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Anxiety And Grief In Confinement: "I Used To Be A Happy Little Girl, I Didn't Have All These Fears"

K., nine years old, calls her small anxiety crises after almost months of confinement "overwhelm".

By HowToFind .comPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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Anxiety And Grief In Confinement: "I Used To Be A Happy Little Girl, I Didn't Have All These Fears"
Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

She wants to share her experience so that other children know that what happens to them is normal. "I know there's nothing wrong with me, but I'm scared and sad about a lot of things I didn't think about before," she says.

According to Save The Children, one in four children has developed or heightened anxiety during this strict and prolonged state of alarm.

-Mom, what if I can't breathe through my nose?

-You'll breathe through your mouth.

-What if I forget to breathe when I'm asleep?

-You don't forget. It's like blinking, your body does it without you wanting it to.

Night has been falling for hours, but K., a nine-year-old girl, doesn't want to go to bed.

In fact, she doesn't want to stay alone, even though her mother is barely two meters away, in the next room of a 70-meter apartment.

Even if she leaves the door open and the light on, even if a movie plays in the background. She does not want to be alone with her thoughts, many of which are totally new or which, before her confinement, were not covered with anguish.

"Now I feel sorry for a lot of things and worry about the passage of time and think that someday I will have to die or that mom or dad will die. I can't even hear about murder in the movies," she says, hoping that verbalizing what is happening to her will help to cope better with confinement.

She also wants other children to know that they are not alone, that although they cannot see each other to tell her, there are more like her, full of new fears, trapped in a loop of almost identical days and with a recurring sadness at the distance that still remains to recover normality.

K. hopes that in September everything will look a little like her life has always looked, although maybe we have to wait until December, she fears.

"I know that life will be a little less normal than it was before," she says. And that makes her anxious, as it does everyone, children or adults.

Although in the case of many children, the uncertainty has gone beyond the pandemic. K., sometimes asks if a meteorite might fall, gets worried about climate change and rising sea levels, or asks to change the channel if a wolf chases a deer in a documentary.

"I didn't have all those fears before. I was a happy little girl playing with my friends, and then the damn coronavirus came along and ruined everything."

She has also stopped reading books or watching some TV series. It was during an episode of a TV series that she had her first anxiety crisis, almost a month after the beginning of the confinement. It was mild.

By Lucas Metz on Unsplash

She and her mother called it "the overwhelm" and, although she has learned to deal with it, from time to time it returns. Almost always at night, at bedtime or "when I talk about it". I feel as if my belly is dancing, although it worries me less.

Her case is not unusual. According to an international survey by Save the Children, four out of ten children show symptoms of anxiety due to confinement.

The NGO warns that "many of them could suffer permanent psychological disorders, such as depression" and several associations of pediatric mental health professionals foresee an increase in disorders and in the demand for care "unbearable in Mental Health, already saturated in itself", for which reason they ask for more resources.

It is absolutely normal for children to feel anxiety in these circumstances. Just as it happens with adults, but children do not have the same mental tools to deal with this new suffering.

However, we must remain calm. We should not psychiatricize reactions that are totally normal. It would be strange if the children were not having a hard time, they have lost their whole routine, which is fundamental for them. It is even healthy that things like these happen to them.

Let's remember that anxiety has many ways of manifesting itself and that it is not always identified by parents and medical attention is not always necessary.

It is important to talk to them and let them express themselves. It is also important for them to know why all this has happened. Children are emotional radars, but they cannot tell themselves a story to calm them down.

At the beginning, there was a litany in which the words contagion, hospitals, pandemic, dead, distance, security, she enumerates. She knows perfectly well the reasons for everything. "There is a very nasty virus, very tiny. At first we were not interested because we thought it would pass quickly, that it would only be in China. But it came to us and now it's all very crazy.

The most common at this time, are fears, unpleasant nightmares, trouble sleeping, a lot of irritability, an increased level of sensitivity and fear of everything related to death, especially when the age is around ten years old. "There are also somatizations of that stress," which translate into tummy aches, headaches or loss of appetite.

"I had never, ever felt that," K. says of her first "overwhelm." "The first time I thought I was going to throw up, and I have a horrifying fear of throwing up. It was like I had something in my throat," she recalls.

The overwhelm showed up one night after dinner. Her mother was teleworking in another room when K. burst in in panic. "I told her what was wrong with me and she said I was overwhelmed and that nothing was wrong with me. We went up on the roof and had a lime tea and talked a lot. So now I always take lime tea at night," she describes.

It is now a rare day when he lies down in his bed. Bedtime has inevitably been pushed back several hours and she doesn't want to be alone in any room. "I don't like to talk about murders and things like that at all anymore because I think someone is going to break into my house or that there is someone hiding when I go to the bathroom. I didn't have those fears before."

She laughs as she describes it, "now I don't care so much because I know perfectly well that it's just overwhelm, it's nothing," she adds as she gestures to describe the spiral of thoughts that feed back into her head when anxiety makes itself felt.

It's not surprising that all this happens to her when the images she associates with the word coronavirus are "sick people, old people, dead people and a bug that doesn't want to leave her city.

Care and teleworking

By 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

The changes have been so many and so sudden that, although she understands them, she hasn't assimilated them and doesn't think she has to.

She imagines what it will be like to go back to school, "with masks, with separate desks and fewer children in class". That's what she's heard. "What's recess going to be like? We won't be able to play with anyone either?" There's still no answer.

And how will his parents do if she has to go to school fewer days? "Who's going to watch the kids?" she wonders, because she's realized that she doesn't like that her parents are working when she's home.

She admits that she needs more attention than usual, that she has more questions than ever, that she is "more cuddly" and that it is not always possible to get all the attention she demands.

That her parents "work a long time" sometimes. They are or have been self-employed until very recently, their home has always been their workplace, but now it is also different and makes her anxious about that absent presence that is the teleworking that has been imposed in many homes.

"My mother says that before, when I went to school, she had seven hours to work. And when I came back she had all the time for me because she had done so many things. Now I think she's a little sad because she can't pay as much attention to me as when there's school, she has to work." It distresses her to have her parents so close and not be able to be with them. "Then don't work," she says many times, even though she knows that's not possible.

A birthday in confinement

By Jan Kopřiva on Unsplash

But it's not all fears. There's also grief, nostalgia and the strangeness of any current situation, like celebrating his birthday in the middle of a pandemic without being able to leave the house, without his gang, without his family.

"I thought the coronavirus would go away before my birthday but in the end it didn't. I made a Zoom video call with seven friends. We understood each other, but badly," she says. She doesn't like it, "I prefer the normal call, I don't know why, it's an undefined feeling".

It also happens to her when her grandparents call her. She says she wants to be with them, not see them on a screen.

When she said goodbye to her friends, she recalls, she began to cry inconsolably. "I was so sorry for them. I hadn't seen them for almost two months and I thought it was going to take forever for the confinement to be over, that it would be a long time before I could play with them and go back to class," she lists.

"It's all bad things, that's why I cried so much. I used to not cry about not seeing my friends," she explains.

She admits that she has been able to be with some of them lately, in the park next to his father's house, where he lives every other week. "Now they let us go out for a while until seven in the evening and sometimes I meet up with someone, without touching us or anything, of course.

But, unintentionally, sometimes I get too close and my father tells me all the time to keep a safe distance, and I start to get fed up and get very angry.

I know perfectly well that I have to keep my distance, but children are more affected by not being able to see their friends than adults," she says.

"We saw each other all day, five days a week at school, for ten months. You become familiar with them. Adults always have friends in other places they can't see; even if they feel sorry for them, they are more used to it," she says.

K. has no siblings and, during the entire state of alarm, has had hardly any contact with other children, something that exacerbates any feelings. So, if asked to draw a picture of what the most restrictive confinement in the entire region has been like for her, she paints herself and her best friend separated by a brick wall that can only be surmounted by a string of little flowers.

"Even if we have to be separated, that sprig of flowers is our friendship, which surpasses it," she explains.

At least, she is clear about one thing she has read on a banner in the neighborhood of her mother's house and wants it to be a message to all children who, like her, are distressed. "After a big storm the sun always comes out. Don't worry, children, everything will pass", she assures smiling.

This Monday, K. was finally able to play with her best friend.

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