Riding Bikes…

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“I Can Ride A Bike” is a song about avoiding avoidance. It’s a song about emotional resilience disguised as a children’s tale.  It’s a song I wrote to remind myself and my own children regarding the importance of welcoming in discomfort and not running away from difficult emotions.  

In the Summer of 2019 my family went through a number of intense health scares, one with our youngest son, and one with my mom.  At the end of that Summer my brother-in-law passed away suddenly from an accidental drug overdose. My wife and I had been intimately involved in his recovery efforts for more than a decade, and the loss, coupled with the lingering stress related to our family’s other health challenges, let loose in me a wave of generalized anxiety.

Throughout my adult life, I’d experienced a handful of brief anxiety attacks, but they were blips in the timeline of my life, and therefore I never took anxiety very seriously.  This wave of anxiety was different.  It was all encompassing, and seemingly without end. It affected every aspect of my life from work, to sleep, to parenting, to being emotionally present for my wife; who after all was the one who just lost her only sibling. 

Before I found the right therapist who set me on a healing path of exposure therapy and acceptance work, many people in my life were quick to provide the antidote to my anxieties.

“You need to exercise everyday! It keeps the endorphins flowing,” was one of the most common directives I was given by friends.  “Just stay busy. Time heals all wounds,” was another common phrase that played on repeat around me.  And while these statements aren’t necessarily wrong, I believe they are generally bad advice and play into a common problem with how we view discomfort for ourselves and for our children.

So what are some beneficial ways to approach anxiety and other difficult mental states?  What are we as individuals and as parents hoping to teach our children when we are suffering?  What tools do we want to develop for our children to combat difficulties in their own lives, and what does this song have to do with any of it?  

“So many ways to get you where you want to go. Some are fast and some are slow. But if you try to travel too far from your mind, it catches up with you…it’s never too far behind.” 

I hold a Masters in Cognitive Psychology, but I am not a therapist and everyone should rely on their own therapist for professional advice.  What I do know however is that we live in a pleasure seeking society, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to experience a torrent of pleasure, it can come at a cost of not knowing how to handle suffering.  

Here’s an example.  Every month or so a major news outlet will run a story about the increased incidence of depression and anxiety in kids and young adults linked to smart phone and social media use.  Often cited are the social-comparison effect, or the dangers of isolation born of overuse. The response to this is almost always a rallying-cry to limit smart phone use and to restrict certain apps; both worthy approaches.  But where is the discussion about actually learning to live with anxiety?  We may reduce anxiety in young adults by limiting their social media use, but we won’t cure anxiety by doing so. We’ll just be avoiding it.  Being able to sit with anxious thoughts, recognizing anxiety as one of many possible feelings, acknowledging how anxiety changes the body physically, while still able to have a productive and creative day, should be the goal.  

Life is beautiful and amazing, but it can also be painful and challenging, and we should want our kids to be able to experience difficult emotions without panic or dread.  Being comfortable with discomfort, is the mantra.  And this idea can start with little things.  Have you ever looked down at your leg or foot and noticed you’re bleeding from a cut, but have no recollection of when the cut happened, and until you noticed the cut you felt no pain? What’s going on? Either the cut is painful or it’s not, right?  The mind has all kinds of tricks up its sleeve, and learning to be comfortable with uncomfortable feelings like anxiety is similar to being ok with the cut even after you notice it.

Shortly after I began seeking professional help, both my parents revealed to me they had each gone through similar periods of intense anxiety as adults.  My parents were truly incredible during my worst moments, and I love and thank them for literally everything, but they also seemed oddly proud that they had kept their own struggles a secret, and they weren’t alone. Several friends of mine, told me point blank that I had an obligation to my kids not to show them I was suffering, and I needed to figure out how to, “Fake it, until I make it.”  We certainly do not want to traumatize our children if we are in a crisis state, but we also owe it to our children to prepare them for all the crazy, wonderful, and sometimes difficult aspects of life.  

Resiliency is often listed as a goal parents want for their children, but it’s almost always in the context of physical or situational resiliency, like learning how to get back up after falling off a bike, or how to gain new focus for an upcoming math test after failing the previous one.  Falling off your bike may hurt physically, but it’s probably also embarrassing.  Learning to be resilient is as much about accepting embarrassing or anxiety provoking moments as it is about getting back on your bike even when you’re bleeding.  

I worked through all of this with a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist, and continue to practice curated exposure exercises for myself and with my three amazing kids, but there are many ways to achieve acceptance over avoidance. So take long bike rides, and stay creative, and collect moments instead of things, and hang out with friends when you’re suffering, but districting the mind can only do so much. Let’s also teach ourselves and encourage our children to recognize both pleasant and unpleasant emotions, and find purpose and balance in living through them all.