Modern schools are spellbound by “social emotional learning”, or the pursuit of integrating coping skills, attitudes, and “coping behaviors” into educational lessons to better teach emotional regulation skills. It certainly sounds noble. Children have largely been deemed emotional terrorists, which renders their parents exhausted and resentful and in desperate need of a program like SEL which promises to gently recalibrate their psyche. The name is ironic, as social-emotional learning has transformed adults and children into feelings-possessed sissies who seem incapable of carrying out a conversation without the mention of diagnoses, negative mood, or symptoms of “anxiety”. Today’s educational institutions, specifically K-12, are effective breeding grounds for ideologically crazed adults with a strange compulsion to diagnose every child as psychologically disordered.
Anxiety and depression have become two of the most common diagnoses amongst young kids and teenagers, despite having access to all of the country’s leading “mental health experts”, “trauma-informed counselors”, and “social emotional learning” programs. When stated out loud, it seems almost too obvious: if mental health is tanking but treatments are soaring, perhaps the treatment is the problem. Our society, though, makes quick work of overcomplicating very straightforward issues and tainting them with makeshift stories and opinions. “It’s because the world is so bad right now!!! Who wouldn’t be depressed?!” says the millennial psychotherapist. “It’s because he’s still exploring how to best communicate his sensory needs to us; of course he’s dysregulated,” says the trauma-responsive teacher. To bring this into context, the assumptions made about increasing rates of psychiatric disorders amongst our youth are made by people with little to no education, knowledge, expertise, or experience working with mentally ill clients.
I do believe this is an expected result from the tragedy of good intentions. With our inability to handle nearly anything in moderation, including moderation itself, we’ve overcorrected past abuse into a neurotic fantasy. A fantasy which assumes any shred of difficulty, criticism, sadness, bullying, or negativity is enough to squelch a youngster’s spirit, forever damning them to “insecure attachment” or “anxiety”. And I don’t necessarily say that to bash the people doing it--- they’re clearly being reinforced by a culture of adults who find it equal parts adorable and useful to talk incessantly about their own problems. It’s become self-serving but is still believed, by many, to be a revolutionary form of “care”.
When I consulted in schools, I was constantly brought into the principal’s office (as a grown adult employee, mind you) for “taking the kids out of class”, for “letting them get away with too much”, and for “disrupting the learning environment”. I did so by pulling them out for exercise snacks, which were small bursts of movement 5 minutes or less spread throughout their day. My rationale was that, firstly, the lesson was copy-and-pasted from last year and proved to be completely ineffective in teaching the kids much of anything other than how to blindly fill in blanks on a piece of paper. Secondly, sitting in the same spot hour after hour, feigning even neutrality when I wanted to gauge my eyes out from my own boredom, made me wonder how challenging it must be for teenagers to sit still. And lastly, exercise is medicine. One hundred percent of the student body at this school was medicated, some quite heavily for very serious mental illnesses, and I couldn’t think of a worse idea than grouping mentally ill kids together and keeping them inside for 8 consecutive hours.
I’d find myself in similar, hot water at the psych ward I first worked at while I was finishing my clinical psych practicum. I played Metallica over the wing’s speaker system and encouraged the patients to walk as many laps as they can in the hallway until the end of the 8-and-a-half-minute song Master of Puppets. The psych nurses told me I was creating a dangerous environment. Unsurprisingly, I was not asked to return. A decade later, I’d see staff punched, spit at, kicked, scratched, and thrown to the ground on a daily basis--- none of which occurred after listening to metal. They’d also be the very people left completely unsupported in these “clinical” environments, as any form of therapeutic clinic or hospital system finds an extra set of hands just too steep of a price to pay for basic safety and dignity.
In every setting I’ve worked, whether in a psychiatric ward or a school or a university, there are pictures and infographics decorating each and every wall. Nearly all of the decorum points to the same ideas: how to practice breathing when we feel anxious, how it’s perfectly “okay to not be okay”, or directions to the “wellness center” which claims to fix kids up psychologically until they feel “safe”. Perhaps a guide for staff regarding the detrimental, even dangerous effects of essentializing feelings would make a nice mantlepiece.
I have overcome panic disorder after 15 years of being addicted to Klonopin, and I have my education in both clinical psychology and behavior analysis. Let me be the one to tell you (and this is nothing new, nor did I invent this concept): launching into therapeutic mode when you’re anxious, afraid, depressed, or angry are surefire ways to make you more anxious, more afraid, more depressed, and more angry.
Let me explain using the very common example of anxiety. Anxiety thrives off of fear. It is an entirely avoidant-based constellation of symptoms in which the individual actively escapes sensations of fear because they’re uncomfortable, too uncomfortable for a person’s perceived ability to tolerate. The impending doom anxiety imposes upon you is exactly what sustains it, what feeds it, and our recognition that it’s present becomes anxiety’s power-grab. It wants you to not only notice it, but obey it. When we start to feel anxiety, whether through racing, irrational thoughts and/or physiological symptoms, like hyperventilation or our hearts pounding, I believe we’ve taught students to handle it in a manner that reinforces it. We cannot begin a cycle of box-breathing and self-affirmations. The most effective approach to anxiety is to welcome it, dare it to do its worst, and move on as if we’re unaffected. I’m essentially suggesting the exact opposite of today’s “social emotional learning”: do not give power, attention, or even time to your feelings. Ignore them.
Believe it or not, I’m not kidding. When I explain this to classrooms and school staff and practitioners, they chuckle. They respond in a joking intonation to what they believed to be a joke. What I stated above (that is, ignore your feelings), is not an opinion or hunch, but scientific fact. I make it unbelievably clear when I have no evidence to support a conviction or a thought--- and this is not one of those circumstances. Because when we launch into a cycle of box breathing, excessive self-reflection, clawing for a “calm down corner”, and erratically scoping out an escape route, we’re proving to anxiety one thing: “You have made me so uncomfortable that I will do anything to get rid of you.”
This is exactly what anxiety wants: for our time, our energy, and our resources to deplete in its favor. We’re quite literally feeding into it directly when we engage in the behaviors that social-emotional learners or school counselors encourage: talk about it relentlessly, ruminate about its difficulty, and refuse to move on until you “feel ready”. While our feelings and irrational thoughts do tend to enhance the symptoms of anxiety, they, in and of themselves, are not exactly what we need to change--- at least not outright. We need to change our RESPONSE TO and PERCEPTION OF what is happening internally. Anxiety is the petulant child whose sole purpose is that of getting under your skin, who stops at nothing until your seething rage reveals itself in the form of screaming and yelling, to which the petulant child squeals in delight. The petulant child has learned one thing: “If I push enough, you will erupt.” Anxiety is its identical twin.
Something I encourage my clients to do, whether they’re strength and conditioning or psychiatric clients, is to shift their attention toward their language. As they share their issues with me, I mark internal tallies counting how many mentions they make of “my anxiety”, “I’m just so anxious, so I can’t”, or phrases that essentialize their issues. I allow them to air their fears, struggles, and thoughts for about 5 minutes before bringing to their attention what my brain has been charting. Many of them admit they hadn’t even realized they were engaging in this powerfully negative form of language, let alone identifying the connection between their thoughts and their behaviors. Others have proceed to dig their heels in and angrily explain to me that “their anxiety” REALLY IS that powerful.
My response? Then stop giving it power. The only person who can do that is ourselves. Not society, not social emotional teachers, not trauma-informed counselors, not the President. You.
It is a requirement that we stop responding to anxiety as if it deserves our attention or time. Stop indulging it by airing its dirty laundry to anyone with a pulse. Stop behaving as if it’s as permanent as our pancreas or our skin. And for fuck’s sake, stop avoiding things just because you’re anxious. I do not allow any client I work with to tell me, “I just can’t because of my anxiety”. If we allow them to deem anxiety this influential, we’ve lost as a clinician, as a coach, as a teacher, as a friend.
Working with children is no different. I’m unsure why we believe that anxiety and depression are entirely different subspecies simply because they are “suddenly” revealing themselves in kids. This, in my conspiratorial opinion, works to make children into lifelong clients to benefit Big Pharma. A mentally ill child is a lifelong paycheck, as are their highly vulnerable parents who are desperate to take away their pain. Parents, know this: the mechanisms of anxiety are still the exact same, and need to be approached as if they’re the exact same. Your kids would be better off entirely shifting attention away from anxiety symptoms and instead learn the power of their physiology. An individual who exercises regularly, for example, is constantly exposing themselves to symptoms of anxiety (some shakiness, rapid heartbeat, heavy breathing, sweating). In doing so, they learn such symptoms are not always sensations to be feared, or even sensations that make for interesting topics of conversation. A child who learns to regulate their own breathing and learn the physiological thresholds of their body is a child who is unstoppable.
We rarely give attention to the sprinter who speaks of how heavily they’re breathing following a hundred meter sprint. And we certainly wouldn’t bring attention to the person who reports their legs feeling uneasy following completion of a marathon. But when we tie “mental health” to it, it suddenly gains importance. Why? Because we secretly fetishize mental illness. We’re captured by the idea that maybe we don’t have to do anything difficult, because we’re so intricately disordered that we’re just “different”. And for children?! Maybe I’m not a bad parent! Maybe I can be off the hook for disciplining them, because they’re neurodivergent or disordered or sensorily sensitive. No. You are feeding the monster that is anxiety--- your own and your children’s. Should you be skeptical about my straightforwardness regarding anxiety, I challenge you to experiment on yourself. When you begin to feel anxiety, say to yourself, out loud, “Oh great, you’re here!” and move on about your day. No meditation, no breathing, no self-talk. Do not give in.
Our bar is increasingly low for our abilities as human beings. Which is mind-blowing considering all that we’ve overcome: World War II. The Holocaust. Famine. The Great Depression. 9/11. Black Death. AIDS. Slavery. Are we really going to stoop to the degree of “if I go for a walk for 10 minutes today, that’s good enough”? Maybe I should have prefaced this thought with the understanding that 10 minutes of walking may be a tremendous accomplishment for the morbidly obese individual who has not walked in months or even years. It takes such mental toughness to pull ourselves out of a physical and mental rut so deep. But for those of us of generally sound mind and body, I want us to believe we’re capable of more. I want us to believe that our children can handle scraped knees and bruised psyches by reminding themselves of the creed that is sticks and stones.