WALKING ALONGSIDE YOUTH - AN ONLINE ANXIETY COURSE
Session 1 Summary
Understanding Youth with Anxiety
Session 1 focused on information about anxiety, including causes and potential symptoms. The session offered ways for caregivers and care providers to safely and respectfully support youth through relationship. We explored, defined and reflected on:
- anxiety as a result of unmet relational needs, especially for youth in care who have experienced unwanted disruptions and changes, and a lack of consistently safe environments
- definitions of anxiety as excessive worry and fear on a regular basis, for an extended period of time, and interfering with and affecting quality of life
- the many faces of anxiety, which can be confusing and even hard to recognize, such as restlessness, obsession, compulsion and chronic worry
- the primal emotion of alarm, which underlies anxiety and is most acutely triggered by unmet relational needs and too much separation, and which is most safely and effectively addressed through relationships with consistent, caring adults
- a youth being unreceptive to care as an obstacle to helping them with their anxiety, which must be overcome by establishing a safe relationship and connection
Session 1 included Indigenous perspectives on Indigenous youth in care, who often have faced disrupted connections with community, land and traditional life ways, in addition to unbearable separation from their primary attachments. They experience anxiety as a natural response to too much separation.