A doctor’s wife came to see me because of a nervous rash which she had had for the past two years. I showed her a little about relaxation, and as she lived in the country it was arranged that she would return to the city in a month’s time for an extended visit so that I could help her further. But she wrote cancelling her appointment, saying that the rash had already cleared.

She came to see me some two years later when she had a slight recurrence. The rash quickly settled down just as on the previous occasion.

*25/57/2*

*21/75/2*

Mastering one skill brings a child quickly to the next frustration. When stands in her crib, she may cry desperately because she hasn’t yet learned how to get herself down. She needs you to help until she can help herself again, needs a little extra reassurance, so separation difficulties are common.

Dealing with developmental sleep issues may be particularly frustrating because parents do not have control over a child’s development. Sometimes only “cure” is allowing the development to continue on its own with encouraging messages from you. It helps to recognize that the transition probably be short-lived. Overreacting and doing too much can only prolong problem if she becomes dependent upon your help to go to sleep.

Although each child is an individual, there are guidelines and Ü information that apply to all. Table 3 summarizes the affect of development sleep. With this foundation, you can begin to look at the specific is concerning you about your child.

*21/67/8*

At 3:00 am I looked at the clock and was relieved to see I had two more hours before the alarm would ring.

If you poll a group of parents, and get past the “She has always slept through the night,” you will hear a variety of comments:

When he is teething, he has a little trouble sleeping.

She seems so hungry at around 2:00 am—must be a growth spurt.

He has been waking with bad dreams.

If sleeping all night long, every night, is your expectation for your child,

you may be setting yourself up for frustration. Sleep needs and patterns

change with age, illness, and emotional or even environmental factors. Just as

with other parenting issues, our goals, expectations, and approaches must be

constantly re-evaluated.    

It is misleading to think of sleep as a state we simply fall into at night and wake from in the morning. Sleep research has shown that there are definite patterns and fluctuations during the night. They play important roles to help refresh us and can reveal some causes behind sleep disturbances.

The descriptions of these cycles can be quite technical. Because a basic understanding is crucial, an effort has been made to give a very simple explanation of what occurs and how your child might be affected.

*1/167/8*

Dr. Burton White, author of The First Three Years of Life, feels that sleep problems understandably occur in families where children are loved and whose needs have been met. So, in some ways, the emergence of sleep problems is not necessarily a bad sign. He notes that it is the continuance of sleep disturbances that can cause deeper problems.

Dr. Marc Weissbluth, author of Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, states that the development of healthy sleep habits is not automatic. If your child has not learned them, then his functioning during wakefulness is not “optimal.”2 Put simply, a sleep-deprived child (waking several times a night or missing out on even an hour) is not at his best. His cognitive processes will be fuzzy and his social functioning will be marked by grumpy unpredictability.

A child can “adjust” to whatever sleep patterns he has fallen into. (Look at how you have “adjusted.” Do you say “I didn’t know it was possible to exist with so little sleep”?) However, there are signs—some subtle, some blatant—that he is not at his best.

It is the parents’ job to insist on healthy sleep, just as they insist on healthy nutrition, to give the child the strongest base from which to grow. Good sleep habits do not necessarily happen spontaneously. This is a skill that can be learned by children and facilitated by parents.

*6/97/8*

Will hypnosis help?

Answer

Hypnotism can produce a very positive response in the short term. The result will not last if we have no understanding of the disorder and don’t know how to manage the attacks and anxiety ourselves. In conjunction with panic/anxiety management skills, hypnotism can help while we work with aspects of the disorder. If we use an audio tape of the hypnosis session during periods of high anxiety and attacks, the tape must teach us how to control the anxiety and the attacks. The control does not come from a cassette tape.

Some people use subliminal tapes in an effort to ease their symptoms. We must know what the subliminal message of the tape is and, more importantly, we should consciously know and learn how to manage anxiety and the attacks ourselves.

Question

I have heard about people becoming housebound. I am the opposite. I can’t bear to be in the house. As soon as my husband goes to work I have to get out of the house. I spend my days travelling on buses or walking around shopping centres. Is this part of the disorder?

Answer

This does happen to some people. If they have difficulty in being alone, going out and being around other people is better than staying home. It can also happen to people who were housebound, but for another reason. As people progress in their recovery, some may go through a stage where the thought of being home all day brings back too many memories of their disorder. They prefer to go out as much as they can. This stage does pass.

*112/94/8*

Although this aspect is not related only to anxiety disorders, it can be the single most important issue in the disorders. Despite our ongoing attacks and anxiety, it can be the one issue we are most concerned about. It is as if we intuitively know the root cause of our suffering.

The lack of identification goes beyond our cry of ‘this is not me’. When we say ‘this is not me’ we are referring to the image we had before the disorder. Despite the image we had of ourselves, we have always known that we never felt any sense of who we are. We never had a real sense of self. This essential element was always lacking in our lives, and it is from this that our feelings of inadequacy, lack of confidence and lack of self-esteem arose.

We counteracted these by our need to be perfect. Over the years we adapted and modified our behaviour to what we perceived were other people’s expectations of us. We became who we thought we should be, and in doing so suppressed much of who we could be. Our identity became dependent on other people’s perceptions of us. The more dependent we became, the more we had to suppress our real self, even if we didn’t realise we were doing it. The more we suppressed our self, the more inadequate we felt. The more inadequate we felt, the more we felt the need to be perfect.

*100/94/8*

The anxiety and/or the attacks blasted into our lives. They pushed past our control and steamrolled our defences. The image we had of ourselves crumbled with the weight of its own illusion. The disintegration of ourselves continued and our seemingly solid foundations of our self and our life were torn down.

Suddenly we were thrown back onto ourselves and we had nothing left as an identity. Our sense of inadequacy, our lack of confidence and lack of self-esteem became predominant. We felt helpless and isolated. Our need to be in control was the only defence we had left. We tightened our grip on it because we felt that total annihilation of ourselves was only an attack away.

We became separated from our real selves through a lifetime of suppression and, when we needed it most, we felt that we had nothing to give us strength or support. Our sense of helplessness and isolation increased dramatically. These feelings of helplessness and isolation are a measure of the degree to which we are separate from our self. It is the ultimate separation anxiety.

All of us search for external answers to our difficulties, but we don’t realise we are looking in the wrong direction. Although we may find temporary measures to sustain us, we don’t recognise or feel the enormous potential of our self which is waiting to assist us.

*99/94/8*

After several months on treatment, people often experiment and stop their anti-depressants just to make sure that they still really need them. If you do this, be sure to watch out for early signs of relapse and return to the anti-depressant as soon as these appear. It is much easier to reverse the symptoms of depression in their initial stages than after they are fully established again.

*92/75/2*

Working with our avoidance behaviour, and the whole process of recovery, means we need to learn to care of ourselves. We need to learn when it is appropriate to pull back and take a break, as long as the break doesn’t go on for weeks. After the break, begin again.

Begin again. These two words can mean so much in the working-through process. If we feel that we are not making progress, if we feel that some of our attempts didn’t quite work out the way we would have liked, let them go and begin again.

Our ultra-sensitivity also increases the sense of guilt we feel towards our families because we can’t do everything we would like to do. We need to be aware of the extra stress caused by this. We can spend a week worrying and feeling guilty over one small incident which we think of as a failure. Guilt only increases our anxiety. It keep us locked into the cycle. We need to let it go, so we can move forward to recovery and to the time when we will be able to do everything we haven’t been able to do.

*91/94/8*