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Childhood Fears and Anxieties

Dealing with child anxiety is a very delicate area, but need not be overbearing. Children are vulnerable and sensitive beings. Unfortunately, parents can tend to forget that at times, and unwittingly do harm by speaking and acting carelessly towards them, which raises the problem of child anxiety in the family.

Psychodynamic theories suggest that if frightening situations make a. great enough impact on children, not only can they create severe child anxiety in the present, but unpleasant feelings and thoughts can be triggered later in adult life when they find themselves in a situation which reminds them of the original, fearful scene. It needn’t be something which happened in real life; it could even be part of a fantasy. Disapproval, physical threats, and overwhelming stimulation could all be perceived by children as potentially dangerous situations.

Another incredibly frightening situation for a child to be in is where he or she fears separation from their mother figure. Initially this separation anxiety can show itself as school phobia. In later years the anxious feelings can be rekindled when the person finds themselves in a situation which reminds them, perhaps subconsciously, of their earlier child anxiety experiences and that same threat.

Panic attacks sometimes begin to occur after an actual or threatened loss of an important person or support system. Perhaps it echoes those early unresolved fears, but although these links have been suggested, it is unclear whether panic arracks are always linked to early separation anxiety or not. With or without the links with childhood separation anxiety, losing important relationships or other kinds of support does appear to predispose some people to panic arracks.

So it seems that incidents in childhood, the way we were brought up and taught to think about ourselves could all have a bearing on whether someone eventually in later life develops panic attacks.

Subconscious worries and fears can establish, from very early on, a level of anxiety much higher than that of happy-go-lucky people. And perhaps because these anxious feelings have ‘always’ been there, this sort of person is quite unaware of them.