When Reassurance Stops Working

The ten-year-old, at twenty past eight, stops on the front step and says her stomach hurts. The parent looks at the clock, then the child’s face, then the clock again. The pain is, the child clarifies, a fluttering thing, and a sick thing, and the thing where her chest feels tight. She did nothing different last night. She does not know what is wrong. She knows only that she does not, this morning, want to walk to school, and that her body has decided this on her behalf.

The parent says the sensible things. “You will be fine when you get there. It is just nerves. You had a good day yesterday.” The child stands on the step with the small heavy face of a person who has heard those sentences before and not been helped by them. The parent has a meeting at ten.

In our work, some version of this morning comes up often. The child is anxious. The parent has tried, with all the love she has, to talk the child out of it, and the talking has not worked.