Willow's Corner Office

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My Kid Won't Go Near the Basement Anymore. Should I Worry?

Answered by Willow Wade, LCSW

A reader's kid took one bad fall down the basement stairs and hasn't set foot down there since. Willow Wade, this paper's newest advice columnist, on the difference between a fear that fades and one that's here to stay.

Willow Wade, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker at Afton Memorial Hospital and president of Hoodoo County's Child Advocacy Board.

Every issue, Willow Wade answers a letter about adults, kids, and questions on mental health. Got a question of your own? Write the editor and it might run in a future column.

Willow Wade responds:

Nothing's wrong with your son, and nothing's wrong with you for asking. I'll tell you what I tell every parent who sits across from me with a version of this question: fear that makes sense is not the problem. Fear that doesn't let go, long after the danger's passed, is worth a closer look. Six months of avoiding one specific set of stairs, with everything else in his life going along fine, is right at the edge of that line. Let's walk through it.

Here's how I explain it to families: something scary happens, and a kid's brain especially files it away as "this thing is dangerous," and keeps filing it that way long after the body's healed. That's a phobia. Fear that's gotten stuck. That's not weakness and it's not your parenting. It's how brains protect us, sometimes past the point of being useful.

The clue that tells you something's stuck. A kid who's cautious on stairs for a week or two is having a normal reaction to a scary fall. A kid who reroutes his whole day, six months later, to avoid one doorway: that's avoidance doing the talking, not caution. Avoidance feels like safety in the moment. It's actually the thing that keeps a fear alive. Every day he doesn't go down those stairs, his brain gets one more piece of "proof" that the basement is dangerous, even though nothing down there has changed.

What doesn't work. Forcing him down there, all at once, to prove there's nothing to be afraid of. That's how you get a bigger fear, not a smaller one. Your husband's instinct, "just get over it," comes from a good place, but it's backwards. Nobody thinks their way out of a stuck fear. They work their way out, in small pieces, at a pace their nervous system can actually keep up with.

What does. Small steps, in his control, with you right there. Standing at the top of the stairs together, just looking down, is a step. Going down two steps and coming back up is a step. The goal isn't to get him to the bottom on day one. It's to teach his body, slowly, that being near those stairs doesn't mean what happened in the spring is happening again. Let him set the pace. Praise the small steps like they're the whole staircase, because to him, right now, they are.

When to bring in more help. If it's been six months and it hasn't budged at all, if he won't even stand at the top with you, or if the fear has started spreading to other stairs, other rooms, other heights, that's worth a conversation with his pediatrician about a referral. A specific phobia like this responds well to a few sessions of gradual exposure with someone trained in it. There's no shame in that, and there's no waiting-it-out required. Six months is not a failure on your part. It's just information that tells you it's time for a little outside help.

You're not babying him by taking this seriously. You'd be babying him if you let it grow past the basement. Take the small steps. If they're not working in a month or two, make the call.

A Second Letter

Willow Wade responds:

I'll give you the answer first, plainly, and then I'll tell you how we know it: no. Being gay is not a mental illness. It never was one, and what you feel is not sickness. It's just who you are.

Here's how we know, since you asked to hear it from someone who'd actually know. For a long time, it was listed as one: a genuine failure on the part of my profession, one I won't soften for you. But in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, after looking honestly at the research and admitting there had never been any real evidence for it being there in the first place. Every major medical and mental health organization in this country has stood behind that since: the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, all of them. Not as an opinion. As settled science. What was actually happening to gay people all those years wasn't illness. It was the harm of being told they were sick when they weren't, by people who should have known better.

What you're describing, knowing something true about yourself and still bracing for it to be used against you, makes complete sense for someone who grew up somewhere that made you afraid to be honest. The fear is real. But nothing's wrong with you. What was wrong was the messages you got.

I'll tell you one more thing, since I think it might do more than the history did. I'm a lesbian. Married to a woman I love very much. Most of this town has known for years, and not one of them has ever treated me as anything other than exactly who I am, including the people who write my paycheck. I'm not telling you that as a social worker. I'm telling you because sometimes it isn't the research that gets through to a person. It's knowing someone who made it to the other side of exactly what you're feeling right now, and is just fine. Better than fine.

You don't have to tell anyone before you're ready. You don't owe your safety to anyone else's timeline. But I want you to have this in writing, from someone whose job is to actually know: there is nothing in you that needs fixing. There never was.

If you ever want someone local to talk to, in person, this office is open to you. No appointment required for a first conversation. Just come by.