Andrea Nave: Anxiety, Avoidance, and Helping an Anxious Child

Anxiety has a job, and Andrea Nave describes it as an alarm system. It is there to keep you alive, it goes off when it believes something bad is coming, and it does not always get the call right. Understanding that is the difference between fighting the feeling and working with it.

Our guest is Andrea Nave, a licensed therapist in private practice in Connecticut and licensed in New York as well. She specializes in anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, and parenting anxious young people, and she is the creator of the How To Beat Anxiety Blog, which grew out of how many people were writing to her with the same questions. She spent a couple of years working with Dr. Eli Lebowitz, who created the SPACE program at the Yale Child Study Center, a parent-only approach to childhood anxiety that comes up several times here.

Andrea and Lisa talk through the misconceptions first: that being anxious is simply who you are and cannot change, and that worry is doing something useful. Andrea separates the thought your brain hands you from the choice you make about engaging with it, and she makes the case that acting is helpful while worrying is not. They then move to children, where anxiety shows up as stomach aches, vomiting, and irritability, and where irritability regularly gets labeled defiance at home and at school.

Two parts of this speak directly to anyone living inside a long court case. One is Andrea's point that a parent's anxiety is learned by the child, so a parent who cannot steady themselves cannot ask the child to. The other is her account of riding out a panic attack rather than fighting it, because fighting your own physiology teaches your brain that those sensations are dangerous. She and Lisa also cover what to do when a child's distress about going to the other parent is not irrational at all, and the nervous system is reporting something real.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why anxiety is an alarm system, and what happens when it fires at the wrong time
• How avoidance teaches your nervous system that the thing really was dangerous
• The question that separates useful action from unproductive worry
• How anxiety shows up in kids: stomach aches, irritability, and the defiance label
• Why a parent's untreated anxiety limits what therapy can do for the child
• Self-regulation and co-regulation: naming your feeling out loud in front of your kids
• Riding out a panic attack instead of fighting it, and why that works
• The SPACE program: reducing the accommodations that keep a child from coping

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Are people more anxious now, and what anxiety actually is
5:00 Exposure therapy, and why avoidance keeps the false alarm on
7:00 Misconceptions: "I'm just anxious," and whether worry helps
13:00 Anxiety in kids: stomach aches, irritability, and the defiance label
18:00 When a parent's anxiety becomes the child's
21:00 Self-regulation, co-regulation, and modeling it out loud
25:00 Parent burnout, self-compassion, and finding an outlet
29:00 Riding out a panic attack instead of fighting it
33:00 Facing an abusive ex in court: anxiety that makes sense
38:00 Validation first, and the SPACE program

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 How To Beat Anxiety Blog: https://www.howtobeatanxiety.org/
🔗 Andrea Nave on Instagram (@howtobeatanxietyblog): https://www.instagram.com/howtobeatanxietyblog/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.