We'd love to have you start by just sharing a little bit about yourself and how you began this journey and career path.

Thank you.

I'm so happy to be here because a lot of times when I talk to people about how I work with parents of anxious kids, people will assume that everything I do is so much easier or so much more focused on little kids.

And I really want to get the word out that this is not a little kid problem.

It's not like you work with them when they're little and then once they're tweens and teens you just are like well i guess we missed our chance like there is so much you can do so i'm really excited to be here i think this i want to you know keep getting the word out to this demographic so thank you for having me um all right my name is robin i am a therapist i am i i work out of massachusetts but now you know post-covid times We work wherever because that's what we do.

We're available.

And basically what happened was I started my career as a social worker working, doing in-home family therapy, which is something in Massachusetts that's common.

So if a parent or caregiver is listening to this and they're wondering, is this normal stress or is this the diagnosis of anxiety? How would you explain it to them to be able to kind of suss that out?

Sure, go for it.

I was going to say F it up.

You can really F it up because on psychology today, you'll see all these people will be like, I treat anxiety, but treating anxiety is not talking to you about what you are anxious about.

And in fact, it's the opposite of that.

And so when you start to see what's going on and people are doing that in the, in their therapy, I started being like, oh my God, this is, this doesn't, this isn't working and this isn't right.

And so I started really leaning into getting like all my continuing ed was with anxiety work.

My OG guru is Lynn Lyons, who if you're local to the Northeast, she's out of New Hampshire.

Now, are there any really common things that you have been seeing in the past couple of years that were not common before when it comes to anxiety, accommodations, a more permissive approach to parenting that have ballooned in the past few years?

That's how it's different for me.

There was a lot of parallels of the postpartum period during hospice.

Another parallel I had was I remember after I had my first child, walking around being like, there are all these survivors of birth, and all these women are just walking around with children, and we're like, "Oh, your child's so cute," but really they've just been through either a healthy birth but still traumatic.

They're postpartum traumatic.

Maybe it was a traumatic birth, but they're just walking around like survivors, and I felt like that after my mom died.

Like, there are people just walking around after surviving the loss of their mom, and I had no idea what that grief did to their brain.My executive functioning.

I was someone who never had unread texts.

Yeah, we're still here.

Like, what does it look like? What are its impacts? That kind of thing.

First of all, one important part that I want people to take away, also because I am talking to you, and you know, you specialize in marriages and relationships, I wanna emphasize different people, different partners, different parents, are going to experience their kids' anxieties in different ways as well.

So anxiety can show up in anger.

It can show up in opposition.

It can show up in silliness.

It can show up in people pleasing.

It can show up in isolating yourself.

... different viewpoint than when I see it, and so I'm, I'm just interested on what view yours looks like.