New Netflix series about boy with social anxiety highlights power of emotional support animals
A new kid-friendly Netflix series about a group of pre-teens is not your average family comedy. "The Healing Powers of Dude" covers issues that many teen series miss, with a focus on social anxiety. The show follows 11-year-old Noah Ferris, who has a social anxiety disorder and uses an emotional support dog, Dude, to get him through middle school.
Even 13-year-old actor Mauricio Lara knows the show is unique. In an interview with CBS News, Lara, who plays Noah's friend and the show's comedic relief, said he's learned a lot from the show. "I think I've learned that the support system you have around you is so, so vital," Lara said.
"The Healing Powers of Dude" follows 11-year-old Noah Ferris, who has a social anxiety disorder and uses an emotional support dog, Dude, to get him through middle school. Noah's friends, Simon and Emma, also play huge roles in his life. Netflix
The teen said being on set with kids around his age and having a dog as a co-star was fun, but he knows it was also an important job. "It can't not be fun being with a puppy all day," Lara said, adding that he saw how helpful emotional support dogs can be. "I think it's an amazing thing to have an emotional support animal, and i'm glad we were able to use one in the show."
Lara's other co-star, Sophie Kim, plays a friend named Amara who uses a wheelchair. In real life, Kim has Ullrich Congenital Muscular Dystrophy, and has used a wheelchair since the age of four.
The inclusion of an actress with a disability received praise from groups like RespectAbility, and Ability Magazine, which says Netflix found Kim through their job services.
Lara, wise beyond his years, is glad the show portrays young people dealing with mental health and disabilities.
"It's a topic that's been talked about among adults, but it's not really talked about when it comes to kids," he said. "There are so many kids who suffer from social anxiety disorder, and I think they're just normal people trying to live their lives and they have the same struggles as us."
13-year-old Mauricio Lara is happy the show shines a light on young people dealing with mental health and disabilities – not just adults. CBS News
Lara admits he previously didn't know much about the topics covered in the show, and he hopes watching it teaches viewers valuable lessons, too.
"I hope it can help people become more aware of this topic and, of course, it's not covering all the struggles, but I think it's a good starting point, and it's a good addition to the conversation about social anxiety disorder," he said.
"It may not be your experience, but it could be the experience of somebody else."
Do You Need an Anxiety Detox?
Relief from anxiety starts with processing your emotions.
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Contents
No matter the root cause of anxiety, you know the symptoms: sleepless nights; that pit in your stomach; feelings of distress, frustration, and self-doubt.
You might think that the anxiety cycle begins with an anxious or negative thought or comment, but that is not necessarily the case. They cycle starts when you hold back the inner movement of your emotions, which keeps you locked in your brain. Have you ever been around someone who says it like it is? Maybe you were thinking something negative and that person called out, “This sucks!” Perhaps that made you feel relief, like you were not alone. This relief came because calling out discomfort or a negative experience externalizes (even if only temporarily) what you may be feeling.
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Since anxiety is so thought-provoking—meaning it’s hard to get your mind to stop chattering—it makes sense that you might see your thoughts as the root of a problem. The reality is, worrisome thoughts can happen only when your body is restricting the inner movement of energy. Since your emotions and physiological reactions to them are made of energy (molecules and atoms in motion), this means when you avoid or hold back on allowing your emotions to circulate throughout your body (e.g. , constricting them to your head or shoulders or chest), you increase the likelihood of fearful or negative thoughts arising and lingering, which continues the anxiety cycle.
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See also Find Refuge from an Overwhelming World
Constricting emotions also uses up some of your mental energy. You most likely experience this as distractibility. The anxiety cycle forces energy loss and as you sense that, your symptoms likely increase. Now you’re fully in the cycle, and you have to cope with those symptoms. Once you understand that emotions get processed in the body, this will change.
Here’s another way to think about it: When you eat a piece of food, your body naturally breaks it down, absorbing what you need and getting rid of the rest. When it comes to processing your emotions, especially anxiety, instead of breaking them down, you are breaking free from the ways in which you have been controlling your emotions.
Most of us have learned to view this as an active process, meaning you attempt to label or figure out what and why you are feeling the way you are, before you allow it to be digested. However, I’ve found processing your emotions is an experience, not an action.
Just as you might experience the incredible taste of chocolate, digesting your emotions happens when you are in a state of non-effort. You don’t try to experience the taste of chocolate, and you don’t try to digest emotions; you allow yourself the experience. In my practice, I’ve learned that as the experience of processing an emotion unfolds, four key elements are required: oxygen, awareness, observation, and free will.
Here, how to start an anxiety detox today:
Oxygen: Trust Your Breath
Oxygen is the driving force behind how your emotions are circulated, moved, recycled, and digested in your body. When it comes to processing your emotions, how you bring oxygen into your body really makes a difference. During an emotional detox, you will bring oxygen into your body through your nose (not your mouth).
Your emotions move through a process similar to the one food goes through—only instead of the amino acids and simple sugars that digest food, your emotions are digested by activating nerve channels called meridians. One of the ways to access these meridians is nostril breathing—inhaling and exhaling through your nose—like this:
Did you notice an energetic shift when you did the simple nostril breathing? The process of inhaling—how you bring oxygen into your body—is vitally important to your physical and emotional health.
See also Nicole Cardoza’s Guided Meditation For Anxiety
Be Aware
To digest your emotions fully and properly, you have to become aware of how they are experienced in your body. This means that you notice how your emotions show up in your body. Most often this happens through sensations. Your emotions can be experienced as:
While awareness is noticing, observation is the skill of witnessing. Many meditation techniques are based on learning and understanding the art of observing. According to the theory of the observer
effect, simply observing a situation changes it. In an emotional detox, observing your emotions changes your experience. In other words, the emotions you once called guilt, fear, or anger now change frequency, shape, form, and movement, giving you a new and lighter interpretation that resembles joy.
To be clear, witnessing the awareness (sensations) of your emotions is different than watching. When you watch something, you are more likely to think. For example, if you are told to watch your breath, you are more likely to think about whether you are breathing “right” or “wrong.” On the other hand, when you witness your breath, you are less engaged from your brain. While watching may be great if you are a security guard or a mom looking after small children, it won’t serve you during your anxiety detox.
Here is the thing: Your body is always looking to go back to a place of balance and ease. There is nothing for you to do—noticing the difference between watching and witnessing is enough.
See also Try This Meditation to Learn How to Witness (Not React to) Your Thoughts
Watching vs. Witnessing
Watching
Witnessing
Now let’s apply your understanding of watching versus witnessing to the process of finding balance and ease in your body.
Finding Balance and Ease
Free will matters. You can get a million healing treatments, spend your money on all sorts of modalities, accumulate a bunch of tools meant to help you overcome anxiety—but until you choose to heal, you may find the results you get are short-lived.
Free will means choice, and in the case of an anxiety detox, you are choosing whether to heal or to revisit old patterns. You are also choosing whether you pay attention to thoughts or to feelings. If you are struggling with symptoms of anxiety, it is likely you have been giving your thoughts an excess of attention. What starts out as one thought ends up being a slew of mindless chatter. These types of thoughts and your reactions to them could cause you to really believe things were out of control. However, what is really happening is that you have undermined the power of your own free will. Your free will is your light! The detox process helps you reclaim it.
Adapted from Emotional Detox for Anxiety by Sherianna Boyle. Copyright © 2019 by Sherianna Boyle. Used with permission of the publisher, Adams Media, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
SHERIANNA BOYLE, MED, CAGS, is an adjunct psychology professor, author of eight books including Emotional Detox for Anxiety, and founder of Emotional Detox Coaching, C.L.E.A.N.S.E. Method, and C.L.E.A.N.S.E. Yoga. In her book Emotional Detox for Anxiety, she shares seven steps to help you learn to experience and digest your emotions, also called the C.L.E.A.N.S.E. method. These steps will help you release anxiety and negative feelings, clearing a path to peace, acceptance, and pure joy. Sherianna provides Emotional Detox workshops through renowned centers such as Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health and 1440 Multiversity. Find her Emotional Detox podcast, workshops, and services at sheriannaboyle.com.
The 3 Parts of Anxiety: Thoughts, Emotions, and Behaviors
Everyone wishes they could control their anxiety, but this is a trap! Any anxiety problem has several different parts to it. There are parts you can control and there are parts you can't control. It's important to understand which is which so you don't waste your time trying to change something that you do not have the power to change.
There are 3 parts to an anxiety problem: anxious thoughts, the emotion of anxiety itself, and anxious behaviors. Let's go through each of them and then what to do about them.
Anxious Thoughts
Anxious thoughts are the phrases, messages, and images that run through your head when you are anxious. They are the "inner monologue" that is always running in your mind. Minds are always saying something; they never shut up, even if it's not always about anxiety. These automatic thoughts just "pop up" in your head; you don't have to do anything to make them happen, they just happen.
Because this is an automatic, passive process on your part, it is NOT something you have control over. No one can control what thoughts pop up into their minds. If I tell you "don't think about a pink elephant", what are you going to think about? A pink elephant! You can't help it, no one can.
Pink Elephant Slide
Source: Source: tdes
Thoughts do not respond to efforts to control them. If you try to not think a thought, that will be all you can think about. This is not a problem you alone have, this is simply how thoughts work in all our minds. You can't control your automatic thoughts.
The Feeling of Anxiety
Here we mean the emotion of anxiety itself, the feelings you have when you are anxious. The specific physical feelings of anxiety vary from person to person but typically include tightness or pain in the chest, a light-headed or "out of it" feeling in the head, muscle tension, increased heart rate, and shortness of breath. You probably experience these feelings as uncomfortable or even painful and understandably want to get them to go away. You WANT to control your anxiety. But is that possible?
What does your experience tell you happens when you try to make yourself calm down? Probably that when you try to calm down, the anxiety actually gets worse.
Like anxious thoughts, the feeling of anxiety does not respond to efforts to control it. The more you try to make your anxiety go down, the worse it gets. We can do another little thought experiment here to prove this:
Let's say I hook you up to a machine that senses your anxiety and will tell me how anxious you feel at any given moment. If I then say to you “Don't feel anxious”, how do you think you will feel? Probably there will be some anxiety. But let's say that I then up the stakes. Let's say that I point a gun at your leg and say "Okay, don't feel anxious and if you do feel anxious and I see it on this machine, I'm going to shoot you in the leg". Now how are you going to feel? Even more anxious! The anxiety will be even worse because now you are putting pressure on yourself to not feel anxious.
Anxiety Detector
Source: Source: FBI
Not only does anxiety not respond when you try to control it; the more pressure you put on yourself to not feel anxious, the worse it gets! Anxiety is not something you have control over. If people could control anxiety, my job as a psychologist would not exist and you would not be reading this article. We would simply all choose to not feel anxious when we didn't want it and that would be that. But anxiety doesn't work that way, it is not something we can control.
Anxious Behaviors
The last piece of the puzzle is behavior: our actions, what we do. When you are anxious, you probably behave in ways that help you avoid triggers for your anxiety (e.g. avoiding social functions if you are afraid of what other people will think of you).
With behaviors, it is fairly obvious: we DO have control over our behavior. Behavior is the one and only thing in life that we actually have control over. For instance, in the above example, even if you are anxious about going to a party, you DO control whether or not you go to the party. You can choose to go or not go, you control that.
What to Do
So you have control over your anxious behavior, but not your anxious thoughts or the feeling of anxiety itself. However, I'm guessing that if you are struggling with anxiety and reading this article, you probably spend quite a bit of time trying to control your anxious thoughts and feelings.
The thing to do instead is to practice acceptance: allow the anxious thoughts to be there exactly as they are; give up on trying to control them (because they will be there either way, you can't control them). Allow the anxious feelings to be there exactly as they are too; give up on trying to control them (again because they will be there either way, you can't control them).
Instead, focus on changing your anxious behavior. If you're anxious about going to a party, go to the party. This is the basis of what works for making anxiety better in the long run anyway, which is facing your fears (Exposure Therapy).
But when clients start therapy with me, I notice that they typically have a misconception about the order in which things change. Most clients think that if they could only change their negative thoughts to be more positive, they could feel better and then they'd be able to do the things they think anxiety stops them from doing.
In other words, they think the order of change is: thoughts change first, then emotions, then behaviors. But unfortunately, because they can't control anxious thoughts or anxious feelings, they get stuck on those first two steps and never actually get to doing the things they wish they were doing.
In reality, the order of change is the opposite: behavior has to change first and if you do that, emotion changes and thoughts change in the long run.
If you simply start doing the things you think you can't do because of anxiety, your brain eventually learns that those things are not dangerous and the feelings of anxiety naturally decrease over time. When that happens, the anxious thoughts also naturally decrease over time. But this only happens by taking different actions first.
So instead of beating your head against the wall trying to change something that you can't control, try going and doing the things you wish you could do now and see what happens. By facing your fears and taking different action, your life will open up, you will gain freedom, and you won't be wasting your time anymore trying to change things you have no control over.
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