e036 – Managing Anxiety with Dr. Carly Crewe

Dr. Carly Crewe is the mother of twin three-year-old girls, a Canadian small-town family doctor from rural Alberta and an online anxiety coach for moms. After suffering considerably with her own postpartum mental illness, Carly became passionate about helping women overcome their own mental health struggles across the spectrum of motherhood. Carly is extremely passionate about mental health education and advocacy, with a special focus on maternal mental health. In her clinical work as a family doctor, she spends a large proportion of her time helping to optimize mental health patients through counseling and medications as well as running postpartum support groups in her local community. Carly was recently awarded the Outstanding New Professional Award by the Alberta College of Family Physicians in recognition of her exemplary work-life balance and dedication to her family, patients, colleagues, and community. Through her private coaching, group coaching program and online course, Carly provides the education and support for women to adopt healthy mindsets related to their anxiety, learn strategies to manage their thoughts and emotions in the moment and regain control of their lives so they can be present and do motherhood on their own terms. Remember to do motherhood on your own terms. There are so many choices and drama around doing things "right" and we often lose the perspective that there is no "right". How much of our anxiety is built from someone else telling you to parent and what the correct way is when it doesn't align for you. How much stress do we place on our shoulders based on this fact? What is anxiety? Where does it come from? Everyone feels anxious at some point, it has evolved from our fight or flight evolutionary response. Needing to be alert and aware all the time is coded into our DNA from the time we lived in caves and under constant threat. Now in modern society we still have the anxiety response but it is triggered by things that may not be a direct threat, but it still causes the anxious response. It's important to learn how to manage the anxiety so that it is an appropriate response if needed, say if your child is about to run into the street. It can protect us, but it can also be harmful. In a recent New York Times article, How Parents are Robbing Their Children of Adulthood, the concept of "snowplow parenting" is discussed. Parents can have a habit of removing all obstacles and plowing the way for our children because we as parents are so anxious and worried about our children so much. We are not allowing them the autonomy to explore and learn the hard way and allow them to make mistakes and get hurt. We learn from our mistakes, and we need to allow our children to make them. We pass anxiety on to our children when we "snowplow" parent. We mitigate our own discomfort when we clear the way for our children to not get hurt. But when we get hit with something that triggers our anxiety, we have to bring out the strategies that help every time we are faced with our anxious moment. When we eliminate the stressors in our child's life we limit their ability to learn how to mitigate that discomfort for themselves. We need to manage our discomfort so that they can manage their own discomfort. It is important to end this loop and let our children fail and fall. By removing all the obstacles, we are preparing our children for a false world. A lot of mothers struggle with anger while raising children. And from the feelings of anger comes the feelings of guilt and shame for being angry at very real things to be angry about. But our children need us to get angry. They need their most loving person to get angry with them so they can learn how to regulate it and adjust their actions. They need to learn the limits of human interactions and learn boundaries and what happens when you press against someone's boundaries.