Things I Learned on My Trip Down the Rabbit Hole: A Child and Adolescent Therapist's Self-Reflection
As a child and adolescent therapist, I often find myself cautioning clients (and their parents) to avoid jumping down the proverbial rabbit hole. So, you might be wondering, how did I find myself doing just that, and what could I possibly have learned?
Here goes....
It all started as the COVID-19 pandemic was drawing to a close, and I was getting more requests for new client appointments than I could keep up with.
My private practice was full, my waitlist was growing and so was the niggling feeling of discomfort in the back of my head.
The source of the niggle? Well, I’m a connector. And an empath. And I love kids. And I feel for their parents. So making kids wait to get the help they needed didn't sit well with me. The national news echoed what I was seeing in my practice– an increasing need for child and adolescent therapists who could provide affordable and immediate treatment.
Never one to sit on the sidelines and wait for problems to solve themselves, I decided to see what I could do. (Some might say that this is the exact moment I jumped down the rabbit hole with both feet.) True to my social work roots, I assessed the problem by surveying parents and colleagues to find out what they were experiencing, and what was keeping kids from connecting with a qualified therapist.
Bottom line…I consistently heard the same message. Three things stood between anxious kids and treatment:
No local therapists with immediate availability
Long waitlists for services
Lack of affordability
✅ Problem defined.
Next up on my agenda: Find a way for parents of anxious kiddos to access affordable care relatively quickly.
Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy!
NOT.
I’m not one to easily admit defeat. But I know my limits. So while I couldn’t magically produce a long list of great child and adolescent therapists with immediate openings, I could and did begin suggesting that in the interim, parents do whatever they could to address their child’s anxiety themselves.
[Before the child and adolescent therapists reading this begin to flood my inbox with DMs about this being an awful idea, keep in mind that there is quite a bit of research supporting the idea that parents are the most important tool in childhood anxiety treatment, and often, treating a child with anxiety means working ONLY with their parents. (Thank you to Dr. Eli Lebowitz of the Yale Child Study Team for his brilliant work in this area!)]
As a childhood anxiety specialist, I am a huge fan of Dr. Lebowitz’s evidence-based approach to treating child and adolescent anxiety, Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE) and I had often suggested that parents read Dr. Lebowitz’s book, Breaking Free from Childhood OCD and Anxiety as part of their child’s therapeutic plan.
In retrospect, maybe THIS is where I jumped down the rabbit hole.
You see, when I recommend that parents of a client read the book, I am available to meet with them and answer any questions they have. Now; however, with a full practice, that wasn’t something I could do for parents who weren't on my current caseload.
My solution? I’d record a series of videos to help parents work through the material in Dr. Lebowitz’s book. Easy enough–I already had my teaching slides, I knew the material inside out and had successfully walked many families through the process.
The only things missing were a ring light, a microphone and a good camera. Nothing that Amazon couldn’t help with. (For now, I’m choosing not to disclose how long it took me to figure out how to use all of the things that the Amazon delivery truck dropped off. But I will say that my grit and determination won out.)
Now the only thing left was for me to spread the word about this great resource. Enter... social media.
As I listened to folks wax on about the benefits of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn, I realized that these people were speaking a language I’d never learned.
In fact, when I was a kid, Stories were things that parents told their children before they went to sleep. Reels were those circular things that were used in a projector to project silent family movies onto a white sheet pinned to the wall. Feed was what you did when your child was hungry and Post referred to the mail.
By this point, I had no doubt that I had jumped down a rabbit hole.
Being convinced that the only thing standing between me and helping parents of anxious children was the language barrier of social media, I did what many struggling students do--I hired a tutor. For several weeks, I met with a social media expert who patiently taught me the ins and outs of social media, and how to feed the algorithm. I learned to use canva to create attention-getting images, how to effectively use emojis/hashtags and how to schedule content on my Meta content planner.
And it felt awkward, uncomfortable and inauthentic.
It felt salesy.
And what started out as a project to help people became about creating content and getting audience engagement. For after all, how could I spread the word about the resources I created if I had no followers?
I lasted in the world of social media for about 3 months.
Then. I. Just. Could. Not. Bring. Myself. To. Create. One. More. Piece. Of. Content.
And I quit, cold turkey.
No more posts, no more algorithms, no more reels, no more stories. No more likes, no more messages.
Bye-bye Facebook.
Bye-bye Instagram.
Bye-bye LinkedIn.
I shelved my passion project.
I worked my way through my waitlist.
And I went back to feeling like myself. Authentic. Real.
It’s now a full year later, and I still haven’t quite recovered from my first foray into the world of social media.
But my desire to help hasn’t gone anywhere--It’s been a busy year!
About 6 months ago, I co-wrote a children’s anxiety book with my 14-year old daughter. We made it available as a digital release (free-of charge,) and it was viewed and downloaded thousands of times. (Good old word-of-mouth and WhatsApp).
We got many requests for a printable PDF, and happily sent them out to whoever requested one. After several months, a colleague suggested that I make a paperback version available. So...I taught myself the ins and outs of self-publishing and made the book available for purchase as a paperback on Amazon.
Over the course of the last several months, I was also inspired by a less verbal tween client to create art-based therapy activities to help her work through her feelings in session. Some of these activities became the first pages of a new art-therapy workbook that I've written called, “Color Your World: An Art-Therapy Workbook for Kids.”
But, don’t look for it in bookstores, or on Amazon. You won’t find it.
It’s ready to go to print, but on my trip down the rabbit hole, I learned about forming launch teams, promoting on social media, getting pre-release reviews….and I’m just not interested.
You see, I want to share my resources. But I don’t like living at the bottom of a rabbit hole.
So last week, I interviewed a social media manager. My thinking? I can get the word out about my new workbook, a workshop that I have beginning on May 6th, and a group that is forming for early June.
And someone else can live in the rabbit hole.
Sounds like a win-win, right??
Wrong. Because that felt disingenuous. It’s not me. And if I’m putting something out there, my goal is to connect deeply and authentically, to inspire, and to help young people and their grownups.
Perhaps I’m too old to do the whole social media thing.
Or perhaps I just need to do it my way.
I invite you to follow my journey as I share bits and pieces of what goes on behind the scenes for this child and adolescent therapist as she charts her own course to meaning, impact, connection and inspiration.
