I’m trained in mental health. And I still spent years being told the same thing every parent gets told: Help her challenge the anxious thoughts. Reason with her. Get her to see school isn’t actually dangerous. We tried. Endlessly. And it never touched the thing that was actually happening. Here’s what finally made sense of it. The thoughts were never the cause - they were the smoke, not the fire. Underneath them was a body that had already decided she wasn’t safe, before she’d thought a single conscious word. You can talk to the thoughts all day. The alarm underneath doesn’t speak that language. And this is the part that matters: most psychologists are trained almost entirely in the thinking side - challenge the thought, change the behaviour. The body’s alarm system barely gets a mention in standard training anywhere. That’s not them failing. They’re doing exactly what their training built them to do - it just starts in the wrong place. Cognitive work can help a chil...