Hope and fear collide

Anxiety is an unpleasant, emotional state that involves a complex combination of emotions that include fear, apprehension, and worry. It is often accompanied by physical sensations such as heart palpitations, nausea, chest pain, shortness of breath, or tension headache.

The definition above is from wikipedia.com.

It is also is what my six year old sometimes has at nighttime.

She was adopted from China at 9 months old. So we are not even remotely sure if this has something to do with her very early months. What we do know is that she is terrified of a fire in our home.

We have tried calming her before bedtime.

We have tried talking to her about the causes of fires in the home.

We have tried the “Plan” approach. (What to do if there is a fire.)

We have added smoke alarms to all of the rooms in the house.

We have added two extra fire extinguishers to the upstairs.

Now with the help of a school counselor we are working toward her inner dragon!

This is really helping quite a bit. She gave us a book entitled Anxiety Cure: An Eight-Step Program for Getting Well and it seems to be working, little by little. In one of the first steps it talks about addressing the issue and to write in a journal. When our daughter gets ready for bed we ask her to “rate” the size of her dragon. Then depending on the size we start a wizard approach. Meaning that we get her to dream about the wizard getting the dragon to stop being mean. Tell the dragon to stop making her scared of things. If the dragon starts taunting her she is supposed to ask the dragon to not talk to her or she will leave the room. If the dragon keeps being mean then she is supposed to spell the dragon to a time out. This seems to work the best! Since her dragon is over 100 years old then the dragon gets a time out for 100 minutes! By the time the time out is over she is fast asleep. Sometimes the dragon will wake her up, but not too often.

We started this whole thing at the beginning of the year and she has been writing in her journal most nights. There are nights where she doesn’t “share” that the dragon is bugging her and that is very nice. The book also talks about the dragon always being there and that it is okay for it to be there, but it shouldn’t keep trying to “eat” your fears, which is it’s food. So if you have fears it will come up and start it’s feeding process. Meaning that the more it taunts you the more fear you will release and the more the dragon will grow. If we can cut some of that process down then she will become stronger and stronger. Now this is not to say that all fears are bad, it just means that the when they come up at night it is a way to help deal with the control part of it. Hopefully she will be able to control this dragon and become a stronger person overall. We both know this will not be an easy road and it will probably involve professionals in the future. We have just started the whole thing, just the tip of a very big iceberg sitting just above the water line.

My hope is that it will all work out and the fear of the fire slows down just a bit!