#189 Is It Normal Anxiety—or More? A Guide for Parents with Zack Schafer Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 1:04
does sending a simple email fail paralyzing to some young people? Anxiety is becoming more common and more misunderstood among students navigating post graduation decisions, knowing the difference between everyday nervousness and an anxiety disorder can change the way you parent and support your child. In this episode, I’m joined by Zach Schaefer, Executive Director of mountain valley treatment center, a residential program focused on anxiety and OCD in teens and young adults with a background in occupational therapy and extensive experience and evidence based approaches such as exposure therapy. Zach brings practical insight to a challenge many families face, but few openly discuss. We unpack why anxiety shows up more in today’s teens than ever before, the role technology may play in driving much of it and what parents can do to avoid unintentionally reinforcing anxious behaviors, you’ll learn how to ask the right questions, what signs might indicate your teen needs professional help, and how to use several tools he shares to support your student without overstepping. This conversation will leave you with greater clarity and confidence about how to help your young person manage anxiety as they take steps towards a fulfilling future and launch out on their own. I’m Lisa Marco Robins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity a flourish coaching production. Let’s dive right in to a great conversation.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 2:42
Zach, Zach, welcome to the show,

Zack Schafer 2:44
Lisa. Thank you so much for having me. It’s really a pleasure to be here.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 2:48
I am so excited to talk about this topic because, well, one of my favorite books of the last year was anxious generation that I read.

Zack Schafer 2:58
And so good, such a good book. Jonathan height and his work has been fantastic, and I’m super happy with all the popularity it’s it’s gained, and the traction it’s gained. And a lot of parents come to us, if you guys read the anxious generation, I’m like, of course we’ve read

Lisa Marker-Robbins 3:15
the like. I probably could have written it as well, right? So the like you said, this is like the theme of the day, the decade, the generation, whatever, at this point. So talk a little bit. We want to talk to parents about their teens or young adults anxiety, yeah, and you’re an expert in this, and let’s tell everybody what you do. But I also want to say, when you hear Zach say what his day job is, what he does, don’t go like, Oh, this episode’s not for me, because my kid doesn’t need what Zach has. Everybody’s going to get something out of this well,

Zack Schafer 3:57
and that’s the one thing I love about working in the anxiety space is that it is one of the fundamental human emotions that all of us somewhere across our education could really benefit from learning about it, how to manage it, how to how to work with it. Fear and anxiety have an incredibly important role to play in our lives. It’s not all bad. It’s not a negative emotion, but it is an emotion that requires some understanding and some skill to address. So my name is Zach Schaefer. I’m an occupational therapist by trade. That’s my professional background. I’m currently serving as the executive director of mountain valley Treatment Center, which is a residential treatment program for adolescents and young adults, ages 13 to 20, who are struggling with anxiety and OCD and obviously the teenagers and the families that are coming to us are really struggling. Their kids haven’t been in school for months at a time, weeks at a time. They’re really at a really low point in their life. But I’m here. Today to just talk about anxiety at large and how we can better support anxiety, the type of anxiety that comes up with working with young adults when thinking about career and where to go, and the sort of paralysis by optionality that can come from all of the different things we can do in the world nowadays. So anxiety in young adults kind of go, kind of go hand in hand. So, yes, I’m an expert, and I am focused on treatment, but here I’m hoping to shed some light on just anxiety in general and how to work with it.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 5:32
Yeah, I wanted that context because I’m like, You talking about you’re doing in house, like, like, treatment, deep treatment, for people who can’t even go to school or work right now. So you’re truly an expert. But we’re gonna now come all the way down and say, like, I mean, somebody might listen to this today and say, You know what? Maybe this is more serious than I think with my kiddo. But somebody might also just go like, Oh, I’ve got some tips and tricks and tools now in my tool belt to better help our family navigate just regular anxiety, because it plays a role for everybody. So let’s talk about what is anxiety I often find with the parents that we’re supporting in our launch Career Clarity, course, because we’re working with their teens on, you know, college major and career clarity and all the things parents can be dismissive of that term or, like, not even really understand what their child means when they say, like, I’m feeling anxious or I have anxiety. So what’s a good working definition for it? Because I think we all come to, like, a lot to this conversation with a lot of preconceived ideas.

Zack Schafer 6:42
Yeah, so I will start with what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual defines as anxiety. So that is sort of our Bible in the field of psychiatry. And they describe it as tension and apprehension to a future undesired outcome, essentially, so a threat that is in the future. And they actually distinctly draw a definition between anxiety and fear, where fear is the anticipation of a threat that hasn’t yet happened, and fear is the recognition of a threat that is present in the current moment. So a common example I would give would be anxiety is we were just talking about this hiking, and we, we live up here in New Hampshire, so anxiety would be, I’m nervous that I might run into a bear in the woods. So that’s the feeling that you get in your stomach in the car drive to the trailhead. Fear is seeing the bear in the woods in the moment, right? And so the thing about anxiety, though it is, it’s trying to predict an outcome that hasn’t yet happened, and that’s often where it starts to trip us up. So that’s the DSM definition at Mountain Valley. We define it as an overestimation of the threat and an underestimation of our ability to cope.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 7:57
Okay, we gotta say that again. That was beautiful. I have, like, Whoa. Okay, say it again.

Zack Schafer 8:03
So the overestimation of the threat and the underestimation of our ability to cope. So not only is it that I’m going to see a bear when I go into the woods, the overestimation of the threat, that’s not a guarantee that that’s going to happen, you’re also underestimating your ability to cope with that threat if it were to come true, right? So to give a maybe a more practical example that might be relevant to some of your listeners, I may not get into this college that I really want to get into. That’s not really an overestimation of the threat that very much could happen, but what you’re underestimating is your emotional resilience to cope with that threat if it did come true, and what you would do if that fear did actually come present when you receive that letter of rejection, right? So not only are we not not only are we trying to help our adolescents become better assessors of threats, sometimes we over exaggerate a threat. Sometimes our brain can just go haywire with what the threat is, but we also want to boost their ability to be confident in themselves, to face challenges when they come up.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 9:03
You know, one of the things that we do in our career advising course is I’m I’m giving students tools the students in our course, so they might be already out of school, and, you know, young adults, but our students at our course, I’m giving them some tools to go out and ask for informational interviews and job shadows so they can curate some real world experiences to see jobs in action before they start making investments of time and money into a educational pathway, right the amount of anxiety that comes with simply sending that first email to somebody, or that first LinkedIn outreach to somebody about like, Hey, could you tell me more about I’ll use you being an occupational therapist or an executive director of a nonprofit or something like that. Like is. It is huge, and, you know, and there’s some level, like, okay, there they haven’t done that before. It’s new, so I get it. So that’s why we like coach them through it and give them the tools to do it. But I even think back for myself when I was starting my podcast, which about four years ago, we were getting ready to launch the podcast, and even just reaching out to guests at the time, I was like, oh gosh, they’re gonna say no or, you know, whatever. But I still worked through it, and I had something, some actual anxiety about it. So what’s normal? Like, now, I don’t feel anxious at all asking somebody, it could be somebody, like, actually very notable. And I’m like, Ah, I’ll ask. They might say no. They might say yes, because I got used to doing it, and it became okay. So what’s normal? And then when do we know that we actually have, like, a disorder? Like, what is the difference? Because I do think it gets this idea of a disorder gets abused at times, and you’re the expert, because you actually have people in treatment who are residential treatment, who we would say, probably everybody there has an actual disorder.

Zack Schafer 11:11
Yes, yeah, everyone that comes to us is is at a level of dysfunction, which is where we would decide whether something is a disorder or not. So everyone is going to feel anxiety when you’re faced with something that is outside of your comfort zone, something uncertain, something that doesn’t have predictability. And so new experiences and novelty are ripe with anxiety for almost everybody. What happens with people who have an anxiety disorder is that they are unable to embrace that uncertainty and that anxiety, so they start to avoid or retreat to what is comfortable. And their avoidance and their retreat to what is comfortable has gradually, and it happens over time, and that’s why a lot of times parents are like all of a sudden, I don’t know how we got here, the life has just gotten so small. They’ve stopped connecting with friends, they’ve stopped going to school. Their sleep patterns are now all of a sudden, all over the place. They’ve become somewhat nocturnal. And so when anxiety starts to get in the way of your ability to function socially, occupationally in your work, that’s when we that’s when we start to label it more as a disorder,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 12:22
okay, so, and I can see how, like, it’s, it’s a slippery slope, like, all of a sudden we’re here, yeah,

Zack Schafer 12:31
and so, and I’m gonna start to bridge a little bit into sort of what the treatment is for anxiety, what the gold standard treatment is, and what we do. Because I think it relates to sort of what you were getting at with talk about podcasting or talking about that. First email you send out, the anxiety is high. Second email you send out, the anxiety is a little bit lower. Third, no, I don’t even think about it. Don’t even think about it, right? So exposure therapy is what we do, and that is the gold standard treatment for anxiety and related disorders, and has been for many, many years. And so what we’re doing in exposure therapy is we’re gradually exposing people to the things that they’re afraid of, and a couple of different things happen, either they habituate it to the stressor, so you could still the chances of you getting rejected, reaching out to a podcast guest. Maybe it changes because you you’ve gathered some reputation, and people know you well, but it’s still there every single time you reach out. So the threat hasn’t changed. Your anxiety has changed. So you’ve habituated to the stressor. It no longer bothers you if somebody says no, because you’ve been told no, and you’ve learned that you can cope with it. So we want to expose people to their threats until they habituate to it, or they gather what’s called new evidence that sort of competes against what their brain was originally telling them was going to happen. So if I reach out to this person to ask them about whether what their experience is like working as an occupational therapist, my brain is telling me that they’re going to want to have nothing to do with some high school kid or some college kid reaching out to them about that. But you reach out, and it happens to be a guy like myself, and I answer super friendly and very fast, and the next thing you know, we’re on a phone call, and we’re talking about OT and being an executive director at a nonprofit, and that then registers in your brain as what I associated as the outcome that was going to happen when I approached this fear is not true, and what actually happened was this other experience, and now your brain is no longer associating asking people about their jobs with a fear of rejection. I hope that that made a little bit of sense.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 14:41
It does. I Is there a way for us as parents? I mean, my kids are all 24 to 34 so, but I know that times they still deal with anxiety, right? We all do and and life, you know, life’s like this, right? So even if. You’re at a place where, like, not dealing with it right now, or I got some tools in my toolbox, something else in the future is going to make you anxious. So we need to, we need to have these tools to be able to, to just be able to deal with it as it comes. If somebody’s listening, though, and they’re like, you know, I feel now that Zach’s talking like, I feel like we, we’ve been on that slippery slope, right? And I’m wondering if this really is serious, is it to the level of a disorder, or is it not like, is there a checklist that you could walk through in your mind or talk about with your young adult to know if it is at the level where it’s a disorder, or you just need to, you know, do some things at home, which we can talk about, some things that they would be able to do. How do you know when you’ve, like, stepped over the line?

Zack Schafer 15:50
Yeah, I would say when I kind of keep coming back to this phrase, but when it’s really starting to cause a level of dysfunction for your child or your family. So sometimes parents will do a bunch of different things to keep the child afloat, but it’s becoming disruptive and unsustainable for the family system to maintain, and that’s also a sign that there’s probably anxiety disorder going on. So if you’re having to start to write the emails for your kid, and it’s taking up your time, and now you’re running late for work because you’re having to manage your kids, emails and things along those lines. That’s a sign that it’s getting to the to the point where you might want to reach out for some help, or just bring some bring your child in for an initial evaluation. And that’s and that’s the thing too. I think most practitioners really appreciate when someone walks into their office and says, I’ve been experiencing this emotion. I’ve been experiencing this challenge. I don’t know if I have a full disorder, and I really just want to know more of like, this is a problem, or if this is normal, and like, this is just part of the human experience. And what are some maybe quick strategies I could implement, but really paying attention to any dysfunction that it causes for your kid? Are they stopping going to school? Or what are ways that you might be stepping in to compensate for the different anxiety that’s showing up for them? And how is that starting to then disrupt the rest of the things that are happening?

Lisa Marker-Robbins 17:11
Yeah? Like you’re helping to to the point where it actually is hurting, right?

Zack Schafer 17:15
Yeah, you’re putting a band aid, on a on a on a suture that needs surgery, right? That’s, that’s kind of what’s happening. Well,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 17:22
I love what you said there, because there’s, there’s something in between, like, we’re trying to navigate this at home, and then there’s, you know, residential treatment, like you just described, like, seek somebody out within your community. Or, I mean, there’s online therapist, right, you know, too, but talk to somebody. So go ahead,

Zack Schafer 17:40
can I add one thing? Talk to somebody. Not go on Google, not go on Tiktok. The whole self diagnosing culture is a big pet peeve of mine, and a lot of us who are really in the mental health industry. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, guys, and there’s a lot of people self labeling or labeling each other with things that just aren’t totally accurate. I gotta say, like, sometimes kids come to us and parents are like, they have OCD or they have this anxiety disorder. And I’m like, not, not really.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 18:13
You’re like, how do you know that? Like, well, I Googled it. Yeah, yeah.

Zack Schafer 18:17
I saw this Tiktok video that described somebody who you know, who has anxiety, and that that resonated with me, and it’s like, yes, of course, it resonated with you, because you’re a human being and you have anxiety, but it doesn’t mean you have an anxiety disorder. And you’re actually more anxious about something being wrong with you than you are about the things in your life that we need to deal with kind of thing. So

Lisa Marker-Robbins 18:37
well, this whole idea too. I i also have, I keep a small roster of small business owners who I’m an executive coach for as well on the side. And I was talking to one of my clients this week in a coaching session, and our desire to, like, slap a label on things I see. I don’t know if you see a trend in that, but like, people want to label things. And, you know, I jokingly said to her, like, I’m not a doctor, I only play one on TV. But I’m like, why? Like, don’t worry about what that label is that somebody, somebody handed her a book, and she’s like, now I’m wondering if I have, you know, XYZ, and I’m like, Well, that would not be my place. But like, let’s just talk about, like, what’s resonating with you, and some tools that you could get to navigate those behaviors or experiences you’re having without, like, throwing a label on it. I feel, I don’t know if you see that as one of the trends with like, people wanting to just label things. I’m like, do we have to label everything

Zack Schafer 19:43
totally and I would say that that comes from a place of anxiety, because it feels better to know what something is. It feels more certain to know what something is. It’s yeah, it’s less comfortable to be like, I don’t know if I have an anxiety disorder or not. It’s easier to just either be in the black or be in the white, and it’s so much harder to sit in the gray and learning how to manage anxiety is getting really comfortable in the gray, and really comfortable not having any certainty or any bearings, being okay with which whatever way the wind

Lisa Marker-Robbins 20:14
blows. So okay, we’ve talked about, you know, some of these trends, as far as like, people want to throw labels on and trying to self diagnose through Tiktok. I literally do no no longer have Tiktok on my phone, so I did not find it a great place to be. So I’m out, although I’m on other social media. So I shouldn’t say that I’m I don’t say like, Oh, I’m great, but I’m just saying I’m off Tiktok, so I’m not diagnosing over there, but we’ve got these trends. And when you and I first met about a week or so ago, and I said to you, are you I wonder, like comorbidity? Are you seeing a lot of addiction, alcohol, drugs, self medicating, a lot of addiction, comorbid with the anxiety disorders that you guys treat. And you, I’m not going to steal your thunder, but you kind of, you’re like, Well, this is the trend I’m seeing a lot that’s driving anxiety. And it was, do you remember what you told me?

Zack Schafer 21:17
I actually don’t. So if you could give me,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 21:21
it was technology, yeah, because I, I literally thought you would say, oh, yeah, these kids are, you know, smoking too much weed, or drinking too you know, drinking too young, or we’re seeing a lot of addiction like substance abuse issues comorbidly with anxiety. And you’re like, actually, more than that, it’s the abuse of technology. So yes, let’s talk about that. I mean, that was literally why I was like, Oh, we’ve got to talk about this, because I am sitting here thinking, Oh, everybody’s self medicating with alcohol and drugs, nope.

Zack Schafer 22:04
So I think it’s important to understand what medication, quote, unquote, medication is for someone with anxiety, and it is what we just sort of talked about, which is certainty. It’s relief from the unknown. So if you don’t know something, what is one of the first things you do, you open up your phone and you Google it, right if you don’t know about this college or this career or this profession that someone’s recommending that you go into, what’s the first thing you do? You google it. You try to find information. You try to find certainty. And so I think, I think technology is the vehicle for information. And I think information is what people are trying to use to medicate their sense of uncertainty about the future and how things are going to go. But I think that that’s why we’re seeing a lot of kids leaning into technology as a way to again, find certainty, for for the for the anxiety that they’re feeling or numb out from it and get distracted and just get, you know, an influx of of dopamine and and there’s actually research coming on right now that the the amount of alcohol abuse in in youth is decreasing, like drastically. A lot of college campuses now, kids aren’t drinking anymore. They’re drinking non alcoholic beers or spin drifts are getting popular. Different kind of non alcoholic seltzers are getting popular, but they’re still not mentally doing well, and that is because the whole time they’re taking selfies, they’re scrolling on Tiktok, they’re engaged in Instagram, they’re just they’re living their life through a screen. And that was what I really loved about Jonathan I’d spoke was he, he, he was brave enough to to take a leap and say, I know that this is only correlative data, but I’m going to jump and say it’s causality that the increase in use of technology is causing worse mental health in our youth. And I really appreciated him taking a brave step. There a lot of people you know in the research field will will stick very true to causality versus correlation, but he made a jump, and he said it’s causing it. And I and I couldn’t agree more,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 24:11
that’s fascinating, that idea of on the college campuses, like the kids aren’t really drinking that much anymore, but yet they’re they’re actually not doing any better. This fascinating, yeah, I so I installed an app on my phone, I don’t know. And I am not. I keep saying to everybody, I’m not. This is not an affiliate program. I’m just a fan called be present, and it kind of gamifies it, but I don’t do like the gamifying piece of it to earn things, but is on my phone, and I’m limiting and and I have to go on social media for work, so I limit how many times a day and how many minutes at a time I can even use my phone even for LinkedIn, which is perfect. Professional social media, and I teach all of my students to do because it’s where we start to build those natural connections that are going to lead to opportunities. But you go on and you go down a rabbit hole and I mean, I wouldn’t say like, I don’t I don’t feel like I’m an anxious person. I don’t think I have ADHD, but I got on one of the social media platforms to do something the other day, and I intentionally like, I need to go on to do this for work. And I got totally down the rabbit hole. And then all of the sudden, the Be present app said, We’re closing the app in 30 seconds. And then my brain went and I’ve been on for like, five minutes. I’m like, Why did I come here? Oh my gosh, I didn’t even do the thing. Yep. And so, as you were talking about, like, we pick up our phone to, you know, okay, I’m gonna pick it up to, like, diagnose myself, or get some information to see what’s really going on with me. But then it’s like, we get distracted by all the things and and, like you said, there’s a lot of misinformation out there anyway.

Zack Schafer 26:06
Yeah, I think misinformation start numbing

Speaker 1 26:09
out.

Zack Schafer 26:10
Yeah, I was gonna say, I think misinformation on technology is a recipe for anxiety. I think the what’s going on neurochemically, and the dopamine hits that is happening when you’re on technology for anyone interested, Anna Dr Anna Lembke out of Stanford, her book dopamine nation is a fantastic book to read

Lisa Marker-Robbins 26:29
in the show notes, yeah,

Zack Schafer 26:31
it’s a fantastic book to read to understand. She makes it very she makes neuroscience very complex. Neuroscience very simple to understand, sort of the the dopamine mechanism in the brain and the role that technology can play in that and so and then there’s also, like, the types of information you’re exposed to on social media. So you’re viewing pictures of other people living this beautiful life. Then then you’re sitting there like, well, how come that’s not my life? And then that same person that you’re viewing that picture of is looking at their Instagram screen saying, How come my life’s not that beautiful, right? And we’re all wondering why our lives are more beautiful than our own, and none of us are happy with our own lives. It’s a very, very interesting time.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 27:13
It is a very interesting time. So I asked you about, you know, substance abuse disorders. You mentioned OCD, being a comorbid diagnosis, I guess with this anxiety, are there any other commonly occurring comorbid concerns or diagnoses that you see? Yeah,

Zack Schafer 27:35
so one you actually just kind of hinted at a little bit, which is ADHD. So ADHD and anxiety go hand in hand all the time, if you have trouble staying focused or keeping your attention where it is, and then you’re constantly missing things, and then you’re getting in information from your environment of like, oh, wait, I just missed that thing. You’re going to be anxious and wondering if you’re always missing something, or if you always forgot something, or if you have a hard time organizing your stuff for school, then you’re going to maybe take more time to prepare, and you might even start to create OCD rituals around making sure you’re prepared for school and over organizing more than you actually need to be doing. So ADHD and then Autism Spectrum Disorder is another very common comorbidity for anxiety and OCD. And again, it’s that, that need for predictability, that need for certainty, that is very, very common with someone with a neurodivergent brain that kind of lends his hand to to a little bit more of an anxious temperament. So

Lisa Marker-Robbins 28:40
you did. I hear you say that any, anybody who has a an official, not a tick tock diagnosis of ADHD, would always have some level of anxiety, not necessarily to the state of a disorder that would be present. Can we take him that far? I’m gonna,

Zack Schafer 28:59
I’m gonna, I’m gonna stay away from absolutes. If I can, I would say you have a much higher susceptibility to developing anxiety. I don’t think everyone with ADHD has anxiety, but I do think it is very, very common for us. With kids who come they’re very anxious about school and making sure they remember everything, and it’s because they have a hard time remembering, so it’s coming from a very genuine neurodevelopmental skill deficit. So again, the anxiety is warranted, but it’s now run rampant, and in your ability to try to create certainty, you’ve actually created more dysfunction in your life.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 29:35
That makes sense, okay? So if we we’ve got some of these comorbid diagnoses that are possible, which might cause a parent to really stop and think like, oh, we already do have an official diagnosis over here on one of these. And then maybe I need to think more seriously about the role that anxiety is playing in this or how they go hand in hand. So if somebody’s listening to us and they’re like, my kid. Wouldn’t need, you know, residential treatment. You know, if they did, mountain valley and Zach would be where I would go after listening to all this, because he’s great. But if they are just have some of this going on in their household, or they’re starting to feel like I, as a parent, am maybe compensating a little bit I did send that email that I shouldn’t have sent. I mean, I say all the time, we give email templates to say, like, do not send your children’s email. We’ll even give you the templates that you can customize to try to reach out to get the informational interviews and the job shadows and the things, because we’ve got to teach you how to do it from the beginning, but you need to do it yourself. But if somebody’s listening and they’re like, oh shoot, I sent that email on behalf of my kid, or I even acted like I was them in their email. What are some, I don’t know, tips, tricks, tools that you could give the average listener that it’s not at the level of a disorder that could begin to help. I mean, I’ve already, we’ve gotten a lot, but is there anything else that you would want our listeners to have?

Zack Schafer 31:05
Yeah, so one I will recommend, and again, this is more for a child that has a true, blown anxiety disorder, but I still think there’s a lot you can learn from it. His name is Dr Ellie Liebowitz. He’s at a Yale, the Yale Child Study Center, and he developed an entire protocol called supportive parenting for anxious childhood emotions or space. And so he has a lot of really good books about recognizing what we call in the anxiety world, accommodations. So when your child is anxious about sending an email and you do it for them, we call that an accommodation. And that is a problem, because not only does it undermine your child’s ability to develop that skill, which is only going to perpetuate the anxiety the next time that they have to do that in their life, right? So it just kicks the can down the road, it also sends the signal to your child, yes, that threat that you are afraid of is accurate, you are incapable of sending that email, and so it reinforces that doubt that they already have in their ability to do it. And I know that that’s not what you’re intending to do. You’re intending to do it as a show of love and a show of support. And that’s what I love about most of the anxious families that we work with, is they’re the most loving and caring families that just don’t understand how some of their over parenting or overcompensating behaviors or actually perpetuating their child’s fear of their own ability. So first thing I would instruct people to do is, when your child says that they can’t do something, ask. Why? Inquire. Just pause for a second and say, What makes you feel like you can’t do that? Well, I can’t do that because this What are you afraid is going to happen? That’s another great follow up question to ask. I might get rejected. And what would that mean if you did right? So these are just, it’s just verbal dialog that’s helping your child, and sometimes even just in that they’ll be like, Wait, that’s a ridiculous thing to be afraid of. I’m just going to send the email myself to recognize the irrationality of their own fear. Or you may be able to get into a place where you can talk to your child a little bit more about like, Okay, you’re afraid of being rejected. What would help you feel like we could reduce the possibility of that outcome happening? What would be helpful for you? Well, maybe I could sit down with my teacher tomorrow and she could help me work on my email, and she could give me some support. Or maybe I could meet with with Miss Lisa, and she could help me work on on this part of my my career development kind of thing, and you’re engaging their problem solving system about how to decrease their own fear for themselves, rather than chopping in and trying to decrease it for them. So just some simple asking of some questions and slowing down, instead of jumping right to problem solving and sort of jumping into problem exploration, is sort of how I would describe

Lisa Marker-Robbins 33:53
it. I would tell me what you think of this question, because I is sort of like, okay, what’s the worst thing that could happen? It’s turning that on its head. And I’m not saying instead, but in addition to then take it out and say, and what could this make possible, or what good thing might come out of it as well?

Zack Schafer 34:14
Yeah, what can you learn? That’s we ask that all the time, like, and if you did get rejected, what could you learn from that, right? Like, what would, how could we then take that challenge and turn it into an opportunity for growth? That’s a lot of what we try to talk about, too. And the one caveat I want to throw in here is that a lot of parents listening are probably like, Man, if I said that to my child. So, like, that’s just how they, you know, they and

Speaker 2 34:38
I know how that conversation is gonna go, right, right? And you’re not

Zack Schafer 34:43
your child’s therapist, and so that’s why I really like try to teeter, you know, it’s not your job to be your child’s therapist, it’s your job to be your child’s parent. And it all is in the tone and the tact in which way you ask the question. Like, I had a lot of parents look and be like, Oh, what are you afraid is gonna have. Happen, and it’s like, well, that’s incredibly invalidating to your child’s fear. So a lot of times, the first step is like, I can see you’re really scared. Like, can you tell me more about what you’re afraid might happen, right? But acknowledging their emotion first, and validating their emotion first before just jumping to, well, what do you mean? You’re afraid to send an email. What do you what’s the worst thing that could possibly happen, right? Like, they’re gonna then, yeah, they’re gonna feel that, and they’re gonna be like, okay, like, are you just totally dismissing the fact that I’m having this emotion right now? And I think that that’s a lot of the frustration that a lot of our youth feel, is they feel very dismissed for how in touch with their emotions they are. I think they’re actually a lot more in touch with their emotions than some of our later generations are right now, and somewhere in the middle between being totally emotionally out of touch and too emotionally in touch is the sweet spot. And I actually think between our current youth and our current parents, there’s a lot of magic that can be made if we can learn how to navigate or bridge the gap there.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 35:58
You know, you said that that phrase about like, you’re you’re not like. These are valid emotions, and you’re not validating my emotions, I often am reminding the parents that we’re talking to through our programming about validating that somebody and recognizing somebody actually feels something doesn’t mean that you necessarily agree with it. Validation doesn’t have to equal agreement.

Zack Schafer 36:24
I’m so happy you said that, and it’s an it’s important that it doesn’t in these kinds of situations too, of like, you’re not agreeing that sending an email is going to lead to rejection. You’re not agreeing with the fact that your child can’t cope with that rejection if it did happen, but you are giving them space to feel what they feel. And you’re not debating that like they feel anxious. There’s there’s nothing you can there’s no other truth to that than than what they feel. You’re not validating that it’s true that they should feel anxious. You’re not validating that it’s true that the outcome that they’re afraid of is going to happen, but you are giving them the space to have their own reality, which is, which is what’s happening inside their body and inside

Lisa Marker-Robbins 37:08
Yeah? Because when we do that like, then it doesn’t come about, come around to like, somebody’s right and somebody’s wrong, right? Yeah?

Zack Schafer 37:15
It avoids that head butting and that confrontation which, which never leads to helping move things forward. Yeah.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 37:22
Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. Zach, I knew it would be. So we will link to you gave us some great resources. So the space website, which you’d already given me, so we’ll definitely link to that. This new book that you mentioned that I didn’t hear of dopamine nation. Did I get that right? Yep, we, and we, of course, will do mountain valley treatment center and the notes, in case somebody then starts down this road and they’re like, we might have a bigger problem here than I thought. Yeah.

Zack Schafer 37:54
And the one other resource, if I can play too, is I have a podcast through mountain valley too called fearless, where we talk about all of these topics a little bit more in depth, very anxiety focused and mental health focused. And we’re going to have Lisa on there sometime soon too to talk about anxiety around career planning and young adulthood. So

Lisa Marker-Robbins 38:16
absolutely. So yes, we, and we were already planning on doing that, but I glad you went ahead and said it. So if people want to get in touch with you, is that really the best ways through, you know, listen to your podcast or send a message or, yeah,

Zack Schafer 38:30
they can. I think my email tends to be best, which is Z Shaffer at Mountain Valley treatment.org you can add that to the show notes too, but all that contact information is on the mountain valley website. So if you forget it or you can’t find it, just go to the mountain valley website and you can find a way to contact me. And

Lisa Marker-Robbins 38:48
I just want to tell everybody, like, you are like, bam, you respond when somebody went into your inbox. So this has been fantastic. Thanks. Zach, yeah, no

Zack Schafer 38:59
problem. Thank you. Lisa, thanks everybody.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 39:07
Anxiety doesn’t have to derail your teen’s future, but understanding how it works and how to respond makes all the difference. Zach shared powerful tools that any parent can use, whether your student is simply anxious about reaching out for a job shadow or facing more serious challenges to dive deeper, be sure to check out the resources Zach mentioned. You’ll find the links in the show notes to the space program, the book, dopamine nation, mountain valley treatment center and Zach’s own podcast, fear less. These are excellent next steps if you want to better support your child’s emotional and career development. Thanks for listening, and if this was helpful to you, I’d really love it if you’d follow rate and review the show so more families can move from anxious and unsure to confident and clear. Okay, I’ll see you next time