Last week’s Ask the Expert column about a little girl suffering from anxiety prompted this response from one reader:
I read your column with great interest. I know just how the child feels, it happened to me too. I am now 63 years old. I know you do not correspond with readers, but maybe you could pass on these points to the family involved.
It is a fear that cannot be described, I have tentatively put it down to a fear of one’s familiar surroundings disintegrating.
It is a feeling of worthlessness, of inability to believe that anyone could like someone like me.
I made a parallel world for myself in my mind and retreated into it whenever I could.
It lasted from my ninth year (when we moved house in the same city) to puberty.
I did not tell anyone about it, as I thought most girls felt that way, except maybe the most popular girls in the class.
This is just a brief summary, I went on to become a very competent woman who reared sons and a daughter and is now a granny.
When I experienced the havoc the menopause caused to me, I wondered was the childhood experience also hormone related. Everything in a woman’s life seems to depend on the hormone household in the body, both physical and emotional.
When I became an adult, I realised that the way I felt as a child had not been normal. I have over the years tried many times to put the experience I had into words, but there are none other than fear.
I grew up in a happy family and nothing evil ever happened to me when I was a child.
– Name and address with editor