Strategies for Dealing with Anxiety, Part 4

A second strategy for dealing with anxiety works like this: acknowledge the fear, name it by writing it down, and then practice repenting of it. Let me explain.

 

Years one to three of my marriage were rough at times primarily because I was conflict avoidant. Tamarah would say something to me straight, direct, and with a tone of confidence. My receptors would interpret her as being angry, as if she was hunting a fight. She wasn’t; I just took it that way. And since I don’t like to argue and was a bit overwhelmed with her pace, I did what any sensible man would do: I bailed out and went to another room.

 

What I didn’t know and learn until year three was that every time I cut bait on a difficult conversation, my wife would lose a little more respect for me. Her instinct is to resolve issues and keep moving forward. My instinct is to freeze when confronted by a crazy person. A soft answer turns away wrath, as the proverb says, but I can vouch that no answer only delays it.  

 

In year three, I could see we were on a bad set of train tracks. We were headed for a terrible wreck if we didn’t do something to change course. One day, during a time of non-conflict, I started asking questions about what I perceived to be my wife’s anger. Over the course of many conversations and over the period of a couple years, it became increasingly clear to me that we each had what I now call “Sending Errors” and “Receiving Errors”. It wasn’t just Tamarah’s delivery that was a problem for me, my fears turned out to be an even bigger issue.

 

It was during this same time period that I came to Psalm 56, where verse three reads, “When I am afraid, I will trust in God.” I sometimes read a commentary alongside whatever Scripture passage I’m studying, and I will never forget the words of the commentator on this verse. Derek Kidner writes, “Faith is seen here as a deliberate act, in defiance of one’s emotional state.”

 

I no sooner finished that sentence when I felt something akin to a hot iron branding it onto my psyche. There was no work involved in committing it to memory. It just happened, instantly. Big gaps of time often pass between the point of gaining insight and the point of insight becoming conviction. There was no such time gap on this day.

 

Pieces were falling into place. I was learning that my fears had a voice, and when I listened to that voice too long I would invariably obey that voice. Sometimes to very damaging effect, both to myself and to Tamarah. But now, through David’s witness, I learned there was another voice in me, a countervailing voice, the voice of faith in Christ that empowered me to defy my fears.  

 

It was time for me to be honest with myself. What was I afraid of, exactly? I could feel my fears and knew what they were telling me to do. But could I separate one fear from another? I decided to sit down with a blank piece of paper and try to name my fears. When it came to these hard conversations with my wife, what was I afraid of?

 

Was I afraid of her physically? No, that wasn’t it. Was it rejection? Yes, that was part of it. But there was more. Since I have a tendency to catastrophize situations, I asked myself what I thought the worst-case scenario might look like. If I were to engage my wife in a difficult conversation, my fears were telling me that the worst possible thing that could happen would be what? After I wrote down my answer and looked at it, I laughed.

 

“I could die.”

 

I could die? As in, like, my physical heart would blow out of my chest and I would bleed out on the kitchen floor? That’s ridiculous. That’s not going to happen. And yet that’s what it felt like was going to happen. That’s what my fears were telling me.  

 

To bring some counseling theory into this picture, we would say there are many things in our lives beyond our control. Take the current pandemic as an example. At the same time, I am responsible for and can control my thoughts and actions related to what’s going on around me.  My thinking is up to me, and if I assess something as really bad, then it’s my assessment of the situation—rather than the situation itself—that causes me distress. So would my level of distress diminish if I thought about the situation differently?

 

Such questioning and reasoning get to the heart of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). If you’re not familiar with CBT, it happens to be today’s in vogue form of psychotherapy. What’s  less well known is that the founders of CBT, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, have stated that the philosophical roots of CBT can be found in Stoicism. And one of Stoicism’s maxims says that fear does more harm to us than the things of which we’re afraid.  

 

This is true. Fears and worries can ruin your life in many ways, from keeping you up at night to losing or gaining weight to literally ending your own existence. What Stoicism recognizes—and  the Bible has said this all along—is that there are fates worse than death. (Back on my Easter post from two months ago, I shared the thought that God looking away from someone would be a fate worse than death). In this case, fears that control us can be worse than death because they erode the moral center of your being. As that happens, you’ll be transforming downward into a sub-human life.

 

For example, Boethius (475-525 AD), a Stoic who wrote, Consolation of Philosophy, illustrates it this way: “The point is that the self is not a given, an object, whose essential nature is unchangeable. Triangles can never be non-triangular, and rocks are always guaranteed to be rocky, grass grassy, and dogs doggy—but humans can be inhuman. We alone can fail to achieve our nature. For this reason, anyone whom you find transformed by vice cannot be counted a man. The man who is driven by avarice is like a wolf; the restless, angry man who spends his life in quarrels you will compare to a dog. The treacherous conspirator who steals by fraud may be likened to a fox. The fearful and timid man who trembles without reason is like a deer; the lazy fellow is like an ass. The volatile, inconstant man who continually changes direction is like a bird; the man who is sunk in foul lust is trapped in the pleasures of a filthy sow. In this way, anyone who abandons virtue ceases to be a man, since he cannot share in the divine nature and instead becomes a beast.”

 

The reason Tamarah was losing respect for me was that I was acting like a scaredy-cat when she needed a mature human to confidently and calmly engage her. I had work to do. The good news is that God in Christ has given us the resources to confront our fears and live in growing freedom from them. Next month, I’ll endeavor to show you how I learned to do this.  

 

Because Christ didn’t die and rise to life again to leave us enslaved to our fears.