"It is relatively early on a summer evening, just after sunset. From my bed, I notice a shadow of a spindly branch dancing across the corner of the bedroom wall. I get up and close the curtains tightly to make it disappear, careful not to step on my daughter, who’s camped on my bedroom floor, lying stiffly under the weighted anxiety blanket I’d made her. I don’t mind the shadow, but I know it will make it impossible for her to fall asleep. This is the fourth night in a row she’s spent here.
“Let’s start our meditation,” I tell her as I climb back into bed. “Close your eyes and tense your fists …” I read through the script a therapist gave us, meant to help soothe anxious children. Though it adds ten minutes to her already-long litany of nightly calming rituals, it hasn’t yet emboldened my daughter to return to sleeping in her own room.
She breathes deeply like the script tells her to. It’s a familiar tactic by now; the panic attacks have been coming nightly. At 13, my daughter has become convinced that she will die in her sleep. And as I lie there listening to her struggle to elongate her breaths, another gnawing worry washes over me: In the couple years since my daughter first developed her fear, I’ve become increasingly convinced that I caused her anxiety."
[For more on this story by Paula M. Fitzgibbons, go to https://www.thecut.com/2017/09...-anxiety-i-have.html]
Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images
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