Guiding Your Family toward Emotional Health, episode 6 transcript
Anxiety Management for Multicultural Lives
John Yoder: Today's young people are facing an epidemic of anxiety, and there are stressors that are specific to the American born children of immigrants. Today we want to learn five action steps that parents can take to manage that stress, not only in their children's lives, but in their own as well.
Hi everybody, Pastor John Yoder here again. Welcome back to part 6 of our series, “Guiding Your Family toward Emotional Health”. Today's episode is entitled, “Anxiety Management for Multicultural Lives”. In this series, marvelous Christian counselors of various ethnic backgrounds are sharing with us how to guide our families toward emotional health.
The three presenters that are sharing today introduced themselves to us in our last [00:01:00] episode. If you'd like to know more about them, please go back and hear that. They are Dasha Cochran, a Russian American, Ajab Amin, a Cameroonian American, and Christine Chow, a Malaysian American.
Many of you would like to move beyond merely listening to actually engaging with pastors and counselors about some of the issues that you face. I'd like to invite all of you to join our Facebook group, which is called Cross-Cultural Parenting, where you can ask questions about the issues you hear in these podcasts.
Before our presenters begin, I want to share with you the five causes of anxiety they will share and then the five solutions. You can get a copy of the transcript from our website. And if you like, you can use this for lesson or preparation or just in your personal life. Five causes of anxiety that they've identified.
• Number one, few stressors.
• Number two, learned hypersensitivity.
• Number three, primarily screen-based relationships.
• Number four, the tension of meeting two different sets of cultural expectations
• Number five, academic and career pressures.
The five solutions that they have are:
• Number one, listen to your children
• Number two, acknowledge that their concerns are valid
• Number three, help them change what they can, and let go of what they cannot
• Number four, learn simple physical actions that reduce anxiety
• Number five, seek God’s help.
So the first cause of anxiety that they have listed is that children have few stressors. That may sound like a contradiction to you. Dasha explains.
Dasha Cochran: I think one of the factors that drives anxiety is [00:03:00] interestingly lack of adversity, or very little adversity in the individual's lives. I noticed that the more adversity the individual has experienced, actually the less anxiety they're likely to have, because they a build up the capacity to overcome scary difficult things as they go through life.
Most of us who come from other countries have experienced probably much more adversity than let's say our children. And something that feels really scary to them, feels not so scary to us because we've seen it worse.
John Yoder: The second cause of anxiety is what I'm calling learned hypersensitivity. There's a popular term today, microaggressions. And a microaggression is when somebody says or does something very slight that you don't like. Other words for it are gaslighting and centering. You share an opinion and somebody else shares [00:04:00] their thought, or starts talking about their experience instead of yours.
And if you believe in microaggressions, you should be upset and offended by them. You may hear in the newslines, you may find the following disturbing, or it might trigger you. When children are taught to be hypersensitive, they become very easily offended. Christine explains,
Christine Chow: I think another important thing is helping them to tolerate distress. It feels like nowadays people have lesser bandwidth to tolerate negative experiences, maybe negative comments coming at them, whatever, and it's helpful to talk about it. That wasn't a favorable situation that you experienced. But what are some different ways in which we can think about this and navigate it? Other than avoiding it, to talk through that they operate within an American culture that, that's just more [00:05:00] easily offended.
And then they come home and their parents say these very direct things and they're very offended by their parents now. So you know, in Proverbs, the book of Proverbs, I think it's chapter 17, verse 9, it talks about if you dwell on a slight, it separates relationships.
So the question is, what is a slight? What is not? And it's very cultural how we interpret what is a slight or what is not. When I'm focusing on a slight, my eyes tend to turn inward at me and what I'm not receiving from you or what you're doing to me, But then, when we think of scripture calling us to love God and love neighbor, we're actually invited and called to look outward at our neighbor and how to love them.
John Yoder: A third source of anxiety is from those who make their primary source of relationship building looking at screens instead of [00:06:00] looking people in the eye and developing face to face relationships. Christine explains.
Christine Chow: I feel like we are interacting with one another more online right now, rather than in person. And online interactions are just not the same. So people tend to in the younger generation, especially text more than that maybe meet face to face in a conversation. And feel like the written word doesn't have the tone or necessarily can't really fully carry the warmth of a human presence and the care from another human person.
And we are made for relationships, are made to connect. And so when we have a breaking down of connections deep, good connections it can really do a number in the way that we perceive our lives, perceive ourselves, perceive other people that could cause a lot of anxiety. [00:07:00] or depression.
John Yoder: Another source of anxiety for the American born children of immigrants is the pressure to meet two very different sets of cultural expectations. Here's what Ajab has to say.
Ajab Amin: There's the anxiety which shows up because of the conflict that they feel between how they're raised, they're Americans, and they have African parents, and so there's a conflict of what they believe versus what their parents believe and also just navigating school in some ways. There's a difference between like rules at home versus rules at in school or out there in the world. Even how you pronounce your name changes a little bit. At home your Ajab and out in the world is Ajob. There's just different things that show up with that.
John Yoder: The final cause of anxiety that our [00:08:00] presenters listed is academic and career pressure. For some, it's the academic pressure of getting the grades to get into a famous university. For others, it may be a struggle to get a high school diploma, and it's clearly known that they will not be going on to college. But then the pressure becomes, what will I do to make a good income? Ajab continues.
Ajab Amin: And then for a lot of people in deciding what they want to do with their careers like getting into college, many of our African parents emphasize some majors like, like medicine, being a lawyer, being an engineer. And there's so much more, there's so much more than that. But but sometimes that can be a challenge when, the parents want them to do a particular thing and they don't want to do that. So it can also just bring up anxiety and people pleasing. in trying to navigate do [00:09:00] I please my parents? Do I please myself? Like, how do I navigate that?
John Yoder: So those are a few of the causes of anxiety in the lives of young people. But now we want to ask the question, what do we do with it? And so we're going to list five action steps that you can take. The first, and probably most foundational, is listening. Here's what Christine has to say.
Christine Chow: Finding healthy ways for them to talk about it. When you know, anxiety gets worse if you're suffering it alone and actually compounds. But then when you're able to talk about it, it actually helps you calm down. And then I would enter in a very like light hearted, light tone curious, open-ended questions. What happened there? I want to hear because I care. And then questions that sort of help you understand what the child is thinking or believing about [00:10:00] the situation. Because oftentimes it's what they're thinking and believing about themselves or about others or the situation.
That drives their anxiety which might not even be real, you know, maybe they feel like they're the ugliest person in school, but they're not. So having those kind of open-ended conversations where you can draw them out.
John Yoder: the second thing is to move beyond mere listening and to Acknowledge that our children's concerns are genuine. Here's what Dasha has to say.
Dasha Cochran: So I would say the first and really the most important one is to actually listen and it's really difficult to listen to what your children are experiencing. And I'm going to give a quick example. The same mentality that we apply to our children, that, you're living in the Promised Land, you don't know what it's like, where I come from, we didn't have enough [00:11:00] food, that's not my experience, but right?
But for example, if I think about my grandparents back in Russia, they lived through two world wars. Famine. Half of the family was sent to the concentration camp. The single mothers had to raise the children on nothing, so on and so forth. Now, just because my grandparents experienced all those hardships, does that mean my feelings are invalid? No, they're not invalid.
But I still grew up in the Soviet Russia. I was bullied, and lots of things happened to me. So hopefully we can apply that principle retrospectively and acknowledge that pain is pain and fear is fear.
Okay, so maybe they were not in a refugee camp, but they're being bullied for being black or Latino or having an accent or having a funny name. Can we just listen? and empathize a little bit. You know that their pain, it's legitimate. It's different from ours, but it's legitimate. [00:12:00]
John Yoder: A third step is helping children understand the difference between changing the things that they can and accepting the things that they cannot. Here's what Ajab says.
Ajab Amin: I think part of what helps is there's something about like first recognizing what is making you anxious, and seeing if there are things that are real or there are things that are not real, because anxiety is really either it's like worry about the future or is worry about the past, or is worry about fears that are unfounded that I can't make up. It's not happening right now.
And so it was just being able to identify what it is. What am I anxious about? And then in recognizing that thing that is making you anxious. Is it within your control? What can I do that is within my control? [00:13:00] And then go try going to do the things that you can do that are within your control.
And then the things that are not within your control. Can you give that to God? What in general, can you give the issue to God? There are a lot of things that we cannot do to control various situations.
John Yoder: The fourth step is extremely helpful when a child is having a very strong reaction. It could be as intense as a panic attack. Or it could just be simply something that is out of proportion to the event that has just happened. The child might be screaming and they cannot focus. There are physical things that a parent can do to help their child and themselves cool down. Christine explains.
Christine Chow: There is a very physical component to anxiety. It's actually our brains are going into fight-or-flight. And then we, our bodies are wired when we're in fight or flight [00:14:00] to react without having to do a lot of logical thinking. So that, if a bear is coming at us, that's the right kind of anxiety and fear we should be having and we react, we run without even thinking, I have to run now. It's very fast, the reaction.
But then when we breathe, it actually slows down the fight-or-flight. And brings a calming to our brain where we move out of that reactionary brain into more of a thinking brain. And the best is when we breathe in through our nose, and then we hold it. And then we breathe out through our mouth so that oxygen is really getting all the way in. And we want to breathe out longer than we breathe in. Cause then it really helps us to slow down, helps our heart to calm down. So breathing is important for younger kids.
I tend to ask parents to help them move, run or jump or pull something that has attention [00:15:00] to it. Because you're letting that negative anxiety energy move outward somewhere out of your body. Sometimes even lifting something heavy, like a rice bag, you can, that helps them to calm down. So that's why actually it's so important to have a good exercise routine. And a lot of people have found it very helpful to exercise regularly as a way to deal with their stress, which brings a lot of anxiety.
John Yoder: If you have a child who is regularly triggered, you can teach them to do these things. If they do them two or three times, they will understand them. And whether they're in the classroom or on the bus or wherever they may be, they can, without your guidance, take these steps to cool themselves down. Ajab shares another technique that she has often found helpful.
Ajab Amin: It's called the Five Senses Mindfulness Exercise. And what you do is you just pay attention to your five senses. So I can [00:16:00] ask you what are five blue things that you can see in the room. And so you're walking your child through this. What are five things you can see?
What are four things you can hear? What are three things you can touch, like physically? And what are two things you can smell? What is one thing you can taste? And as you're going through that exercise, You really have to focus on the exercise. Like you can't focus on anything else that's going on in your mind. And so that takes you away, takes the person away from the anxious thing and brings them back to the present.
And so they can expand that exercise. You could say, I said five senses so it really you can say as many things, like what are 10 blue things you can see right now. And you can expand the exercise, and you can do it while walking. Sometimes you're just [00:17:00] walking down the street and you can say, okay, what are four green things I can see around me? So you're just paying attention to your senses, which takes, brings you to the present and takes you away from the thoughts that are making you anxious.
John Yoder: The fifth and final step is to seek God. Now, we do not list that one last because it's least important. The truth is, it's the most important. The reason we put it last is that many Christians only emphasize the spiritual aspect. But God has made us to be wholes--body, soul, and spirit, interacting with one another. And because of that, we put the emotional and the physical side first. The greatest resource that we all have to deal with anxiety and stress is prayer. Here's what Christine has to say.
Christine Chow: Most importantly, God has us to fear not, that we're not to be dismayed because he will help [00:18:00] us. He draws near. So speaking to him and surrendering our fears to him, he actually takes it from us and gives us his peace. So prayer is very helpful for anxiety.
John Yoder: Philippians chapter 4, verses 6 and 7 says this, Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God Which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
So Paul says, be anxious about nothing. He doesn't mean that if you see an oncoming truck or you're being attacked by an animal, that you shouldn't be scared. That's an appropriate response. But we shouldn't stay in that anxiety. What we should do about long term anxiety. is pray, give it to God, and give thanks for the good things he's done in our lives.[00:19:00]
And Paul says that God's peace, which surpasses understanding, in other words, it's beyond anything you would expect. Everybody on the outside would look at you and your circumstances and say you ought to be stressed out, but you're not. You have a peace that passes understanding and logic. And what it will do, Paul says, it will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. All of us need to bring our minds and our hearts to God and ask Him to guard them.
So friends, that's all we have for this episode. Come back next time. These very same presenters will be talking to us about how to manage the epidemic of depression. I'll see you then.
