Panic Attacks: How Parents Can Help
WHAT’S THE ISSUE: ‘I want to work on myself’, a parent recently told me after asking for advice on how she can help her child who is experiencing panic attacks. ‘I feel that it’s me that needs to change’. In this article, I share a 3-step process for parents who are ready to change their role in their parent-child relationship:
- Understand your role in the Drama Triangle
- Take your self-regulation skills up to the next level
- Be calm to help your panicking child through co-regulation
If you are ready to go there, the process can bring you closer to your child in beautiful ways. This advice is not for you if you are seeking an easy “quick fix” solution (spoiler alert: there is no such thing) to your child’s panic attacks. Working with panic takes time and effort.
PANIC ATTACKS, HOW PARENTS CAN HELP: UNDERSTAND YOUR ROLE IN THE DRAMA TRIANGLE
“It’s important to shift your role from Rescuer to Supporter. You don’t climb down a pit with someone. You give them a ladder, a rope. Because you can’t help them if you’re both in the pit.”
Marléne Rose Shaw
For you to be reading this, the thought ‘How can I help my child during a panic attack?’ has crossed your mind. Ask yourself if you have a pattern of falling into the Rescuer role. Going into Rescuer, Victim, or Persecutor roles perpetuates what Karpman calls a Drama Triangle in relationships. This is quite common.
The Rescuer’s intentions are to help. But the impact on a child who is feeling overwhelmed by panic is disempowering. The Rescuer’s role is a fear-based reaction to the problem. You may even find yourself struggling to avoid climbing into the fear-based ‘Panic Pit’ with your child. Kids are experts at feeling people’s energy. A kid who has suffered a panic attack needs you to support them in empowering themselves. And trying to hide your fear, pretending to be calm, only adds to their fear. When you try to hide your fear, they still feel it.
We are also unable to help a child during a panic attack if we go into the Persecutor role. Blaming. Shaming. Getting angry at the child for “attention-seeking”. Criticizing external factors, like the education system, for their panic attacks in tests or exams. Being highly judgmental (e.g. “There’s no reason to panic over such things. You shouldn’t feel this way. I want you to be strong”). The Persecutor role can also have the intention of wanting to help, but the impact can be anything but helpful.
If we are stuck in a Victim role, we can’t help. You can’t help your child when you feel powerless and helpless during a panic attack.
So playing a role in a Drama Triangle is unhelpful for a child who is stuck in emotional distress. What does help is making a conscious decision to step out of the Drama Triangle.
DECIDING TO STEP OUT OF THE DRAMA TRIANGLE: BECOMING A SUPPORTER
I was delighted when a parent followed up the ‘How can I help my child who is experiencing panic attacks’ question with ‘I want to work on myself because I feel that I need to change in order to help my child.’ I believe that being willing to work on ourselves in support of another is one of the greatest acts of love.
When our stress response kicks in, we can all fall into relationship patterns that don’t serve us, the other person, or the relationship, such as the role of the ‘Rescuer’. As therapist Marléne Rose Shaw puts it: “A Rescuer really wants to help but confuses rescuing people with supporting them…consider the difference between rescue (rushing in to protect another) and support (encouraging the person to help themselves and supporting them in that).”
Whatever your role in the Drama Triangle that you notice yourself falling into, you can choose to step out of this drama cycle. Marléne’s advice for how parents can step out of the Drama Triangle is to shift into the Parent as Supporter role. She suggests that parents start asking their child supportive questions like:
- ‘I wonder what might help you to feel better?’ (This is a ‘thinking aloud’ kind of question where you model and emanate a sense of ‘wonder’, which has a more calming effect on a child than emanating worry energy).
- ‘What sort of things make you calm?’
- ‘Can you think of something that worked for you, when you felt panicky, and then you felt better afterwards?’
- ‘What doesn’t work for you?’
These types of questions disrupt whatever role we find ourselves adopting in the Drama Triangle. Instead, parents support the child to engage in a problem-solving thought pattern. The parent and child work together to help solve the problem.
It’s important to be proactive, and ask these questions when your child is calm. So avoid delaying having this conversation until your child is suffering from another panic attack, as they will be too far into their ’emotional brain’ for it to be a constructive conversation.
If you want something different, you need to do something different. Before you do something different, you need to evaluate what you’ve tried that has actually worked. So you can do more of that. And stop doing what you have tried that hasn’t worked. You will then be in a better position to understand what a child needs from you, moving forward.
PANIC ATTACKS, HOW PARENTS CAN HELP: TAKE YOUR SELF-REGULATION SKILLS UP TO THE NEXT LEVEL
“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.”
Lili Velo
Panic attacks are an intense form of anxiety. As an EFT Therapist specializing in stress, anxiety, and academic success, my role isn’t to ‘rescue’ people who are experiencing panic attacks. I’m not here to save anyone. That would be doing them a disservice. It would be robbing them of the opportunity to empower themselves by saving themselves. When we go into a Rescuer role in response to a child who is experiencing panic attacks, it doesn’t empower the child to learn the self-soothing skills that help them take back control of their life.
Empowering themselves to overcome their excess stress, anxiety, or panic requires learning new body awareness and emotional self-soothing skills. This is something kids Pre-K to Grade 12 are capable of doing, with effective support. But for support to be effective, it’s not just about what we say to help them. It’s also about how we are being when they are in distress. The quality of our presence is also key in helping a child co-regulate down to a calmer place when they are experiencing the dysregulation of a panic attack.
Before you can help a child through co-regulation, you need to protect time in your daily life for you to tend to your own emotional health and inner peace. Co-regulation is just a fancy way of saying ‘helping someone calm down because our calm energy is stronger than their panic/stress energy’. Most of this emotional prep work happens behind the scenes – well before a child comes to you feeling panicky.
It is about being proactive and taking response-ability for reducing your overwhelming emotional response to your child’s panic. The proactive work you do to ground and center yourself whenever you become dysregulated during the day is more important than what words you say when your child is experiencing an emotional crisis.
People who suffer from panic attacks tend to be highly sensitive to the energy of those around them. A sensitive child feeling your calming, soothing energy in a crisis is particularly helpful for them when they are panicking. In psychology, this is called co-regulation, which is when your calm energy helps calm someone whose nervous system is dysregulated. For this to be possible, you have to be self-regulated.
One of the many things we can do to work on ourselves is to tap away any fears, anxieties, guilt, or worries you may have about your ability to respond to a child’s emotional dysregulation calmly. That’s one way of breaking the cycle of reacting to panicky emotions with anger (‘The Persecutor’ role), fear (‘The Rescuer’ role), or helplessness (‘The Victim’ role). Another way can be to tap away any thoughts that may be blocking our ability to move into a Supporter role, such as:
- ‘I’m not the kind of person who is good with emotions’
- ‘I’m just not good with people’
- ‘I get angry when my child panics. I don’t know how to stop this knee-jerk reaction, I’ve had it for so long.’
- ‘I’m helpless, I don’t know what to do when my child panics’
- ‘I freeze and go cold when my child panics, I don’t know how to move out of this state.’
- ‘I feel their emotions so much I start to panic with my child and can’t help them’
Some of these thoughts may be observations of what is happening in your body, in response to your child’s panic. We are all human. It’s normal, as part of the human body that we live in, to sometimes freeze and go cold in times of overwhelming stress. The important thing is to notice when this happens so that we can proactively mentally prepare for future situations that can trigger this stress response so that we can show up in a calmer, more grounded state in the future. From this place, we can be of greater support.
Tapping is a great way to work on processing the blocks that are holding you back from shifting into a supportive role. If we choose to hold on to blocking beliefs like ‘I’m helpless’ or ‘I’m not the kind of person who is good with emotions’, this will prevent us from being able to learn and grow. Changing our role in the Drama Triangle from Persecutor to Supporter, from Victim to Supporter, and from Rescuer to Supporter may require challenging some old beliefs about who we are as a person. Tapping away limiting beliefs can help with that.
Remove yourself from the Drama Triangle dynamic while you learn new self-soothing skills. For that to happen, you need to overcome your habit of delaying taking care of your emotional health by always putting others first. I created a free 5-Step EFT tapping guide for parents who are ready to start working on their emotional self-care. Check it out and see if it helps you feel better: ‘EFT For Overcoming Self-Care Procrastination.’
EFT tapping is not the only way to ground yourself into a calmer state that allows you to be there for your child. There are other ways of preventing getting sucked into it and joining your child in overwhelming emotions. You may find this article I wrote on different types of meditation you can do to ground yourself helpful. Alternatively, you may want to try this easy 5-minute meditation that teacher and parent of two, Lili Velo, found very helpful for helping to heal her nervous system so she could help her child: ‘Helping Your Child Who is Experiencing Anxiety’ (Interview with Lili Velo).
PANIC ATTACKS, HOW PARENTS CAN HELP: HELP YOUR PANICKING CHILD THROUGH CO-REGULATION
“We define toxic positivity as the excessive and ineffective overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations. The process of toxic positivity results in the denial, minimization, and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience. Just like anything done in excess, when positivity is used to cover up or silence the human experience, it becomes toxic. By disallowing the existence of certain feelings, we fall into a state of denial and repressed emotions.”
Samara Quintero & Dr Jamie Long
Before you can help your child calm down through co-regulate, it’s important to ask yourself whether you are embodying the change you want to see. As you start to embody a calmer state, you may even feel ready to try teaching your child the new self-soothing skills that you are learning, to see if they might help them self-regulate better, too.
A word of caution: sometimes, we’ve been conditioned to respond to challenges and awful situations with toxic positivity. Toxic positivity can prevent us from realizing when ‘trying to forget about it’ by just keeping ourselves busy or ‘trying to figure it out on our own’ is not working. It can cause us to act like everything’s okay…when it’s not.
We sometimes need professional support to help us reduce how triggering certain situations can be. Does your anger keep getting triggered when your child comes to you in the middle of a panic attack? Get help.
Sometimes there is only so far we can go on our own. It’s OK to ask for help. Working with someone we can trust to help us co-regulate and neutralize how triggering an event can feel allows us to be calm and help someone else co-regulate.
Because we’re human. No one is Superman or Wonder Woman. As a parent…you’re human, too.
REFERENCES
About the author
Eleni Vardaki works online to support parent, teacher, and student well-being. Her mission is to help bridge the gap between mainstream education and the well-being skills we need to thrive. She believes in doable, sustainable interventions for student well-being in school and family cultures that value student and community well-being.
