How to Support Loved Ones with Anxiety

Foreign it's good to see you today. I want to talk with you about loved ones and lily pads. If you're new to this channel, my passion is to help you get your life back from anxiety and depression, panic attacks and other mental health concerns. And part of that journey involves our loved ones. Right. And so if you have a loved one that you're concerned about who's going through anxiety, or if you have a friend or somebody that you know that's going through mental health stuff, I want you to know that lily pad is the word to remember and to know that you're not alone. And I have a lot of ideas and solutions for you and it all has to do with lily pads. So I want to tell you a little bit of a story about why I feel like I'm qualified in a sense to talk to you about what you can do to help your loved ones. And I think one of our best teachers is experience. And so I have a wonderful family, but in my family, my role was to basically emotionally manage to people. In my family, if someone was upset, I felt like it was my responsibility to help them feel better. If they were angry, I felt like I had to be really silly and bubbly to get them to calm down. If they were anxious, I wanted to make their life easier and reassure them. Have you ever felt that way or is it just me on this live right now where you feel like it's your responsibility to fix the well being of your loved ones, to fix anxiety in your loved ones, to fix depression, to help them feel better. And I spent a lot of years studying this impulse. And interestingly, the impulse led me to become a therapist. And then that impulse led me to become a naturopathic doctor. And I spent over a decade helping people with mental health. And it all started when I was really little. My earliest memory is actually playing bingo when I was four. But my second earliest memory is noticing one of my parents seemed really upset and I felt like it was my job to make them happy. And so if you feel that pressure on you, if you feel the sense of responsibility to manage to take care of or deal with the well being of your family and friends, I want you to know that I get it. It's something that led me to become a doctor. So there are beautiful parts of it. And to also let you know that I have strategies to help your loved ones and. But we also want to make sure that you're taking care of you in the process too. Right. So maybe you found this channel because you deal with Anxiety. Or maybe you found this channel because you have a loved one that deals with anxiety. And I want you to know I've got your back with all of the above. We have tons of free resources. The best way to find the blogs that go with these videos is to click on the link tree, which is up in the bio, and then there's a button that says blog. And our blogs are all keyword searchable. So if you want to know about this one, there's going to be a blog that's if you type in loved one, you're going to find two blogs on this exact topic where you have it in writing of exactly what to do. I lay it out for you step by step. We also have a ton of free resources. And so when I'm talking about the resources you can give to your loved one, they're right up there in the link tree and there's a lot of stuff for free. And so that's nice because you're not having to make an investment financially on behalf of your friend or loved one. You can do it for free. So there's no risk. So let's go to the lily pads. Why am I talking about lily pads when I'm talking about helping your loved one with anxiety? And this is something that I taught my medical students a lot is I was teaching. I ran the psych department at the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine. I ran a clinical psychology mental health shift. And one of the things that my students really struggled with, especially the newer baby doctors, was, I feel like this patient isn't getting better. It feels like it's my fault, or this person had an aggravation, or they had a panic attack. How can I fix it? And so there is a lot of responsibility on their shoulders, right? So what I want you to know that you, my love, are a lily pad. And so what do I mean by that? So imagine that your loved one is a frog. And this frog is swimming through the big pond of life, right? So your loved one is the frog. They're swimming through the big pond of life. And let's say they encounter some waves, some current, the bubbles. There's lots of stuff that's hard to swim through, right? So that little frog is swimming and you notice they're struggling. You notice they need some help. And so you are not the lake. You are not the giant pond. You are a lily pad. So you can shimmy your lily pad up to that little frog, to that loved one, to that friend, and they can rest on you for a While and when they rest on you, you can share with them your love, your wisdom, your encouragement, strategies, whatever it is that's right for them. But then know that eventually that frog will jump off of the lily pad because it's their life and they're swimming in the pond, the pond that represents their life. Right? And so as you're doing this work to help and take care of your loved ones, the first thing for you to know is that you're a lily pad. You are not the entire lake. It is not your responsibility to cure them of their anxiety or let's talk about physical ailments. Somebody that you love just received a chronic illness diagnosis. Maybe somebody that you love just had a terrible car accident or they got really bad scary news. So that impulse that we were talking about to be the whole lake is mighty. I felt that way before. Oh my gosh, I need to take care of this person and fix everything and be the pond. But you are the lily pad. And so your job is to hold that space and let them rest and give them that comfort and that peace to be in the moment, to be in their suffering. The first tenet of the ACT method that I created to help walk us through the process of going from tragedy to triumph, to heal. The first tenet is A. And the A stands for acknowledge. And acknowledge is to fully be present with our symptoms. And I feel that oftentimes my impulse, the impulse of many well intended healers and loved ones is to help people move through the suffering, to help people, well, think on the bright side, or let's distract, distract you or let's add something good to your life or let's take these supplements or do these things. We try to move people through their suffering, but the lily pad will help you to simply hold them up, hold that space so that they can acknowledge and be in their suffering. Because we cannot solve a problem that we do not acknowledge. Right? And so as somebody who's helping your loved one, the most powerful and important thing that you can do is to hold that space to be the lily pad. There are many other steps that you can follow to help a loved one with anxiety. And I'm going to line those up for you. They're going to be in the blogs. And so when we finish this video, if you can just go right up to the link tree in the bio, click the button that says blog and type in the search loved ones. And it's going to take you to a bunch of blogs and videos that I've made on this topic and it outlines it step by step of what you can specifically do to help a loved one with anxiety or depression or who's struggling. And so what I want you to focus on today, though, is your role as a lily pad. And your role as a lily pad is to be in that pond and to hold that space. So maybe you're a helper, maybe you have the answers. But remember, that frog is swimming in their pond, and we don't want to just take away the pond from them and run their lives for them. We want to hold the space, allow them to feel, and then allow them to swim on their journey. Right. So this has been Dr. Nicole. Today. We've been talking about your loved ones and how you're a lily pad. We've been talking about anxiety and having the strength to help people be in their emotions. I want to pop here and just say thank you, Sean and Sandy and Wolfsback and Haley and Momo and all these other wonderful humans that have been on the Live today. And. And I wanna tell you that I honor you, I love you, I respect you. I'm also. I have a free Facebook group. I'm gonna be getting in there. I'm gonna start doing kava kava tea time with Dr. Nicole where we do Q and A. And so I know sometimes I get on these Instagram lives and I just teach and I talk. And so we need space where we can talk together, where you can bop on the video and ask me questions. And we can help you personally start working through solutions and of how to be the lily pad and how to be the frog yourself. Right. So make sure that you get into that Anxiety Freedom Facebook group, because we're going to be doing that weekly. And so to find that, you go back up to the link tree and then you'll see the Anxiety Freedom Facebook. You click that and then you'll answer a couple questions to make sure you're not a robot, and then we'll let you in the group and then I'll be posting information on the lives in there. So today I've been talking about helping loved ones with anxiety. If this has been helpful for you or valuable for you, if you don't mind, it helps us to know that if you give the little link a like and if you have a hankering to give it a share, that would be wonderful because there's other people out there that would benefit from knowing the message. Because I can tell you my loves, I get so many questions. What do I do to help this and that person with anxiety? And we want to take care of them as well as the anxiety sufferer. So if you can, give it a share and make sure to subscribe. I'm constantly in here improving and adding, loving on you, creating free resources, and I don't want you to miss a thing. All right? So thank you for being here. I'll see you guys soon. Much love.