A Year 11 student was referred to Connect because she was catastrophising and having panic attacks on an almost daily basis. She felt pressured by her family to study hard and follow a particular career path and it was making her very unhappy. When I asked her what she wanted to be different by the end of our meeting together she said she wanted to be able to remain calm and think clearly and rationally and she wanted to be able to set her own goals for her future and manage her own study time.
To begin with we worked mainly on managing her thoughts and her emotions. She was able to identify a number of strategies that she had used before such as listening to music and writing in her journal, that helped her to be able to calm her anxious thoughts. She started being able to recognise when she was beginning to get anxious and to use the strategies to successfully remain calm and think clearly.
As her confidence grew she was able to talk to her family about her studying and to have a more collaborative approach to deciding on her revision. She felt that her parents now trusted her judgement more and that made her feel good and it significantly improved their relationship.