Written by a long-time Heartwood client:

Imagine you are a teenager. High School is starting soon and you’re not sure what to expect. You’re anxious. Hormones – unseen by you – are, nonetheless, flooding through your system, changing your body almost daily. It’s as if you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror anymore and its scary.

The summer I was 16, I experienced this overwhelming type of anxiety. Some day’s it felt as if I couldn’t get enough air. Other days, I couldn’t swallow. I kept thinking it would get better, but it didn’t. Escalating worries robbed me of my ability to sleep at night, so – exhausted – I slept late. By now, I was afraid to leave the house on my bike because of nerve-induced digestive troubles so instead of playing sports like I had in past summers, I lay on the couch and watched soap operas. That summer while my Mom gave piano lessons in the next room, a major character from Ryan’s Hope perched preciously on the ledge outside her apartment for a full week, threatening to jump. The tension was unbearable. Not long after, I experienced a full-blown panic attack and my Mom took me to the doctor where he prescribed a course of Valium during the day and Thorazine at night.

I am grateful to that doctor – he may have saved my life. The drugs relieved the anxiety but also robbed me of pretty much all other feeling. Gradually, in the year that followed, I was weaned from them. By the time I left for college, I was drug-free. But anxiety followed me. I somehow willed myself to push through, finished school, married, and began my career. Life went on. My anxiety was manageable, but never really far away.

But when I was 39, things changed drastically when my father, while under treatment for anxiety and depression, successfully took his own life. He was only 63. Suddenly I panicked. I could no longer afford to ignore my mental health. But I didn’t feel comfortable with drugs. Besides, they hadn’t been able to save my father. In my search for an alternative, I discovered Heartwood.

For the past 15 years, I’ve learned to rely on Heartwood’s various services to treat my crippling anxiety. Using tai chi, massage and acupuncture, I’ve made tremendous in-roads in recognizing and diffusing anxiety before it mushrooms as it always did in the past. If only I had learned about these pursuits when I was a teenager! I think about how much easier – how much fuller – my adolescence and young adulthood might have been.

So if you know of a teen suffering from anxiety, don’t make the assumption that it will simply pass – that they’ll “grow out of it.” Learn from my experience. Don’t be afraid to recommend Heartwoods’ array of modalities to parents who might mention, in passing, their teens’ struggles. Let’s start to recognize teenage anxiety for the crippling, chronic condition it can become.