The New Anxiety

Our children have adjusted to quarantine. Will they adjust back?

A note to readers: It’s been a hard week. I’ve felt I have little of value to say to you. While this post is not explicitly about the events of the last few weeks, the general topic is something I’ve been thinking about a lot as my own anxiety levels rise with each new act of hatred and violence. May we see some of this worry for what it is - a true sign that something is indeed wrong here. And, may we continue to have compassion for ourselves, our children, and our sad, broken country.

On March 10th, two days before my family began what we assumed would be a few weeks of at-home lockdown, I taught a workshop for parents about kids and anxiety. Even that afternoon, I was sure it would be cancelled, but by 7 pm I was standing in an elementary school library in front of 25 adults, assuring them that worry was a normal thing for children, and that there was something they could do about it. Our own anxiety began to trickle out over the evening, thinly disguised by half-hearted jokes about elbow taps and intermittently eased by a new parenting strategy here, a renewed commitment to our children there. We had come that night because we were all people who believed in the power of solutions and now we were scrambling to hold on to that belief in the face of a mounting loss of control — a roomful of Wile. E. Coyotes running in place off the edge of a parenting cliff.

I thought it would be ‘fun’ (yes, these kinds of things are fun for me) if we ended with an exercise, one I do often with kids, based on the ideas of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT. I drew a simple, sloppy diagram (I have been teased for my poor drawing skills by scores of children, rightfully so) on a spare whiteboard. The diagram showed how our thoughts impact our feelings, which in turn impact our behavior. When we’re anxious, we have lots of “unhelpful thoughts" which lead to scary feelings and unhelpful behaviors, which usually lead to more unhelpful thoughts. If we can challenge those thoughts, and even replace them with “helpful” ones, usually more grounded in fact, we can shift our patterns. I took a leap and named the fears we were all feeling at that very moment, inviting them to voice their thoughts about the virus. At first it was easy to think of helpful alternatives - so many concerns seemed blown out of proportion. I actually told them, smugly “you know the flu killed 60,000 people in this country last year!” But soon I ran out of helpful thoughts. “People I love will die,” said one very sane-seeming mother. Well, yes, perhaps. I left some business cards on a table, ate a half dozen Ghirardelli Squares that were intended for the workshop participants, and went home pretty convinced I had accomplished nothing.

Three months later, my son refuses to be alone in any room in our 1200 square foot apartment. Never mind that it is so small you can hear someone farting in the kitchen while you are blasting music in the corner bedroom. He begs me to “pee with him,” to which I am tempted to reply “how about you pee by yourself, because you are a big boy, and mommy doesn’t want to get up right now, and also I am a person who has her own needs, and dreams, and someday I’m gonna make it out of this town and I’m gonna be a star godamnnit, and you’ll see, you’ll all see!” But I get it. He knows there’s danger afoot. I’m the one who told him. It might as well be in the bathroom.

My brother Alex treats kids with OCD and anxiety disorders. Once when I called him for a late-night chat, he was mixing up fake vomit for a young patient’s session the following day. Fear of vomiting is one of the most common phobias - his work was to get his patient more comfortable with the idea - to explore it bit by bit and prove that nothing bad happens. They’d spent a few sessions just talking about vomit, looking at pictures of it. Now it was time to make it three-dimensional - touch it, taste it maybe (sorry to those of you who are eating lunch, or just snacking on some Cheerios you found in a Lego bin). This doesn’t happen overnight. People spend weeks, sometimes months, doing one course of what’s called “exposure therapy,” painstakingly convincing their brain that puking or spiders or being in a room alone is not actually the end of the world.

Almost 10 years ago, my car spun out while I was driving on Highway 17, the stunning but treacherous road that leads to the beach town of Santa Cruz, where my family lives. It was April. It was raining. Even on sunny days you pass one or two cars on what we call “The 17” (this highway phraseology brings much shame to my East Coast family of origin) that have gotten a little too cocky and paid the price by ramming into a guardrail. Immediately, a surfer in a pick-up truck pulled over and laid out flares, like some kind of Hang-Ten Batman, and within ten minutes I was back on the road, listening to the soothing sounds of Erykah Badu and inching my way to my father’s house while tourists passive-aggressively tailed me (in the Bay Area, honking a horn is the equivalent of aggravated assault - we prefer to say “no worries” and then to release our frustration willy nilly in the bulk aisle of the Berkeley Bowl).

On the drive home, and in the weeks to come, I discovered that I could not drive over 30 miles per hour without feeling like I was being crushed underneath a boulder (I can’t write about this today and not think about George Floyd, the absolute terror of something taking your breath away). After avoiding driving on highways for weeks (avoidance is a natural outcome of anxiety, and only serves to cement your false belief system and unhelpful thoughts - “see, I didn’t drive fast and I didn’t die, the two must be connected!”), I began my own janky, self-administered exposure therapy.

I was starting an internship through the Caldecott Tunnel, 30 miles east. With my sister Rebekah in the passenger seat, I would drive the route back and forth through the tunnel. I usually did fine until I came out on the Oakland side, just minutes from home, where the tunnel spits you out into a big curve and the wind whips you just a tad too hard for my liking. The boulder returned, smack in the middle of my ribcage. Because attending to the present also helps with anxiety from trauma (your mind wants to pull you back to the time it was injured, to remind you why you must remain vigilant at all costs) I repeated out loud “It is May 3rd, I am in Oakland, California, my name is Sarah Wheeler” until I could stand it no longer. Then I’d pull over and she would take the wheel while I put my head between my legs and gasped for breath. It went on like this for weeks. “It is June 7th, it is July 23rd, it is August 11th,” until finally I made it all the way home without pulling over. After a while I didn’t even need to yammer on about the present moment to feel okay. My growing exposures, my helpful thoughts, had sent the boulder tumbling after some other hapless victim.

As a generally anxious person, I have compensated by being a very laissez-faire parent. I let my children climb on the furniture in ways that make my parents almost unbearably nervous. I let them use real knives. I proudly dust off curb-kissed graham crackers and tell my kids “a little street won’t kill you!” I no longer have that privilege. And in the weeks since we have cut ourselves off from the world, I have watched my child become much more cautious than I am. He reminds me, gently, that we must give our friend’s baby “space” and that, while we may stand on our neighbor’s porches, we should not, under any circumstances, go into their houses.

Everyone’s talking about now - the kids are anxious (this piece by Amy Herzog about her family’s anxiety is quite moving). Some of them took longer than others to let it leach into their systems, but most of them have found it — a vigilance that I have always associated with a mental illness which required treatment. Children have suffered ongoing trauma in many homes and communities for all of time, and we are starting to understand how it impacts them. But this thing is somewhat different — this is a population-wide adjustment to phobias that have a basis in fact. When psychologists don’t know what to diagnose a child with, we say they have “Adjustment Disorder.” Because children adjust. Children are adjusting to this. Will they adjust back?

The thing about exposure therapy is, vomiting will not kill you. You will not crash into the divider because of a little breeze. Washing your hands will not protect you from harm. It works because these fears are not real. But what about the unhelpful thoughts that happen to be true? The ones our children are repeating in their heads all day, every day? How will they think themselves out of those?

My friend Hannah, a behavior analyst, tells me that it takes 8 repetitions for a child to learn a new behavior. But it takes 28 for them to unlearn an old one. This pertains to calling out instead of raising your hand. Turning your homework packet in in the new blue bins instead of keeping it in your desk. But our children are paying much more attention to the behaviors they are learning in quarantine than to anything in their old lives.

We imagine our children afraid to touch one another. Scared to leave our sides (there will almost definitely be a pandemic of separation anxiety once schools do whatever they are planning on doing whenever they are planning on doing it), to go into crowds. We picture them 20 years from now, washing their hands while they sing “I’m a Little Teapot” twice before eating, preferring some kind of VR sexual encounter to the much more triggering specter of physical intimacy.

Why is that tea cup winking? So many questions…

Yesterday I took the kids on a “Car Adventure” to San Francisco (I find branding to be an essential part of my new, everything-all-the-time parenting role). It had been a stressful week, everyone was operating at a low simmer of emotional fragility, and I figured we might as well be somewhere pretty and strange as a backdrop to our meltdowns. We drove past many highway signs encouraging us to “Stay home. Save lives,” through a Zombie-apocalypse version of downtown on a weekday, which is saying a lot since downtown San Francisco is always a little disturbing. We drove on Lombard Street, “the crookedest street in the world,” and up and down the steep slopes of the Presidio. My son whooped and described a delightful and terrifying sensation that he claimed “tickles my tummy.” “Do you know this feeling mommy?” he asked.

I took the long way home. Right before we got onto the Golden Gate Bridge, the kids fell asleep in that way kids in cars do, where you are certain their necks will snap at any moment but you’re just so dang grateful for the quiet you will take the risk. The fog had cleared and you could see the whole Bay stretching out on all sides, held in its peaceful but creepy limbo. It was stupid beautiful. We drove through the tunnel, out the other side and WHAM, it hit me, the wind and the bend in the road just so. I could feel that old weight pressing down on me, almost hallucinating that my car was spinning out of control. I tried to recite the date, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Instead, I spoke the names of my children, and for a moment, it was enough.