How Howard Stern Helped Soothe My 8 Year Old Daughter’s Anxiety

How my anxious child was helped when I got hypnosis therapy.

When my husband told me that I might be causing my daughter’s intense separation anxiety, I wanted to hold his head underwater. After all, he was the one that passed the anxiety gene down to her. I am the cool, laid back, easygoing person in our house. They are the high-strung, over planning, constant worriers. 

I was most irritated by his accusation because I am both he and my daughter’s constant source of soothing – a job that feels like keeping a mesh-bottomed bucket full of water. If I make her anxious, then why does the notion of leaving my side make her break down in tears?

But after sitting with my defensiveness, I knew I had to check myself. If my parents, at any point in my upbringing, had stopped labeling me as problematic and instead examined their own feelings, motivations and agendas, the entire trajectory of my life could have potentially been altered. I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t have ended up in that cult.

Because my husband had grown up with this similar anxiety and had not received the support he had needed back then, I was also willing to consider his relevant feedback. 

So it was in this open state of mind when I heard hypnotist Scott Schmaren on the Howard Stern Show earlier this year. I am a die hard Howard fan and have been listening to the show since I was a kid and had to hide my listenership. Amongst a host of reasons why I love him, Howard is the person who helped me find the relief and humor in my childhood. If you have challenging parents and you’ve never heard Howard reenact a phone call with his, do yourself a favor and go sign up for SirusXM.

On this particular day, Howard hosted Scott for a funny bit with Stern Show staffer Sal, after Scott had hypnotized him to believe that he could speak to the dead. 

Prior to the bit, putting the entertainment value aside, Howard asked Scott about his craft, the clients he works with, and the ways that people benefit from hypnosis. Scott shared his own experience with dramatic weight loss through hypnosis, which is what I assumed hypnosis was for – tricking your mind into not want something, be it food, smoking, etc. But Scott talked about the crap clogged up in our subconscious that impacts our daily interactions, and how hypnosis could help clear that from a person’s life. 

Now I have had plenty of therapy in my life to help heal from various traumas, and that therapy has afforded me the awareness of my actions and reactions. For instance, thanks to therapy I could hear my defensiveness to my husband’s suggestion that I might be triggering my daughter’s anxiety. Because of therapy, I also have the awareness that my daughter’s anxiety and neediness for me triggers both my parents’ overwhelming smothering of me growing up, and the feelings of being trapped with no freedom that I experienced having been in a cult. This awareness allowed me to attempt to support my daughter’s needs and ignore my visceral response to brush her off, tell her to grow up and run the hell away.

The problem was, even though I sat with her and tried to be loving, I couldn’t rid my energy of the frustration and feelings of suffocation, and she could feel it. I could hold her hand or let her cuddle up to me, but inside I was screaming for space. I could spend one-on-one time playing with her or helping her with school work, but on the inside I was filled with resentment over my lack of freedom from her. She absorbed it all, making her grasp for me more, which only increased my inner revolt. 

After the Howard segment I called Scott right away with the hope that maybe he could help me rectify my energy to be a more loving, accessible parent. He told me he could, and I believed him.

Because I have done so much therapy, I was encouraged that Scott didn’t need to deeply excavate my entire history to get started, nor would we have to do lengthy weekly sessions. Our first call I gave him the bird’s eye view of all my bullshit and he got it and its implications in my present life very quickly. From there, we began to have weekly or bi-monthly 20 minute calls to talk. Later that day, he would send me a hypnosis recording addressing what we talked about for me to listen to daily until our next call.

I could not chart out for you how what I’ve done with him and the things he’s had me do have profoundly healed me, and thus my daughter, but I don’t need to understand. What I can tell you is, my daughter no longer cries when we have to leave each other. She no longer anxiously follows me around the house, or weepily clings to my side. Every morning before school isn’t spent in tears needing to be soothed and bribed to get out of the car at drop off. Most miraculously, my husband and I can go out of town without her getting so upset she makes herself sick. 

When I saw the almost immediate change in my daughter, my immense gratitude was tempered by guilt. While my daughter is an anxious child, I was exacerbating her otherwise mild worrisome tendencies. What’s worse is my intention and belief was that I was doing all I could to ease her woes. 

After reading her book The Conscious Parent, I have long been a follower of Shefali Tsabary and believed that I was in sync with her parenting wisdom of “fixing” our children by fixing ourselves.

But, it is hard to see oneself. Especially when our intentions are good. 

That’s the good and the bad parenting news…if my kid is struggling, the solution is likely within me, not within them.