Helping Your Child Who Is Experiencing Anxiety
WHAT’S THE ISSUE: Parents often feel helpless when their child experiencing anxiety develops serious anxiety-related health problems. If this is you right now, educator and mother of two, Lili Velo-Egonmwan can relate.
In this interview, you will:
- learn what Lili realized that helped her child heal from the anxiety she was experiencing
- experience the daily self-care activity Lili found most helpful to be there for her child
Lili is a trauma-informed teacher and mother who talks about how she helped her own child; in this real-talk interview, Lili shares her inspiring story of what worked to help her child heal.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
CHILD EXPERIENCING ANXIETY: PARENT TO PARENT ADVICE
ELENI VARDAKI: Hi everyone! I’d like to introduce you to Lili. Lili is a trauma-informed educator based in the US who works with families and schools to understand the impact of trauma on children. Lili, thank you for being here. Welcome.
LILI VELO: Thank you so much, Eleni, for inviting me and sharing my story with your audience. It’s such a pleasure to be here with you.
ELENI VARDAKI: You’ve got such an inspiring story. So I’d love to ask you: What advice you have for parents of children who are experiencing anxiety, right now?
LILI VELO: I’m both an educator and a mother. I have a 5 and a 7 year old, and the bottom line answer that has been for me, very true to healing my daughter’s anxiety was to work on myself. And to work on my childhood wounds. And heal myself. Because what I understood was that my daughter, who at the time was about to turn 3, was mirroring my internal state. And we landed in the hospital. We were in the ER and she was about to have surgery, because her anxiety and the nervousness and the stress had twisted her intestines. She was very close to getting surgery and that, as a mother, left me feeling so hopeless. And it really just made me think about, “How can I protect my daughter? How can I make sure she’s not in this situation again?” And thankfully during that time, I was already doing some Inner Child work, some working on my own trauma growing up. And so I went full-fledge on that and understood with the coach that I had that as I worked on my own anxiety – which at the time I didn’t even know I had it – my mother had it. She had anxiety and depression. I had anxiety and depression, but was so unconscious and was not aware of it. And it took my daughter to really open my eyes and mirror, like, this is something that has happened generationally. And as soon as I started to get better and work on myself and allow myself to be grounded, allow myself to heal my nervous system and not be in a state of survival, I noticed that she also got better.
I think as parents, the one thing that we can control is the choices that we have, what we can do with ourselves.
And I know that this may be very unpopular to say, but if we have children that are experiencing anxiety, even depression, I always understand that there’s something in the environment that is a factor causing that. And so the unpopular advice here that I would share is really look at how you are presenting yourself. How is it that you’re showing up for your child? Because children pick up on energy. And so that would be my advice, Eleni. To really just do some healing work for yourself as a parent, so that you can show up fully in your power and be in joy and bliss. Because our children, I mean, as a child, I wish my mom could show up like that for me. I think all children want to see their parents like that. And modeling that shows them that they too can do that as well.
ELENI VARDAKI: Recent research in the field of trauma highlights the occurrence of cross-generational trauma and how it can be passed on through generations. What a gift, as a mother to say, “I’m going to work on healing my trauma to help break the cycle, to help my child.” So I want to acknowledge you for that because that is just so beautiful that you were willing to go there to do the work.
LILI VELO: Thank you. And I think any mother is willing to do that. I think it just took the awareness that it was me that was showing up with the anxiety. And it was me that was showing up in a state of chaos. I mean, I remember going to her classroom and she was constantly hitting her head. It was her method of self-regulating herself, all these emotions that she felt that she just didn’t know what to do with. And I remember the teacher saying something to the effect of, “It looks like there’s this internal chaos going on.” And when she said that, it just hit me so strong. I was like, “That is me! I’m going through that.” And that awareness allowed me to be, “Okay, I need to focus on myself. ‘Cause if I can ground myself and I can show up grounded and not feeling chaotic (nd you know, this ties back to my own childhood upbringing), My daughter will be able to mirror how I’m feeling”. As you just stated, there is generational trauma that gets passed down and energy. Children pick up on that. And so that awareness allowed me to move into that. So healing myself was a no-brainer for me at that point.
PRACTICAL SELF-CARE ACTIVITY: THE ZERO POINT ENERGY EXERCISE FOR REDUCING ANXIETY
ELENI VARDAKI (04:44): How did you heal yourself? Is there a practical example or exercise that you could walk us through?
LILI VELO: I think often we get stuck in like, “Well, what does healing look like? What do I do?” I’ve tried a lot of different things, but I think that the number one thing that has allowed me to heal those wounds and that repressed energy that was in my body was connecting back to it. Often we are so stuck in our, in our brain and, you know, in thoughts (our energy is completely above our neck) that we become disconnected to our body. And so for me, it was a process of creating safety back in my body. Of being able to connect back to it, to its sensations, feeling the weight on my shoulders, right? Feeling that tension in my back. And slowly connecting back to that, to even be aware that that’s there and allowing myself with breath, work and movement and tapping to allow it to release. And it was a gradual process because these new sensations were very unfamiliar to me. And so I had to titrate this. And allow myself to slowly, slowly grow more space in my body to feel everything that, you know, after 38 years had been suppressed. And so I’ll guide you into doing one very simple that for me in the morning, it takes no more than five minutes. And it just really allows me to bring my energy down into my body and disconnect from my thoughts and really feel that sensation. And it’s called a Zero Point Energy Exercise.
So I’ll invite you by just, you know, using your hands. And what you want to do is just rub your hands together. Rub, rub, rub. And you’ll probably feel a lot of warm sensations. And we’re just gonna rub and create some friction there. And this can take as long as you want. It can be as short as you want. You can either continue doing this, but what I like to do after this is kind of just tap my fingertips.
LILI VELO: So I’ll tap my fingertips. And I do like to do this with my eyes closed. It just kind of allows me to go into my body and just kind of feel whatever tension, tightness, whatever may be showing up in my body. For me, I hold a lot of tightness and tension in my shoulders and upper back. And so as I do this, and again, you can go longer or shorter, but just for the sake of time here, what I’ll invite you to do after is just to release your hands and just feel any sensations in your hands. You may feel like an energetic or a magnetic pull in between your palms. You may feel like, you know, when your hands fall asleep and then they’re waking up a lot of like prickly sensations. And you can gently just pull your hands together without touching, and then just kind of pull apart. And just hone in and just tune into that sensation in between your palms.
And I usually do this playing some music in the background. And I just focus on the space between my palms. If this is your first time doing this, which I assume it may be, if you don’t feel anything, that’s absolutely okay. I noticed that when I started to do these exercises, I was so disconnected from my body that I was stuck in my head that I didn’t feel much. But over time, I was able to feel a lot of pull in between my palms. Like right now, my poems feel very warm. And so as we do this, we’re allowing our mind to just kind of silence. And go into our body and feel the sensations that comes up. And it allowed me to, in my own timing, just create more safety in my nervous system.
To kind of wrap this up, you can gently just have your palms facing your heart. And at this point you can just say out loud, any affirmations or anything that you want to heal, you want to change, you want to, release. And you can say that out loud. Usually what I like to say is “I release anything that is no longer here to serve the unfolding of my higher self” or you know “the purpose that I’m here to live out on mother earth.”
LILI VELO: And then once you’re ready, just bring my hands, my palms together and just put it on my chest. And I just take a deep breath and that’s it. It’s just a very simple practice in the morning, or even during the day when I’m feeling a bit stressed or a bit, you know, starting to get ungrounded, I just come back to that and it just allows me to center myself. So it’s very simple practice that you’re welcome to practice at anytime.
BONUS: A BELLY BUTTON EXERCISE FOR RELEASING ACCUMULATED ANXIETY
ELENI VARDAKI (09:35): Thank you so much for sharing that. And I was following along as you were leading us through it,and it felt so wonderful. I mean, I do feel this (exhale), I do. You know, I felt that, that was powerful. And I know that you also have a second activity that you’d like to share with parents on how to reduce their anxiety.
LILI VELO: This second activity, which I’m sure Eleni can provide you a link for, focuses on activating our vagus nerve. Our vagus nerve connects our brain down into all our organs. And so one of the things that happens when we have anxiety is that we tend to breathe very shallowly from our chest, and we don’t get enough oxygen down into our gut area. And our gut and our stomach become very tight. And so this simple activity is literally using your belly button and your fingers to activate the vagus nerve and to allow some of that suppress energy that gets stuck cause of anxiety to be released.
ELENI VARDAKI: Thank you so much, Lily I’ll have a link below so you can access that right away. Thank you so much.
LILI VELO (10:36): Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Lili Velo-Egonmwan grew up in a country that was foreign to her parents. She experienced a lot of uncertainty at home, so school became her ‘home away from home’. She went on to become a high school teacher, working with immigrant students for more than 15 years. Her experiences as an educator and mother led her to become trauma-informed, and to heal her own symptoms of trauma that had manifested in anxiety and depression. She now works with families and schools on understanding the impact of trauma so that children can process their emotions, self-regulate, become life-long learners and thrive.
