Hey, everybody. Welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell Laughing in the Face of Motherhood.

This is Amy. And today we are talking to the co-hosts of one of my favorite podcasts. It's called FlusterClux.

Lynn Lyons and Robin Hudson are with us today.

Anxiety expert Lynn Lyons has been a therapist for over 30 years. She's trained hundreds of teachers,

school nurses, counselors, and parents about managing anxiety. At the beginning of the pandemic,

when their parenting retreats went on hiatus, Lynn and her sister-in-law, Robin Hudson,

started the podcast Fluster Clucks to help families with anxiety. Two years later, they're still

talking about anxiety and worry

in kids and in parents and the crazy things the mental health field gets wrong about anxiety.

Welcome, Lynn and Robin. Thank you. Hi, thanks for having us. Great to be here. I'm so excited to

talk to you today. This is one of these great privileges of hosting this podcast is getting to sit down with true experts and being like, okay, so let me figure out this thing. These guys, they're going to solve all our problems today. Yeah. Let's start with this question. What does the mental health field get wrong about anxiety? Oh, geez. Well, a lot. But let me say this. Like, it's all with good intention. And the problem with anxiety is that the things that you do

that feel right, like the things and the things that work in the moment are the things we get wrong.

And so a lot of times the mental health field says, okay, so we need to help kids. That's what we want.

We need to help parents. That's what we want. So let's just calm everybody down. So everybody needs to

calm down. Everybody needs to relax. And then it goes in, okay, so how do we do that? Well,

if we can just avoid this, if we can just make sure that we don't trigger our children, if we can

just keep them safe, all of that language moves into the anxiety world and unfortunately gets in the way of what we really need to do, which is to teach kids how to manage their emotions, how to tolerate when something doesn't go their way, how to be okay with their big feelings.

Not everybody, of course, but the mental health field and schools too, oh gosh, schools really focus on accommodating and avoiding and calming down.

And it just takes us in the wrong direction.

That accommodation thing.

As the moderator of our Facebook groups, I can tell you that we constantly get listeners join the groups and say, nothing's made

sense until I found Lynn read her book because the therapist that they would see would only

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