The only way to overcome anxiety is through exposure

I agree with many others that it can help to an extent in the right situation.

DS has severe anxiety and pushing too far out of that comfort zone would send him backward not forward.

I had to do something completely out my comfort zone at work last week. I did it, I hated it. I know i can do it but I also know if it comes up again (not likely thankfully!) I will still panic.

I agree with what a few posters have already said - exposure is only appropriate if the child has been given the right tools/support to face whatever is causing the extreme anxiety. It would just be a form of torture if not.

I would also say the same methods may not work if the child is autistic where anxiety is often baked into the child's cognitive function. That doesn't mean you have to give up supporting them to manage their fears but multiple episodes of exposure can actually have the opposite effect and destroy a child's mental health. My child required withdrawal from the cause of stress, medication and intense therapy before exposure was even a possibility.

It's also important to remember a successful life may not necessarily look the same as an NT child in terms of education/work/activities/relationships - sometimes adjusting your expectations is not a failure of parenting.

What you see on the outside op as just anxiety - you’re not seeing the whole picture.

im not going to tell everyone in my life what causes my anxiety. That’s my health information and it’s of itself traumatic to share.

you’re judging and you don’t know the whole facts from the outside.

The fear of considering controlled exposure?

im working intensively with qualified mental health professionals. I’ll take their advice. Thanks but.

Exposure can really help with specific phobias but anxiety disorders are quite often more complex than that. There’s a reason medication and therapy are both used. Anxiety can involve nervous system dysregulation, thought patterns, trauma, neurodivergence etc, not just a fear of one specific thing.

Avoiding everything long term isn’t likely to be helpful, but neither is assuming every anxious person just needs more exposure.

Yes, this. And in these cases, there is no replacement for 'felt safety' which must come first. There is only so much a parent can do, if all the good work gets erased at the most crucial point.

Example being having a reintegration plan (school) based on tightly controlled exposure. But when the child gets there, the school doesn't stick to the plan - "just try a little bit more". Trust and confidence erased immediately. Build trust first (no tricks), then comes confidence and capacity.

I do know my dd. And i have had camhs parenting courses till they're coming out of my ears. What i want is for others to help me by sticking to the bloody plan and helping me rebuild my child's trust and feelings of safety when she's away from me.

I felt anxious every day I went to school and ended up taking some overdoses - I guess the regular exposure doesn’t work for everyone.

You mean experienced posters are calling out the armchair psycology and highlighting the damage it can do.

I think you are generally correct OP (having suffered quite life-alteringly at different times for a few years) and I'm sorry your thread is being derailed by a few people wilfully misreading you.

My mother was an anxious person who couldn't or wouldn't tackle it and she had a restricted life and blighted relatiinships because of it.

I agree, obviously there are people dealing with serious trauma or ptsd who are dealing with severe anxiety. But for ordinary children we need to stop labelling feeling a bit nervous as anxiety. I notice it in schools now. Teen feels nervous about the fact the didn't do their homework. Someone well meaning sends our an email saying "X is feeling anxious' please don't question them about their homework. Next week, X decides to tell the kindly person they don't like it when the teacher asks them questions. So next email " Due to x's anxiety please don't cold call", the week after it's must sit next to bff the week after it's must have a movement break. Before you know it X is at home refusing to come to school. If X had just turned up to my lesson and accepted that they were going to be moaned at for not doing their homework then none of this would've happened. Some parents and staff in education think that students shouldn't experience any sort of discomfort but this means they have no resilience.

A lot of anxieties are trauma based.

you might be surprised how many people there are out there who have been raped or sexually abused.

the best estimates we have on a population level (Sweden) suggest that by the time they are teenagers about one third have been abused.

sexual abuse is incredibly, incredibly common, and as you say earlier in the thread you are fully aware that being anxious as a result of being g violently raped will not be solved by being repeatedly violently raped.

a LOT more anxiety than you might think is driven be very violent and traumatic events.

sure, phobias of flying etc might be dealsble with y fear of flying courses and the like.

but many many many people are scared of men or just people in general as a result of violent or sexual abuse and exposure therapy is not going to fix that aswell as being immoral.

You’ve no idea what you’re talking about when it comes to actual diagnosed anxiety and its comorbidities.

Absolutely this!!!

Please, please don’t follow the advice on here.

I agree broadly, op. Years ago I started experiencing panic attacks and reacted by making my world smaller and smaller. Susan Jeffers' book 'Feel the fear and do it anyway' really opened my eyes to try and keep challenging myself and helped me open up my world again. It's an old book now but its message still resonates.

This is very true. I’ve been generally anxious for as long as I can remember, and sometimes it has been made worse by forced exposure to things when I’m already on the edge. Not everyone realises that I’m already doing well to be up and out of bed; I’m facing a fear just by getting that far. Then they try to get me to do something like going to a busy train station and it’s just too much, so I go into meltdown and that just makes it harder to do anything at all.

i absolutely agree that parents need to encourage their children to develop resilience; in most cases (absolutely not all) they should be encouraged to work through nervousness and anxiety rather than being removed from the situation.

Indeed!

Thank you so much for this. I have a child who was significantly re traumatised in the way you described. It has caused significant life changing damage and the need for lengthy treatment.

Just knowing there is an awareness of this helps me trust the better informed professionals he is now with more.