G4 Emotions

Chapter four may have left you without a story. You looked at the events and impact of your depression-anxiety in chapters two and three, then let go of the destructive narratives that you used to explain them in chapter four. In chapter five you learned to mourn the presence of depression-anxiety without giving in to unhealthy wallowing.

To this point it is as if you found an old pocket watch on a walk through the woods. It was dirty and tarnished. You’ve disassembled its parts to clean and polish them. You appreciate its value enough to be sad for the person who lost it. Now we’re about to begin the process of putting it back together again.

Chapter six is intended to give you the right story out of which to live out the practical directives you’ll find in chapters seven and eight. Just like an athlete can train hard for revenge (one story line) or to reach his full potential (a different, healthy story line), we can strive for healthy emotions with several different narratives fueling / explaining our actions.

The reason we take the time for this step is not primarily about effectiveness; many athletes train very well when they are seeking revenge. Our goal in this chapter is to ensure that our pursuit of emotional heath is spiritually healthy.

In this chapter we will seek to answer six questions that often become distorted in our struggle with depression-anxiety. We will offer key points of clarification that are commonly helpful for re-orienting people’s struggle through anxiety-depression, but encourage you to take the time to write out your thoughts on what a healthy response to your experience of depression-anxiety would be.

1. Who Am I Now?
2. Who and Where Is God?
3. What Should I Expect from My Friends?
4. What Is Sin If This Is Suffering?
5. Is Hope Worth Disappointment?
6. What Am I Living For?

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What are we supposed to do with bad news? Step four reveals a large amount of “bad news” – narratives we place upon our experience of depression-anxiety which leave us feeling shame or like God is absent. What are we supposed to do with that kind of bad news?

The tempting answer is “make it better… spin it positive… fast… if we can use the Bible, all the better; that way we’re more likely to believe what we’re telling ourselves.” Chances are you’ve tried that and have the scars which rushed emotional change produces to prove it.

So let’s ask a better question, “How does God want to care for you as you come to grips with these false narratives?” Does God want to free you with truth (John 8:32)? Yes, but he also wants to free you in a way that is bearable and sustainable. God wants your change to last and to be motivated by grace instead of shame or fear.

That means God wants you to grieve the presence of suffering in your life. God does not think you are whining when you acknowledge that depression-anxiety has been a heavy burden. God wants you to know his care during your suffering so that we will rely upon his care in the midst of future blessings and hardships.

Mourning is the focus of this chapter. We want you to feel free to mourn the presence of depression-anxiety (agreeing with God about the hardship of suffering) instead of feeling shame about it (hiding it from God and others in order to appear strong). Mourning our suffering allows us to quit faking strength so that we free to rely on God’s strength and his people.

We will examine the subject of morning in four sections:

1. What Is Being Mourned?
2. Differentiating Mourning from Wallowing
3. How to Mourn
4. That’s Not Helpful: Things Not to Say

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This may be the darkest step in your journey. It will be where your fears find words and they move from being a haunting echo in your emotions to overt statements that feel more true than they are. You will be asked to question what is real so that you can embrace what is true and find the freedom this brings.

Imagine the child who is afraid of learning to swim. Each time she is carried near the water she clinches her parent’s neck with all her might. Her fear is real. We need not assign the motive of being a “drama queen” or that she is faking for attention. But her fear is not true. The emotion is built upon a false story of drowning. Believing this story both locks her in fear and prevents her from knowing the joy of swimming.

We want you to be able to read this chapter with the tone of a compassionate parent helping this young girl overcome her fear of learning to swim. We want to honor your emotions of anxiety-depression without affirming the destructive, untrue narratives that undergird them.

This process will not un-script the facts you detailed in step two or the impact you discovered in chapter three. The young girl could make many factual statements that seemingly affirm her false story, “I do not know how to swim. You want me to get in water deeper than I am tall. People who don’t know how to swim drown in water over their head.”

These facts get several things wrong – the character of the parent, the presence of the parent, the ability of the girl to learn, the level of danger of the pool, and how much fun swimming will be. But we can all sympathize with how easily the realness of our emotions interfere with these kinds of truths about God, ourselves, and our circumstances.

To help you complete this step we will break this chapter into two parts:

1. What Does My Depression-Anxiety Say? 10 Potential Themes
2. From Facts to Themes to Story 

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After acknowledging the history and realness of your depressive-anxious experience, you need to understand the impact of these experiences on your life. Unless we understand the impact, we will be forced to “just try to feel better;” which leads us to the trapping question, “How can I change my emotions when they do not respond to my will like my hands and feet do?” Merely trying to feel better reinforces a disposition of helplessness and despair.

But the other rebuttal is, “Looking at the impact will only make me feel worse.” This is partially true, and why it is highly recommended you go through this study with a friend, pastor, or counselor. But it is also largely false. Consider the parallel example of debt. Many people in debt fail to itemize and total their debt for fear it will be overwhelming. But that leaves them powerless and with a “haunting ambiguous” sense of how big it must be.

In this chapter we will seek to understand the impact of your depressive-anxious experience in three key areas.

1. Factors that Contribute to Impact
2. Changes in Lifestyle that Add to Impact
3. Impact on Family and Relationships

While difficult, this examination will do several things. First, it will show you where and how you can begin to engage your depressive-anxious experience without trying to artificially “make yourself feel better.” The information gathered will be even more important in step seven.

Second, it will de-mystify the experience of anxiety-depression. Often the question, “How did things get this bad?” paralyzes and shames us with bewilderment. No piece of the depressive-anxious experience seems to account for the whole. Looking at the pieces can give you the hope and strength to continue the journey.

Third, it will begin to reveal the unhealthy ways you have made sense of your anxious-depressive experience. This will be the primary focus of step four, but understanding impact is a great way to make the unhealthy “story” we build around our depressive-anxious experience more obvious and, therefore, possible to change.

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“It’s not that big of a deal. I’ll just press through this. What is a little sadness or anxiety? I can still do my job, pass my tests, take care of my kids, etc… I don’t want people to think I’m weak, weird, needy, ‘have issues’ etc…” These are the kind of thoughts that are often used to minimize or dismiss the experience of depression-anxiety.

Some of these messages may be good and true. Assessing how well you care for your self, family, and responsibilities is important. Often we are “just sad.”

Other messages are purely stigmatizing and lead us to believe that asking for help would make us sub-human or a drain on our friends. These messages will tempt us to “be strong” until we are at “code red” and despair-panic has us firmly in its grip.

Your goals in this chapter are simple – (a) to assess how severe your struggles with depression-anxiety are, (b) to determine the different expressions of depression-anxiety you struggle with, and (c) to identify who you need to ask to come alongside of you in this journey towards hope and peace.

In order to help you in this process, we will provide you with two tools.

1.    A Depression-Anxiety Evaluation

2.    A Depression-Anxiety Daily Symptom Chart

The evaluation will provide an overview of the various expressions of depression-anxiety you may be experiencing. This information will help you to identify which symptoms it would be beneficial to track on the daily chart. Becoming aware of the various types-frequency-intensity of our emotions will help you gain important aspects of insight to look for in chapters 3-5 and tangibly measure progress by in chapters 6-8.

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What is the only thing more overwhelming than being asked to lift an unbearable load? Being asked to move while carrying an unbearable load. That is what many people feel is being asked of them when they begin a journey like this one. When you’re emotionally taxed beyond your max, then even the most practical and compassionate advice either feels like it comes from an enemy (someone against you) or a stranger (someone who “just doesn’t understand”).

There is no way around this obstacle, so let me begin by acknowledging the level of faith and courage represented in your willingness to read these words. To you it may feel like doubt and fear, but your willingness to engage this material is noble and virtuous. I wish, and I’m sure you do too, that we could just rename your depression-anxiety as something positive and it would go away, become a blessing, or become an indicator of some unseen virtue.

Those options do exist. Over the course of this study your depression-anxiety may…

• … diminish to a point that it does not interfere with your day-to-day life.
• … become the context for you to learn about God or care for others in new ways.
• … reveal aspects of your character which you wrongly viewed as meriting shame instead of honor.

But we don’t know that now and there is little value in trying to predict in how God will work in your experience at this point in the journey. Likely those things seem far away; as if they belong in a fairy tale. If so, focusing on them will serve as a discouragement rather than an encouragement in the early stages of your journey.

Instead, let’s ask a less ambitious questions; not, “Where are we going and what are all the steps and challenges to getting there?” but, “What is the next step and how do I prepare myself to take one step in the direction of hope?” At any moment we can take one step towards hope. If you are already feeling overwhelmed, it may do you little good to think about more than that.

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It might be easy to want this study, like this season of your life, to just be over. But this study, like your life, has at least one more chapter (and several appendices) left. When you put a great deal of effort, as you undoubtedly have, into getting past something, it can be easy to forget that there is something next. The fact that God has brought you to this point should be evidence enough that He has more in store for you and more to do through you.

In this chapter you will be doing most of the writing, because it is your life that is being stewarded for the glory of God. No one else could write this chapter but you. What you will be given is nine questions that walk you through a life assessment to determine where God wants you to serve now and where He may want to prepare you to serve in the future.

As you read through and answer the next nine questions, remember God’s patience and timing. There will be some aspects of God’s design that you can engage in immediately. But there may also be ways you want to serve God that will require you to be more mature or be equipped before you are prepared to fulfill them. The main thing is to begin to have a vision for life that involves being God’s servant and actively engaging that vision where you are currently equipped.

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New and normal are words that do not belong together. But that is precisely what step eight is all about, establishing a new normal. In steps 2-4, you looked at the things that disrupted your old normal. In step 5, you grieved the loss of your old normal. In steps 6-7, you began to piece together a new, healthy normal. Now, in step 8, you will begin to rest in that new normal and allow it to solidify.

Unfortunately, the post-traumatic responses of intrusion, constriction, hyper-arousal, shame, and fragmentation created a way of life that made it easy for us to wonder if “normal” could ever be good again. Hopefully that skepticism is beginning to fade by the time you’ve reached this point in your journey.

Realize, the phrase “new normal” seems to imply more intentionality than it actually requires. You do not need a spreadsheet with seven columns and twenty-four rows to itemize and color-code. As you live wisely, a new-healthy normal will happen. This chapter will be devoted to identifying the defining marks of this new normal so you can be comforted as this occurs.

The chapter will also include two other sections. First, we will look at how this new normal assimilates into your life story. This will be a place for you to summarize what you learned and how you have grown over the course of this study. You will seek to combine the narrative you built in steps four through six with the practices you implemented in steps seven.

Second, guidance will be provided to help you think through how to prepare to transition from your current formal helping relationship (i.e., support group, counseling relationship, or mentor relationship) into general small group ministry of your church for continued encouragement and growth. You are about to enter a new season of transition: from healing to living. 

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One of the biggest challenges in identifying goals for combatting the effects of suffering is to be active without accepting false guilt. It is easy to think if there is something I “can do” to offset the impact of my suffering, then it is something I “should have been doing” all along.

In order to help you avoid this mindset, we will arrange the strategies for combatting the impact of your suffering around the three areas of symptoms most common to the post-traumatic experience.

1. Settling Hyper-Arousal Symptoms
2. Countering Intrusive Symptoms
3. Lessening Constrictive Symptoms

The intent is to help you see that, because the presence or magnification of these symptoms did not begin until you experienced your trauma, that they are not things you “should have been doing all along” that would have “prevented the trauma in the first place.”

Many of these approaches do have application in normal-everyday life. This is because re-engaging life and relationships is a very normal-everyday activity. Don’t allow this to become a point of self-condemnation (i.e., “I must be an idiot if this is all I should have been doing”) or short-cutting (i.e., “I can stop this study now, the information is getting simple”).

These are the steps that solidify the progress you’ve made on your journey. These are the steps you’ll return to when you face an unexpected, intense trigger in the future. These are the steps that will help prevent future experiences of suffering from revitalizing your old suffering story (step four) by making your progress seem like a façade. 

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When you experienced your trauma, life stopped, at least parts of your life stopped, yet the rest of life has continued in a way that can be both disorienting and offensive. So far this study has been a major deconstruction project; we have broken down your experience and its fallout in many ways. The result is, while you may feel like there is hope for things to be better, you likely also feel like a person without a story.

That is what this chapter begins to address. In this chapter you will begin to put the pieces you deconstructed into a new narrative; not a narrative that makes the “sad things untrue” but a narrative that allows you to understand yourself, God, your life, and the future in ways that are healthy and hopeful.

This new narrative will likely not answer the nagging “why” question. Think about most suspenseful movies you’ve seen or books you’ve read. When is the “why” plot revealed? At the end. Where are you in your journey? Still in the middle. It is unlikely at this stage in the journey that, however God intends to redeem your experience, that this could be clear to you now. Guessing at God’s intention will likely place you in a series of all-or-nothing moments where you try to seize a moment to make your trauma experience seem “worth it,” only to be disappointed or make the experience worse.

Instead, at this stage in your journey, it is recommended that you seek to understand yourself, God, others, your setting, and your future in a way that both sets you up for stable-healthy living now and allows for redemptive moments where your experience can be used for a larger purpose when the situation is wise. We will seek to do this by walking you through five questions that help you identify key ways God would have you understand your experience.

1. Who Am I Now?
2. Who and Where Is God?
3. Where Am I?
4. Is Hope Worth Fear?
5. What Am I Living For?

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