Tag Archive - anxiety

How Anxiety is The Greatest Motivator for One Author and Blogger

May 14, 2012 in Therapy-Psychology with 0 Comments

Today I asked author and blogger Renee Fisher to share with us about how anxiety has transformed her life and motivated her to continually pursue God. You can learn more about Renee here, as well as following her on Twitter @devotionaldiva — and don’t forget to cruise over and check out her books Not Another Dating Book and Faithbook of Jesus: Connecting with Jesus Daily.

The Greatest Motivator

There is nothing else on this planet that motivates me more than my sufferings.

Every time I experience the anxiety that plagues me, my immediate reaction is to run! My body tenses up and I can’t breathe. I grasp for my throat only to find my hands are already shaking. My pastor once said, “Stand up to trials and run away from temptation.” My flesh is real good at doing the opposite. If I’m honest, I’d rather not focus on my anxiety. I’d rather numb my mind in front of the television while I eat more junk food.

As much as I hate my anxiety–it keeps me in check. I have to ask myself questions like, “Am I sinning to avoid the truth?” “What am I so afraid of?”

Sometimes the answer doesn’t come right away, and I am left with panic attacks. Other times I realize it’s just my flesh readjusting to new surroundings–like a new husband and a new house. I even have an office now. Sometimes I think I become anxious because I have so much freedom in a whole room to myself.

My anxiety is a point of suffering in my life, and I guess I still struggle with accepting it. Even when everything is going great, I am always afraid that my anxiety is going to come back and shake my confidence once again.

I thought marriage would quiet my anxiety. Nope! I quickly learned in my first few weeks of marriage that God continues to allow my thorn in the flesh. Sometimes I hate that He won’t allow me to get the least bit comfortable, and yet I am joyfully surprised at times to see how God uses what I see as suffering to motivate me into godly action. What a comfort to know I have a perfect example to follow. When I feel lost, hurt, and overwhelmed by my anxiety, I can once again be motivated by the sufferings of Jesus.

The more I study the life of Jesus, I see how He didn’t waver. He did everything the Father asked Him to do–even if it meant suffering. Jesus was tempted in every way as we are and yet He did not sin.

Let that sink in for a moment!

“He never sinned, nor ever deceived anyone. He did not retaliate when he was insulted, nor threaten revenge when he suffered. He left his case in the hands of God, who always judges fairly. He personally carried our sins in his body on the cross so that we can be dead to sin and live for what is right. By his wounds you are healed” (1 Peter 2:22-24, NLT).

My sufferings teach me how to grow.

I have learned to embrace these times of quiet fellowship with God. When the panic attacks come I know God is waiting for me. All I need to do is surrender my pride. Easier said than done. The nature of anxiety is to take the focus off God and onto myself. I’m the one who’s suffering. As much as I struggle with the disruptions–I’ve learned to simply humble myself. The more I wrestle with God, the longer it takes for God to teach me these vital truths impertinent to my character.

If I can learn what He is trying to teach me–then He removes my anxiety. Not always, and not right away, but I can trust God to show me what to do.

Some days God uses my panic attacks to call me into action. The more time I spend in prayer the better. I remember to take my thoughts captive to Christ–not myself. Through reading the Word and other devotionals, I am able to stop worrying and let Him take control.

When I finally reach the point of giving everything to God, I can feel the release. My hands stop shaking, my throat stops closing, and I can breath again. I hear the words of the Lord from Exodus 14:14 that say, “The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still” (Exodus 14:14).

I am thankful how much God has used my anxiety to motivate me into prayer and reading the Word. Some days I feel this is all I do. I feel plagued by my thoughts of worthlessness.

But I know better.

If it weren’t for that deep longing in my heart to allow God to use my anxiety to motivate me into a closer walk with Him, I truly believe I would have missed out on so many spiritual lessons.

When my husband and I first married I would take my anxiety personally. If I could just try harder, God would show me what to do. I furiously searched for the lesson God was trying to teach me.

But there are two of us now.

I love that God has given me a husband, but he has limits too. He works long hours, and when I take the focus off myself and on to serving the needs of Marc my anxiety is transformed. It’s not all about me anymore.

My sufferings are not all about me; they are for my husband and for those God calls me to serve! I’m so glad God uses our greatest fear to motivate us into acts of service. I now use Hebrews 10:24 as my ministry verse because it reminds me of where I’ve come from and where I’m going. “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds” (Hebrews 10:24).

Do you know where you’re going? Ask the Lord to give you the strength to be used by Him. Even if that means, like me, He uses your greatest fear as the greatest motivator in your life.

Anxiety Makes Humanity Unique

March 29, 2012 in Ministry-Theology, The Anxious Christian, Therapy-Psychology with 0 Comments

Eric Chinski at the Paris Review, has a great interview with Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive.

The article is a fascinating look at the interaction between humans, computers and AI (artificial intelligence)…and a probing look at what makes us human. Brian won ‘The Most Human Human’ award…which is basically this:

The Most Human Human is an award given out each year at the Loebner Prize, the artificial intelligence (AI) community’s most controversial and anticipated annual competition. The event is what’s called a Turing test, in which a panel of judges conducts a series of five-minute-long chat conversations over a computer with a series of real people and with a series of computer programs pretending to be people by mimicking human responses. The catch, of course, is that the judges don’t know at the start who’s who, and it’s their job in five minutes of conversation to try to find out.

But in the midst of this article, this statement jumped off the page at me…

 

“humans appear to be the only things anxious about what makes them unique”

What if anxiety not only makes us human, but what if anxiety is a gift? A gift that reminds us of our humanity. A gift that reminds us of our freedom. A gift that reminds us to pursue the God who uniquely created us. Created us to live with anxiety in order that we may continually seek after and depend on him.

Today is the Day

March 1, 2012 in Writing with 1 Comment

The Anxious Christian: Can God Use Your Anxiety for Good?.

I thought that writing the book was the long and tough part, and that when I handed my manuscript in…I was sort of done. Wrong. There is so much more work to do, and I’m excited about all the conversations that I’m already having around the book, and I’m looking forward to the ones that I haven’t even had yet.

There are more articles coming on this topic, interviews, etc. But for now, join us for the next week at Thrive80 for some posts by me and others on the topic of anxiety.

I hope that you can join in and contribute your voice to such an important topic as anxiety…especially as it relates to our Christian faith.

Pressed to the Ground: A Theological Re-Frame of Depression

January 27, 2012 in Ministry-Theology, Pastoral Counseling, Therapy-Psychology with 1 Comment

In my continuation on the topic of depression, especially male depression (here and here), I wanted to share something with you by Parker Palmer. In his wonderful book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (a must read), Parker has one of the most insightful, haunting, painful, and beautiful glimpses of someone who suffers from depression that I have ever read.

Parker begins the chapter with an excerpt from a book that we all read in high school, but that perhaps we might re-read differently all these years later — The Inferno of Dante:

“Midway on our life’s journey I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard–so tangled and rough.

And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring; death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well

I’ll tell you what I saw…
–From The Inferno of Dante, Robert Pinsky trans.” (pp. 57)

Parker picks up after the quote with a gripping statement:

Midway in my life’s journey, ‘way closed’ again, this time with a ferocity that felt fatal: I found myself in the dark woods called clinical depression, a total eclipse of light and hope. But after I emerged from my sojourn in the dark and had given myself several years to absorb meaning, I saw how pivotal that passage had been on my pilgrimage toward selfhood and vocation. Though I recommend it to no one–and I do not need to, for it arrives unbidden is too many lives–depression compelled me to find the river of life hidden beneath the ice.” (pp. 57-58)

At some point in all of our lives we may experience some form of depression as we also find ourselves “midway in life’s journey.” But it is Parker’s account of his own depression that can help offer us a different way to look at it. In a sense, he offers us a paradoxical take on depression that sets up a paradigm through which to view depression that is so foreign to our culture. Most of us want to do anything we can to avoid the difficulty in life, while if at all possible numb out any painful experience we have with medications, alcohol, drugs, sex, etc. But perhaps mental health problems like depression and anxiety are the catalyst to help us see life in a new way.

Of course, this is not a paradigm that is easily seen in the midst of the “dark night of the soul“, but I am thankful for Parker’s words as it has helped me, help clients view their own depression from a different angle.

And so as I close, here is the theological re-frame that was offered up to Parker by his therapist:

“After hours of careful listening, my therapist offered an image that helped me eventually reclaim my life. ‘You seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you,’ he said. ‘Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to the ground on which it is safe to stand?

Amid the assaults I was suffering, the suggestion that depression was my friend seemed impossibly romantic, even insulting. But something in me knew that down, down to the ground, was the direction of wholeness, thus allowing that image to begin its slow work of healing me.

I started to understand that I had been living an ungrounded life, living at an altitude that was inherently unsafe. The problem with living at high altitude is simple: when we slip, as we always do, we have a long, long way to fall, and the landing may well kill us. The grace of being pressed down to the ground is also simple: when we slip and fall, it is usually not fatal, and we can get back up.”

“The grace of being pressed down…..” Perhaps in our darkest nights of depression it is the hand of God that is pressing us down…an act of grace that leaves us grounded and more whole.

[Interesting aside: Parker was reticent to write about his depression until he was asked to contribute an article on the theme of the "wounded healer" in memory of his friend Henri Nouwen who had also suffered at times from depression and wrote about it in several places]

The Angry…I Mean, Depressed Male: Do You Know Him?

January 19, 2012 in Marriage-Family, Therapy-Psychology with 12 Comments

Over the last several months when I have gathered for lunch with a few of my friends, we joke about the idea of me writing a follow up book to The Anxious Christian called The Angry Christian. Don’t worry, that is not on my to do list, but our conversation hints at an issue that can be seen in our Christian culture.

If you haven’t noticed, there seems to be a lot of angry Christians out there. And more often than not, they are men.

But what I’m really wondering is if there isn’t just a bunch of depressed Christian men out there…and really,  men in general.

In the book Unmasking Male Depression, Archibald Hart lists off a few statistics (pp. 3):

  • 80 percent of all suicides in the United States are men
  • The male suicide rate at midlife is three times higher than at other times; for men over 65, it is seven times higher
  • 20 million American men will experience depression sometime in their life
  • 60-80 percent of depressed adults never get professional help, and men are at the top of the list here
  • It can take up to ten years and exposure to at least three mental health professionals to properly diagnose this disorder
  • 80-90 percent of men seeking treatment can get relief from their symptoms

This book was published in 2001, so I wonder what the statistics are today. Certainly higher I would imagine.

More and more men are coming into my office these days because they complain that they just don’t seem to know what is wrong with them. But when a man finds himself in my office I want to communicate to them that it is a huge step of courage on their part. Many men do not reach out for help, so if they take the step to call and actually come in, then I know something is seriously wrong. Hart writes (pp. 8):

“Being a man can be hazardous to your health, especially when you have to maintain your masculine identity at all costs. Generally, men are less willing to admit to depression because they believe, irrationally, that being depressed is a sign of weakness. They are also less likely to want to discuss the topic, for fear, I suppose, that they may discover something about themselves that they don’t like–that they are less manly than they think they are. Depression, the subliminal male self-believes, is a ‘feminine’ problem, so therefore, I cannot be depressed. It’s only logical, so don’t even suggest the idea.”

So maybe underneath all that anger is a man who really needs some help. Maybe you are that man. If you are, then one of the biggest acts of courage that you can do is to reach out for help. You are not alone.

And if you know a male who is struggling with depression, maybe there are some ways that you can come alongside of him and encourage him get the help he needs.

So what are some signs of male depression, since it so often looks different than female depression. Again, I turn to Archibald Hart for some good insight (pp. 29):

  • Blames others for his depression
  • Acts on his inner turmoil
  • Needs to maintain control at all costs
  • Overly hostile, irritable
  • Attacks when hurt
  • Tries to fix the depression by problem solving
  • Turns to sports, TV, sex, alcohol
  • Feels ashamed by depression
  • Becomes compulsive, time keeper
  • Terrified to confront weakness
  • Tries to maintain strong male image
  • Tries to act away his depression
  • Turns to alcoholism and other addictions

This last summer my father and step-mom spent a month on a small lake in Minnesota. When my dad returned home he commented on how each day he could sit outside and hear all around the lake conversations of men who were sitting in their fishing boats all day fishing. My dad wondered if that type of male bonding wasn’t a form of therapy for them. Whether it was fishing, hunting, or playing sports together, maybe that is a way and a place for men to emotionally connect and process that anger, anxiety, depression and other emotions they were experiencing.

But we are living in a society that has become increasingly fractured and fast paced and men might be losing the ability to connect. And technology that men so often love may actually create a disconnection and with that disconnection comes a sense of loneliness that can foster depression.

I don’t have all the answers, but I do know this. For every angry man I come across in life, I now ask myself, “Is he depressed?”

The Anxious Christian is Coming Soon….Sneak Peek

December 21, 2011 in Writing with 1 Comment

This has been an exciting month for me as I have been wrapping up some details on the soon to be publication of The Anxious Christian: Can God Use Your Anxiety for Good?.

The book will be released by Moody Publishers on March 1.

I’m very thankful for the amazing group of people who have endorsed the book, and a special thanks to the New York Times best selling author of Quitter, Jon Acuff for writing the foreword to the book.

If you are someone who has wrestled with anxiety, then I believe this book is for you.

Here is a sneak peek:

Anxious Christian from ETS Productions on Vimeo.

Can You Tolerate Your Own Anxiety Long Enough to Grow?

December 1, 2011 in Ministry-Theology, Therapy-Psychology with 1 Comment


[image by Phil Schatz]

The ability to live in the question long enough for genius to emerge is a touchstone of creative success. In fact, a 2008 study published in the Journal of Creative Behavior revealed tolerance for ambiguity to be “significantly and positively related” to creativity.

Uncertainty, Innovation, and the Alchemy of Fear

These words from author Jonathan Fields (Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance) reminded me a bit of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s words in his work, Letters to a Young Poet:

…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

When we can tolerate, or sit in our own anxiety…it is then, and only then when we are close enough to being in the place to truly discover, grow and be transformed in the process.

But sadly…most of us aren’t able to tolerate our own anxiety long enough to push through our own fears and doubts.

Anxiety is Good…

November 29, 2011 in Ministry-Theology, Therapy-Psychology, Writing with 1 Comment

Philosophers and Poets, from their perch on the cutting edge of reason, have always seen the advantage of anxiety. It is the “dizziness of reason,” argued Soren Kierkegaard; “the handmaiden of creativity,” said T.S. Eliot; “the beginning of conscience,” observed novelist Angela Carter. So have actors backstage, summoning eternal energies and edges for the roles they play, and sprinters on the block, finding hormonal springs in the fear of failure that allow them to achieve race times they never managed in practice.

So begins the opening paragraph of TIME Magazine’s December cover story, The Two Faces of Anxiety.

This is a timely topic as the release of my book The Anxious Christian: Can God Use Your Anxiety for Good? is being published by Moody Publishers on March 1, 2012. When I was in the book proposal writing/submission phase in the late Fall of 2010, anxiety was the topic that my acquisition’s editor Randall Payleitner seemed to be really focused on. You see, in all my anxiety of trying to submit the right proposal I had submitted a large, sprawling dissertation that lacked any real focus or clarity, but Randall seemed most excited about a chapter I had submitted on anxiety. So eventually, one chapter idea became the whole theme of my new book.

I think anxiety is an important topic because everyone at some point in their life struggles with it, and many struggle with it on an ongoing basis.

But is all anxiety necessarily bad?

I don’t believe so….in fact, anxiety can actually be good for us as I see it as a catalyst to help us grow as people. There are only a couple of options when you begin to feel anxiety.

  1. Pretend it doesn’t exist and push it below the surface.
  2. Acknowledge that the anxiety is there and use it as an opportunity to move you forward/to grow in life.

You choose.

Do Churches Try and Protect Their Congregants from Anxiety?

July 12, 2011 in Ministry-Theology, Pastoral Counseling, Pastoral Leadership, Therapy-Psychology with 4 Comments

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine shared an article with me on my Facebook profile called, How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.

It is a fascinating read for sure, and well worth your time.

But I was especially taken by this passage:

Paul Bohn, a psychiatrist at UCLA who came to speak at my clinic, says the answer may be yes. Based on what he sees in his practice, Bohn believes many parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment—“anything less than pleasant,” as he puts it—with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.

Consider a toddler who’s running in the park and trips on a rock, Bohn says. Some parents swoop in immediately, pick up the toddler, and comfort her in that moment of shock, before she even starts crying. But, Bohn explains, this actually prevents her from feeling secure—not just on the playground, but in life. If you don’t let her experience that momentary confusion, give her the space to figure out what just happened (Oh, I tripped), and then briefly let her grapple with the frustration of having fallen and perhaps even try to pick herself up, she has no idea what discomfort feels like, and will have no framework for how to recover when she feels discomfort later in life. These toddlers become the college kids who text their parents with an SOS if the slightest thing goes wrong, instead of attempting to figure out how to deal with it themselves. If, on the other hand, the child trips on the rock, and the parents let her try to reorient for a second before going over to comfort her, the child learns: That was scary for a second, but I’m okay now. If something unpleasant happens, I can get through it. In many cases, Bohn says, the child recovers fine on her own—but parents never learn this, because they’re too busy protecting their kid when she doesn’t need protection.

I think that we often do the same thing in the church as well.

Take this quote:

“parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment—“anything less than pleasant,” as he puts it—with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.”

And re-write it like this:

“churches will do anything to avoid having their congregants experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment-’anything less than pleasant.’”

I just see too often instances where pastors will swoop in and try and rescue a congregant from having anxiety as they wrestle with scripture or with God. They somehow believe that any anxiety is wrong and the person should have a solid certainty about God’s truth. So much for the dark night of the soul.

Or a youth pastor tries to keep a youth kid from asking too many tough questions that promote some anxiety in the group, and uncomfort with the youth pastor themself.

Or a worship planning meeting will spend endless hours managing every detail of a service so that nothing unplanned happens, or no mistakes are made. Sometimes I wonder if they are just trying to stave off any anxiety that may arise during the service in congregants or themselves if something were to not go off as perfect.

Much of church life is geared around trying to protect people from the frustrations of life and from experiencing any discomfort during church or their spiritual lives.

I say this from experience in my own work as a pastor for many years, and from what is conveyed to me by clients who come in for counseling.

But if anxiety is unpermitted in the church pew, then where else can they go to freely express it than the counseling office?

Managing Anxiety in the Family System: How Couples Can Do a Better Job of Owning Their Own Anxiety

June 7, 2011 in Marriage-Family with 2 Comments

I would estimate that in about 70%-80% of the situations in which kids are brought into my office for counseling, the presenting problems have less to do with the individual child, and more to do with what is happening in the larger family system, and more particularly in the couple’s marriage (or former marriage). The children have often become the scapegoats or the symptom-bearers for the marital problems.

One of the newer relationships that I have become engaged in is a relationship with the Fuller Youth Institute. I love the work that they do in providing training, research and resources for youth workers, youth and families. In June I wrote an article for their E-Journal called Managing Anxiety in the Family: Strategies for Changing Our Relationship Dance.

Anxiety is a huge issue in the lives of many people, and it is often manifested in the lives of the youth I work with. In this article I wanted to help families understand how anxiety works within the family system, and how when couples avoid relational conflict they often end up placing their anxiety onto the lives of their kids. I hope that you will find some of my recommended strategies helpful, and that you become not only more aware of this issue, but that it will also help you avoid casting your anxiety onto others in the process.
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