After months of riding the Coronavirus roller coaster, David Luke’s Resident Anxiety Coach Sarie Taylor asks “How do you really feel about your children returning school?”
It’s likely that as a parent, you will have a whole range of feelings about your child returning to school. Especially after having to remain at home for a much longer period of time than they are used to. Often when we are trying to work out how we feel, we believe that we will get to a place where we have thought so much about it, that we have considered all eventualities, we will then suddenly feel a weight lifted where we feel completely at ease with everything. This just isn’t how it works.
The fact that our feelings actually come from our thoughts, means that our feelings will fluctuate as our thoughts change. You may find yourself thinking you are OK with the idea of them going back. You have settled your mind on it being the best thing for your family. Then you read something, or someone else shares their opinion and you have a whole new thought process. This means that your feelings will change again as a result. It can be a roller coaster. What is important is learning how to navigate and ride and the discomfort rather than expect that we can get rid of it completely.
When we start to feel uncomfortable and worried, we suffer. We look for our crystal ball and we think we can predict the future, we can’t. The phrase that ‘we will cross that bridge when we come to it’ is crucial because actually it’s so common that we don’t even end up at the bridge we thought we would. Therefore all the worry and stress has been for nothing.
It can be difficult to set our children free in to a world that to us seems scary and overwhelming. But the reality is that we can not control their environment all of the time, and in fact they do not need us to! Our children are
resilient human beings just like us. When we start to see our own resilience in and amongst the anxious thoughts, we start to see our children’s too.
Remember:
- We feel our thinking
- It’s normal for feelings to change and fluctuate
- The future cannot be predicted
- It’s only possible do our best in any given moment, and that is enough
- We can cross that bridge when we come to it. We may even end up on an entirely different route anyway!
Sarie Taylor is The Perfectly Imperfect Mind Mentor and is a qualified psychotherapist, specialist anxiety coach and founder of Sarie Taylor Coaching https://www.sarietaylor.com/
