NEW EDITORIAL
BY LISA WEINER
Tummy aches and monsters in the closet. Headaches and risky behaviour. Frequent hand-washing and repetitive behaviours. These are all manifestations of alarm. Thinking about this list of manifestation probably doesn’t make any of us feel very playful, however play is often just what is needed to keep our children’s alarm system healthy and well-functioning.
The alarm system lives deep in all of our brains, beautifully designed by Nature to look after us by keeping us close to those who take care of us. Because attachment instincts are, truly, survival instincts, what alarms us most is separation from the people and things we are attached to.
Different kids deal with alarm in different ways. In some, the alarm system is hair-trigger, the equivalent of the fire alarm that goes off in response to a few particles of dust. For others, separation, the true source of alarm, is too painful to see, so the brain assigns other reasons to the alarm (this is often the genesis of “irrational” phobias). For others yet, alarm is too vulnerable to feel at all. These kids experience the physical manifestations of alarm, such as restlessness and agitation without consciously feeling alarmed at all. When defenses go very deep, we are left with kids who are not worried, restless or agitated, in fact, they often look cool as ice. These are the kids and teens for whom “No fear” is the mantra; the rush of adrenaline becomes an experience of relief for them and they seek it out through dangerous and risky behaviour and, sometimes, cutting or burning themselves.
We can see that a well-functioning alarm system gives kids “danger alerts” that they are able to feel and respond to. What can we do to support the alarm systems of our anxious, obsessive, restless or risk-taking kids so that they can work in the way Nature intended?
For more on the topic of the human alarm system, we recommend our newest course,The Alarm Spectrum (details below).
