects stories like Brace’s to show
just how dangerous the stress hormones can be. “Norepinephrine is toxic
to tissues—probably all tissues, but in particular the heart,” he says.
Israel recorded nearly 100 excess deaths during Saddam’s 1991 Scud
missile attacks — not from bomb injuries but from heart attacks
presumably triggered by fear and stress. And a recent study suggests
that heart patients around New York City suffered life-threatening heart
arrhythmias at more than twice the usual rate in the month following the
World Trade Center attack.
“Prolonged stress has physiological consequences,” says Dr. Jonathan
Steinberg, chief of cardiology at New York’s St. Luke’s-Roosevelt
Hospital Center and the leader of the study. “These patients experienced
potentially fatal events, even though many of them had trouble
identifying themselves as unduly fearful.”
In other words, acute fear is not the only kind that can hurt you.
Constant, low-grade adrenaline baths may subtly damage the heart,
raising the long-term risk of cardiovascular disease. Continuous
exposure to cortisol can dampen the immune system, leaving stressed
people more vulnerable to infections and possibly even cancer. Stress
hormones can harm the brain, too, severing connections among neurons. In
both human and animal studies, researchers have found that prolonged
stress also shrinks the hippocampus, a brain structure that plays
critical roles in processing and storing information.
Even when it doesn’t wreck the heart or the brain, prolonged stress can
have countless subtler effects. And Lepre, the L.A. chiropractor, is not
the only one feeling them. Pierluigi Mancini, the director of a
community counseling clinic in Norcross, Ga., says his clinic’s family
and adolescent program has recently seen a sixfold increase in the
number of people seeking help.
“Kids are acting out, and adults don’t know what to do or who to talk to
about the terror alerts,” Mancini says. “People are reporting headaches,
insomnia, back pain, neck pain, disorientation. But after a physical
exam, we can’t find a physical cause.”
Such complaints are common among worried people, and you don’t have to
be a hypochondriac to experience them. “Stress almost always comes out
in a bodily symptom,” says Afton Hassett, an expert in psychosomatic
illness. Even at low levels, she says, anxiety causes muscle tension,
which leads in turn to aches, pains and twitching eyes.
From ABC News, Nov. 7, 2002:
By zeroing in on how the brain processes fear — and quells it —
scientists hope to develop treatments for people with runaway fear
responses.
"What was clinically interesting was we could reduce fear in rats by
stimulating a particular area of the brain," says Gregory Quirk, a
physiologist at the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico who authored
the study in this week's issue of Nature. "Someday we hope to use what
we learn to help people with anxiety disorders."
Now Quirk and others have taken a closer look at another region of the
brain — the prefrontal cortex — where they believe one's sense of safety
is generated.
To analyze this region, Quirk and his student Mohammed Milad trained
rats to fear a tone by following the sound with an electric shock to
their feet. Rats conditioned to fear the tone froze at the sound in
anticipation of pain.
Next the team reconditioned some of the rats using the same tone
followed by no electric shocks. Over time most of these rats no longer
froze when they heard the tone. In another set of rats, Quirk and Milad
did not retrain the animals so they would no longer fear the tone, but
instead electrically stimulated neurons in the prefrontal cortex of the
rats' brains.
Quirk says the rats whose brains had been stimulated "acted like they
had never been conditioned to fear the tone at all," — even when the
tone was repeatedly followed by shocks.
"We know that fear is not erased — it's always there," says Quirk.
"Instead there seems to be a system that actively inhibits the response.
That's what we've discovered."
"It's not about erasing fear from memory, but replacing it with a memory
of safety," he says, adding, "It's good we can't erase fear, we need it.
Fear keeps you alive."
It can also kill you. We and our children are not laboratory rats in
some experiment, no matter how useful. We can't stick probes into our
kids' prefrontal cortex and give them some shock therapy to deaden their
fears.
Now that we have some understanding of what fear is in an anatomical
context, let's take a look at just how rational our current fears are.
To judge by what we see on television, each and every home in America is
on someone's list of targets. That is simply not true. Not even the
Soviet Union, when it posed its greatest nuclear threat, ever had the
illusion of being able to target every family.
Your odds of being directly affected by a terrorist attack are extremely
remote. You have a better chance of dying in an airline crash or on the
highway or being attacked by an animal. There are many, many dangers
that pose a greater risk than terrorism, so put it in perspective. Take
a deep breath and ask yourself: What is the realistic possibility that
my home, my job or my child's school will be the direct target of a
terrorist attack?
You are far more likely to be affected indirectly - a sinking economy,
higher gasoline prices, being stopped and searched on the road or at the
airport. True, these are threats - but they are not life-threatening.
They are more inconveniences and annoyances than dangers.
These three pieces of information are vital in reassuring and comforting
yourself and your children:
1. Fear is a normal reaction to real or perceived danger.
2. The dangers we face in our personal world of work, home and school
from war or terrorism is far more perceived than real.
3. The fear itself poses a greater health risk.
Realize, too, that as a country we haven't faced this kind of situation
since the Cold War - and specifically the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
It is probably a healthy thing that we not become too complacent and too
comfortable. It is not creature comforts that make us a better people,
but the challenge of adversity. The Olympic athlete does not win the
Gold by being a couch potato.
In an age when the majority of our children, as well as adults, have
become obese, it is not entirely a curse that we've received a wake-up
call. In fact, it's a blessing that allows us to take our heads out of
the clouds (or our posterior) and plant our feet on the firm, solid
ground of reality.
It's a golden opportunity for us to once again make note of what is
really important in life. Is it the mutual funds? Is it the BMW? Is it
life in the corporate fast lane of Enron and World-Com? Is it the
relentless, driving pursuit of money, power and superiority?
Or is it in the laughter of a child? The song of a bird? The feel of
grass and dirt and mud between our toes? The beauty of a sunset?
These are the gifts we have over the years gradually ignored, at a
terrible price to our health and to our children, not to mention our
society and our nation's future.
The saddest aspect of this current Climate of Terror is what it is doing
to our children ... to Iraqi children, to Israeli children, to American
children, to Afghan children, to Palestinian children.
Sara Cowan of suburban Washington, D.C., “is not a ‘freaking out’ kind
of kid,” her mother, Kathy, says. But when the federal government
recently bumped up its terror warning to Orange, the eighth grader felt
unnerved. Frets the teenager: “High alert makes you think of bombing —
people bombing us — and that scared me. I wasn’t ‘Oh my God’ panicking,
but I was more anxious than I would normally be.”
We need to do much, much more than run to Home Depot for duct tape and
plastic. We need to talk to our kids - about fear, about God, about
bravery, about courage. And about love. That may sound corny, but it's
the truth ... and down deep in your heart you know it's the truth!
Children are especially vulnerable to fear and anxiety. “I’m seeing a
lot of regressive behavior,” says Los Angeles psychiatrist Carole
Lieberman. “Lots of parents are telling me their kids are afraid to
sleep, or go to school, because they don’t want to be separated if
something catastrophic happens.”
Anxious children are even more likely than adults to experience their
anxiety as a stomachache or a physical malaise, and emotional
experiences have deeper effects on their still-developing brains.
“Kids learn everything faster than adults,” says Dr. Bruce Perry of the
Child Trauma Academy in Texas. “If they have the stress response turned
on a lot, their bodies say, ‘I’m in a world where I need to use these
systems a lot’.”
Genes and temperament make some kids less vulnerable than others. But
when a susceptible child experiences too much fear, the consequences can
extend beyond general anxiety to include phobias and posttraumatic
stress disorder—conditions in which the amygdala hijacks the rest of the
brain every time it encounters some cue. Like a rat in a conditioning
experiment, the sufferer reacts as violently to a harmless stimulus as
she would to a life-threatening emergency.
The most dangerous, harmful thing you can do to your children is to
expose whatever fear you yourself may have. Fear is contagious - and
they depend on you, more now than ever, for a sense of stability and
calm and leadership.
Newsweek recommends the following, some of which I disagree with:
MAINTAIN ROUTINES: As much as possible, keep to normal daily routines —
children find them comforting ... and so do we.
TURN OFF THE TV: Limit their exposure to violent TV news, movies and
videos.
GET THEM TO TALK: If your child isn’t talking to you, gently bring up
the topic.
NOTICE HOW THEY ACT: Watch for signs of distress, such as nightmares,
irritability, sleeplessness or clinginess. If concerned about a child’s
behavior, seek counseling.
OBSERVE KIDS AT RISK: Remember that children who have been traumatized
before are more vulnerable.
REASSURE YOUR CHILD: Remind kids that many people in the community are
out there to protect them — police, firemen, paramedics, military.
Because news has been my business most of my life, when I lived in the
city and had cable TV and cable modem, I was a news junkie. Where I live
now, on the far side of a hill 60 miles from the city, I can't watch
television if I wanted to. The nice thing is, I don't want even want to.
Instead, I write or I take walks in the woods and on the hills, or I sit
on the porch and watch the deer and wild turkey, or I dig my hands into
the dirt of my garden. These things are much more conducive to healing
than watching an endless barrage of terror and fear on CNN.
Most of us like scary movies - particularly children in their young
teens and up. But what we're seeing now on the news is not a scary
movie. It's real. Imagine the effect of this on your children. Sit the
family down and announce your plans to trim some of the fear from their
TV viewing. It is probably impossible to unplug the TV altogether - we
and they have become addicted to it. But for God's sake, take some steps
to shield them from the fear.
As for reassurance that the police, firefighters, paramedics and
military will protect us, as adults we probably know better. There are
too many of us and too few of them. I would not give children or
teenagers a false assurance. But must we be "brutally honest" with our
children on this matter? Rather than tell them a lie (they'll never
trust you again once it's found out) or just ignoring the issue, stress
the importance of your devotion to protecting them. This is much more
personal, closer to home, effective and believable.
If they come back at you with some tough "what if?" questions, give them
honest answers. If you don't have an answer, admit it, tell them you
will find an answer by a certain deadline, do so, then follow up by
going back and giving the child your answer or plan. Children are great
at finding weaknesses and chinks in our best-laid plans.
"What if I'm at school and something terrible happens and you can't come
and get me?"
That's probably one of the toughest questions they'll ask, because it
goes to the very heart of their fears of vulnerability, separation and
isolation. One of the recent government recommendations is to have a
plan worked out for meeting and/or communicating with each other, and
it's probably one of the best recommendations they've made - certainly
better than duct tape and plastic.
Make sure you have such a plan in place - and don't rely on cell phones
to make it happen. Have more than one plan - a Plan A (where perhaps
cell phones are operable), Plan B (where they aren't) and even a Plan C.
To the list above from Newsweek, I would add this:
Before you sit the family down to discuss your plans, go over the
various scenarios in your own mind, privately. If the family becomes
separated, how could that happen?
Example #1: With you at work and latch-key kids at home?
Make sure they know how and where to turn off the gas (run through it
like a fire drill). Make sure they know where the tools to do so are
located; keep such tools in an easy-to-reach place so they can be found
even if the power goes out. Make sure they know where the blankets are,
where backup water supplies are (toilet tanks, hot water heaters, ice
trays in the refrigerator, etc.) Make sure they know who to do
everything you would do if you were at home when the worst happened.
Example #2: With you at home or work and them at school?
Take comfort in knowing that your school is already dealing with this
contingency. There are, right? If you don't know, you should. And if
they aren't you need to bring pressure as a parent to make sure they do,
through your PTA or with private meetings with the teacher and/or
principal. It could be they could use some volunteer help in achieving
this, so try the sugar before you do the vinegar. What can the parents
do to help the school make preparations and carry them out? What parents
living near the school could act as coordinators to notify parents
living farther away? Can the school or parent coordinators reach you at
work as well as at home?
Once you're confident these plans are in place or in motion at your
school, then share this information with your kids. Include them as
particpants and partners and seek out their own advice and suggestions -
their abilities may surprise you!
Once again, have Plans A, B and C. How and where would you meet as a
family? If something shoots that plan down, what is the alternative?
Involve your neighbors if need be; in fact, it might even be preferable
to come up with a community or neighborhood response in addition to a
personal, family-only plan. Someone on the block could be responsible
for checking on any elderly or handicapped neighbors who might not have
family to protect them.
Just the mere act of making such plans will do a lot to ease your fears
and theirs. It demonstrates a concrete, pro-active response - not just a
fearful "waiting" for the worst. It gives both parents and children a
better sense - and reality - of being in control. A neighborhood plan
will do a lot to boost morale in the whole community.
In addition, plan more family activities that take place away from the
fear inputs - such as a weekend afternoon in the park, a fishing trip,
etc. Now, teenagers may be reluctant to go on such family outings; they
don't regard it as "cool." If so, respect that. After all, you're doing
this to calm and reassure them, not to "embarrass" them. This will be
more readily accepted by smaller children.
But more than the logical, you must reassure them emotionally.
Personally, I would point to some of the more popular disaster movies of
our times, where the parents plunged into the most frightening worlds
imaginable to find their children. Look your child in the eye at their
eye level (even if it means getting down on your knees to do it), with
both hands on their shoulders, and let them know - unequivocally - that
you will go through hell and back to reach and protect them and that you
will never, never ever abandon them. Then seal that promise with a good,
firm hug.
The odds are greatly in your favor that you will never be called upon to
keep that promise, but making it and reinforcing it from time to time,
especially when frightening events do take place, will go a long, long
way to easing their fears - and yours, because it will strengthen your
own resolve and put steel in your own backbone.
And if you're ever called upon to fulfill that promise ... do it! Just
do it! In your determination you will find a way and in the process
you'll discover you have no time for something as trivial as fear.
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