Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Worry and anxiety › Breaking the worry loop
Children are being bullied, are laughed at, do get things wrong in front of everyone. If you wave that away, they learn the exercise is fixed and they stop telling you things. Write the real evidence down with them, then work properly on what stands against it. And if the evidence for turns out to be strong, you have found a safety or practical problem to solve rather than a thought to examine.
Guesswork is of no value against the Truth (Quran 53:28). That cuts both ways, since guessing it will all be fine is guesswork too.
النجم
وَمَا لَهُم بِهِۦ مِنۡ عِلۡمٍۖ إِن يَتَّبِعُونَ إِلَّا ٱلظَّنَّۖ وَإِنَّ ٱلظَّنَّ لَا يُغۡنِي مِنَ ٱلۡحَقِّ شَيۡـࣰٔ ا
They have no knowledge to base this on: they merely follow guesswork. Guesswork is of no value against the Truth
Qur’an 53:28read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A pilot randomised controlled trial found that a group therapy working on how people handle their own repetitive thinking reduced distress in prolonged grief. That is a case where the loss is entirely real, and the loop around it was still treatable without anybody denying the loss. It was a small pilot in a different population, so the parallel is instructive rather than direct evidence about children.
Jenine Anne Wenn; Moira O’Connor; Robert Kane; Clare S. Rees; Lauren J. Breen (2019). A pilot randomised controlled trial of metacognitive therapy for prolonged grief. BMJ Open doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
An honest weighing is the only kind whose conclusion the child will still believe later.
Where the evidence for the fear is strong, such as ongoing bullying or a real threat at school, this becomes a safeguarding and problem solving task for adults, not a thinking exercise for the child.
Settling the body only goes so far for some people, and there is energy left over afterwards. That leftover needs somewhere to go, or it goes back into the worry.
Whatever approach the anxious person is learning, teach it to the people they live with. A skill that only one person in the house knows gets overridden by everyone else's habits.
Ask one question about the worry: is there something to be done here that has not been done? If yes, make the plan. If the plan already exists, or there is nothing to plan, the worry gets no more of your time.