Are you or a loved one living with food allergies?
The Stress and Anxiety can be Overwhelming
Overnight, you have to learn to read every food label, how to deliver epinephrin, cross contamination, and how to educate everyone around you about you or your child’s food allergies without feeling like a broken record or a nuisance.
You are constantly vigilant, and that worry and fear in the back of your mind seems to never totally go away.
You or your child may also have experienced trauma around an allergic reaction, or close call.
You have no choice but to have this diagnosis change so many aspects of your day to day life, because it is life or death.
You are NOT alone.
You deserve a place where the changes in your life, and the weight of living with food allergies in your household is understood.
It’s no surprise that developing and learning to live with food allergies brings on anxiety and stress. For many, it is just plain overwhelming. When you are first getting your diagnosis, your doctor gives you all this information about how to use an epi pen, and what to do if an allergic reaction happens. Little to no information is given about how to accomplish this or navigate all the nuances that come with changing your entire diet.
Plus, you still have life to live.
Your kids still have to go to school, you still have family cookouts and holiday get togethers to attend, still want to go out to eat and so much more. All of these scenarios present a unique set of challenges when you are navigating life with food allergies. These scenarios, and many more can be sources of high anxiety, stress, worry and dread.
How Food Allergies Impact Mental Health:
It’s no surprise that learning to live with food allergies brings on anxiety and stress. For many, it’s just plain overwhelming. Ideally, you or your family will develop a relaxed readiness approach. The unfortunate part is, there is no rule book on how to accomplish this.
When you first get your diagnosis, your allergist or primary care specialist go over how to administer epi pens, how to read labels, they may talk about cross contamination, and probably will send you home with some pamphlets. Just like that, your world changes and you have to figure out what all this information means and how it will impact your life.
In the search for information, you might join some Facebook groups, and do a lot of googling. Just like googling anything, you are going to find some wonderful resources, and some that present fears you haven’t even thought of. In an attempt to reconcile these new circumstances and stress, your mind and body work to figure out what it needs to do to keep your or your loved ones safe.
Anxiety inherently isn’t bad. It’s what lets us know that we are unsafe. Think of it like a smoke detector. However, anxiety becomes problematic when the smoke detector is going off when there is no smoke. When your internal smoke alarm is going off, and the thing you feared happens or nothing happens because you followed these anxious intuitions, it reinforces the need for the smoke detector to sound with no smoke.
How Can Therapy for Food Allergies Help?
Reduce anxiety: Therapy can help reduce anxiety by examining how our thoughts and impacting our behaviors. We will work together to categorize what are safety measures, and what are based more extensively in fear.
Improve stress management: Life in general, and especially with food allergies is stressful. We can’t prevent that stress occurs in our life, but we can develop a tool kit of techniques tailored to you that help reduce the impact this stress has. Through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) interventions, we will learn about thinking errors such as always feeling like the worst thing is going to happen, and how to counteract these.
Shift perspective: We’ve all heard the saying glass half full and glass half empty. Looking at the silver lining, or at least trusting that you are capable of getting through this difficult transition phase, can make a difference. Your therapist will challenge you to look at what criticism you think about yourself, and underlying schemas in order to alleviate shame and guilt.
Learn to balance fear and health related quality of life: Fear and shame are two of the most powerful emotions a human can experience. Taking small steps towards addressing your fears and learning how to manage these feelings comes through utilizing relaxation techniques, examining the sources of the fear and taking baby steps towards releasing the amount of power this emotion has on you and your daily life.
I am not only a person who lives with food allergies and it’s affects, but am knowledgeable the psychological, emotional, social, and relationship issues that are involved. In therapy, we can sort through your thoughts and feelings, fears and anxieties while helping you build confidence in your ability to make decisions and advocate for yourself and/or your family.
