‘I’ve poured all I have into it, so it was really emotionally driven’
Dr Malie Coyne’s new book draws on her experiences as a childhood worrier, a period of teenage anorexia, and her moments of guilt as a mother, to help parents provide compassionate support to anxious children, writes Liadan Hynes
TWO minutes into speaking to clinical psychologist Dr Malie Coyne, I’m asking her for advice about my own child. I recount how my six-year-old daughter said to me out of the blue recently, “Mommy, I know the virus kills people,” and describe my panicked attempt to come up with a reassuring answer. “I know it does,” my daughter had replied with a stern look, adding: “You’re going to lie to me.”
Malie’s new book, Love in, Love Out: A Compassionate Approach to Parenting Your Anxious Child, is perfectly timed, given the norms we now live in. In the past few months can anyone claim not to have undergone, at some point, heightened levels of anxiety? Malie’s approach is about supporting your child, while also managing your own emotions.
“I’ve poured everything I have in terms of my own experiences of being an anxious child into it, so it was really emotionally driven. And then working with people every day, and being a parent myself… all of those voices are in there,” she reflects.
“Around the age of eight or nine seems to be a time where the onset of anxiety can happen for lots of kids, if there’s anything going on in their lives at that time. Especially if they’re kind of sensitive as well. I think I was always a sensitive soul, somebody that picked up on stuff that was going on around me.”
Malie’s Dutch father was a diplomat; he met her Irish mother on his first posting in Ireland. She is the youngest of three siblings. “We moved around a lot as kids. I was anxious about small things. I didn’t like the idea of going to the beach, because there would be a lot of people there — what if I got lost? There were certain things that really worried me. I knew that there were family problems; my parents later split up. Because it was just the five of us moving from country to country, there were no other family supports.”
In her early teens, Malie, who now lives with her family in Galway, where she lectures at NUI Galway, developed anorexia, when she was living in Milan. “That can happen when you’re quite perfectionistic,” she says. “I wouldn’t say mine was severe. I did lose my period for a year, so it was serious enough for that. I was 14, I met a friend; very often anorexia sparks like this. I decided I wanted to lose a little bit of weight, and suddenly it became this competition with this other girl about how much weight we could each lose. You start hearing people saying ‘oh you look great’, or ‘oh you look nice’. I was just so deeply unhappy at the time. My sister had moved away to Switzerland, my parents had a lot going on. It developed very quickly. Within three months I had lost quite a significant amount of weight. The anorexia was like a military regime, and my mind was a dictator.”
Home for Christmas, her older sister realised what was happening and stepped in. “Something just clicked in me. I didn’t get treatment. I suppose I just made the decision. I had no energy left. All I could think about was exercise, and not eating, and going to the gym. Going to the gym when you’re 14, what the heck? But just as quickly as it had come, it resolved itself, with the help of my sister, and my parents helped a bit.”
Although Malie didn’t require professional support, she acknowledges that anorexia is a serious mental health issue and is different for everyone. Many of those who suffer will need professional support to help them to explore the underlying issues and to find adaptive and healthy ways of dealing with negative emotions. Recovering from anorexia can be a tough journey.
Has she suffered relapses since? “Thankfully not. However my anorexia was part of a cycle of me not nurturing myself, physically and emotionally, when I was not doing well emotionally or feeling uncomfortable in my own skin. Although I haven’t relapsed with anorexia, sometimes I find that I can relapse with over-worrying, being too busy, saying yes to everything out of fear and trying to be perfect. I know many others can feel the same. All these behaviours stem from a tendency to operate from threat and not to soothe ourselves when under stress, which are usually patterns born in childhood. This creates a vicious cycle. It is only when we really pause and reflect that we can make better and kinder choices for ourselves as parents and as human beings (Love in), which we can then model for our children (Love out).”
Malie’s book stands out among parenting guides, in that the author’s honesty about her own struggles helps frame her compassionate approach towards other parents. This is not yet another book which tells you what you should be doing or makes you feel like you are failing.
“At the age of nine my anxiety was caused by awareness of parental difficulties, moving around so much, maybe not having the supports in place. And just feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders. I suppose that’s why I wanted to write this,” she explains.
Malie moved to Ireland when she was 18, joining her sister at Trinity; her parents were then posted in Korea. “I knew psychology was something I wanted to do. I’d always taken the role of care-giver in my family. From a very young age, if my brother and sister were arguing, or my parents were fighting, I would get in there and try to make things better.”
Her parents split after they retired, “but they’re good friends now which is brilliant, thank God,” she adds. “It was hard leaving my parents. I remember my mum describing the loss they felt when I left that day, because I was the last child. But I was already quite independent. I always had a good head on my shoulders, probably because I was anxious, an old soul inside. I was fairly responsible, although I liked to have fun as well.”
In Dublin, she shared a house with her sister, recalling now how she loved those days: studying, going out, having boyfriends. She met her husband, an IT specialist, after college, when they were living in the same building. They married in 2009.
Her own experiences, as well as her observations formed in her practice, have informed her approach to parenting an anxious child. “I wanted parents to understand that when your child is worried, and they say that there’s a monster in the room, rather than using the logical responses of ‘don’t be worried about that, it’s okay, there’s no monster’, actually that’s quite invalidating for the child. Because their thoughts, and their bodies, are telling them otherwise. To meet your child where they’re at is more important.
“If my daughter tells me there’s a monster in the room, rather than tell her there’s no monster, I’ll just ask her a bit more about the monster, and we’ll figure out a child-like way of getting the monster out of her head,” she explains. “Like maybe putting a tutu on the monster, or using a spray and spraying it out.”
Anxiety, Malie says, narrows your focus, making you overestimate the size of the problem to hand.“You immediately think there’s more of a threat than there actually is. And you underestimate your ability to cope with it. That’s really what anxiety is.”
Often an anxious child will have an anxious parent, and as such, Malie advises that parents prioritise real selfcare, the kind that can help them stay anchored. “It’s not about having a nice bath or a massage, although those are nice. It’s really about how you manage your own emotions.
“It’s about for example, when your child says ‘Mommy I know people can die with this virus’, looking at what is going on for you in that moment. How are you, the parent, feeling in this moment right now? It’s what I call shark music: echoes of your childhood wounds. How was your anxiety when you were young?
Very often we just repeat automatically the kinds of responses that we got when we were younger.”
That said, Malie’s approach is one of managed expectations rather than parenting as a competitive sport; she uses the phrase ‘good enough parenting’, something that will be welcomed by anyone who has recently experienced working from home while trying to home-school.
“Good-enough parenting is about reframing difficult feelings. Like, everybody struggles. All children struggle some times. All parents struggle. That’s our common humanity. These are all opportunities for connection. It’s important to know that we all struggle. And that’s why I share my struggles. People might think ‘oh you’re a psychologist, you’ve read the books, you know how to do this’. And I don’t, I don’t have all the answers.
“That’s why I didn’t want to be too prescriptive in my book and say ‘you should do it that way’. I didn’t want to put in a million strategies. Because I’ve read books like that and thought ‘god, every one of those sounds brilliant, but where the hell am I going to start?’.”
Malie, a mother of two daughters aged eight and six, is honest about her own parenting difficulties. “I feel quite guilty for how I parented my second daughter in the early years. She had a different temperament to the first child; it was a different time in my life, where having two kids under two was really hard. I’m quite perfectionistic, and I like things to work a certain way, and that doesn’t work when you have kids.”
She describes a situation where the older child is awake with worries at bedtime, and the younger gets out of bed. “I used to have this real control thing, where I’d be like ‘Aimee, go back to bed, I’ve put the millions of blankies on you, go back’. And I’d be really stern. I realised that when she gets out of bed, there’s a need underneath what she’s doing. There’s a communication. She’s feeling the need to belong in a conversation. By me being stern with her, it made things a lot worse, because it took half an hour to settle everybody after the shouting and the screaming and the crying.”
Her response changed from thinking, “I’m wrecked, I want to get downstairs to relax after working all day”, to “my daughter has a need here, to belong. This is an opportunity.”
“So instead I brought Aimee into her sister’s bedroom, and I said ‘Jess is really worried over something in school, and she’s upset’. I got Aimee to give a little suggestion to her older sister, we all had a big hug, I brought Aimee back to bed and they all went to sleep. That was just one situation where me pausing and thinking, changed things.
“I feel really guilty for some of those times in her early years,” she says, welling up. “With the book, I just wanted to help parents to realise that you have a choice, and don’t blame yourself for how you react. But that there are ways of just taking a step back, and going ‘well why am I reacting the way I am?’
“Does it matter if my kid is awake for two minutes? The second you start to feel very rigid, or chaotic, as a parent, you know there’s something really strong going on inside you that you need to look at.”
What is Malie’s advice for my six-yearold wondering about death? No need to answer immediately, she suggests. It’s okay to tell your child you need to have a think when the difficult questions arise, as long as you always come back to them with an answer.
“Telling her that it doesn’t happen will make her sense of threat even bigger, ironically, because she knows that’s not true. The thing is, you don’t have to reply in that moment. As parents we all think we have to immediately reply to our kids. Kids benefit from really physical explanations,” Malie says.
“Tell her the virus can make people die but not many people. This many people have caught it, but only this many people have died.”
Actually, when it comes to managing anxiety, it is about reframing anxious moments as opportunities.
“It’s okay to struggle,” Malie says. “You’re doing your best. It’s really important to bring kindness to yourself. It will really help you to be able to support your child. That’s why the book is called Love In, Love Out. If we make peace with all the parts of ourselves, it helps us to support a child who is anxious.”
‘It became a competition with this other girl about how much weight we could lose’
Love in, Love Out, by Dr Malie Coyne, published by Thorsons, is available from July 23, available to pre-order now from Easons, €14.99 or online