Strategies for Dealing with Anxiety, Part 5

“Jon, repent of your fears.” This is the go-to, under-my-breath phrase I say to myself when I feel the impulse to back away from a situation that calls for my engagement. For example, when facing a confrontation, my natural instinct is to leave the scene. After years of working on this, I still feel the impulse to make a quick exit. It’s been said that the number one coping mechanism worldwide is avoidance, and I totally get it.

 

Except that there are plenty of instances when avoidance is actually abdication. It’s one thing to avoid a lion rushing you from the tall grass. It’s another thing to frame your frustrated spouse as a lion coming at you. And it’s still yet another thing to stay away from rustling grass because there might just be a lion stalking you. There are situations in your week when you’re called to be a responsible agent, but if you listen to your fears—real or perceived—and obey them, then you’ll end up shirking those responsibilities. With the result being not only lost opportunities to grow yourself but also lost opportunities to advance the good for someone else.

 

If you listen to your fears and obey them, there will be times you’ll violate your own conscience by suppressing the truth to save your own skin, you’ll stagnate your marriage by not learning how to communicate at higher levels of complexity, you’ll cheat your kids by not parenting them through challenging seasons of their development, you’ll enable a toxic work environment by acting like you don’t know what’s going on, you’ll be complicit in the spread of evil in society by not considering ways to take the injustices being done around you and making the wrongs right. I could go on.

 

When I say to myself, “Jon, repent of your fears,” what am I saying? First, the word “repent” means to do a 180-degree turn. My fears are telling me to step away; when I defy my fears, I’m telling myself to step in. Sometimes literally. Repenting of my fears means I’m doing the exact opposite of what my fears are telling me. Rather than abdicating, I assert my will and engage.

 

Second, I have to have some positive ground to stand on with confidence if I’m going to move forward rather than retreat into safety. For the Christian, this is where first-hand knowledge of Christ and his Gospel become the source of our strength to overcome our weaknesses. If I only know of God’s love theoretically but not personally, then I’m in no position to trust him in my immediate circumstances let alone for my eternal destiny.

 

That phrase I say to myself, “Jon, repent of your fears,” is backloaded with truths that come from digging into the Bible and excavating Gospel-saturated literature. Truths with strength and depth to them, such as God’s adoption of me, his promises of Spirit and grace for me, his covenant oath that immediately and eternally secure me to him. So armed, rather than falling on my sword in the face of fear, I can drive the sword of God’s truth into the heart of my fears. My fears haven’t died, but they are getting weaker as I grow stronger in the truth and grace of Christ.

 

To put some counseling language into this, let me go back to my previous post in which I referenced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and the Stoic philosophy which forms its foundation for psychological help. Everything I’ve written in this post accords with CBT principles. CBT says that much of our psychological distress can be attributed to unhealthy ways of thinking and dysfunctional learned behavior. When I say I need to not listen to my fear and instead assert my will and engage, CBT would say that what I’m doing is activating my prefrontal cortex (the thinking part of my brain) to influence my limbic system (the feeling part of my brain).  

 

By learning to rewrite the script of the stories I tell myself, and then acting out the new storyline, my life is changed. Yes, I believe that’s right. But what storyline will I choose? We could go way back to Marcus Aurelius, the last famous Stoic Roman Emperor, and see how this played out for him psychologically. It so happens that the last fourteen years of Marcus’s rule were marked by a devastating plague. Rough estimates put the death toll at around five million lives lost. Whatever the contagion was, it ravaged the city of Rome and decimated the Roman Legion. What we know of Marcus is that he mentally rehearsed his death many times over. So much so that when his dying day finally came, possibly due to the virus, he was neither surprised nor fearful because he had already psychologically put himself in that place many times beforehand.

 

For the record, I’m not saying that Christians should adopt Stoicism as their guiding light; I’m saying that Stoicism and CBT shed light on the truths of Christian Scripture and help in its application to daily living. I do not tell clients, as CBT would for example, that they need to learn how to soothe their amygdala. Nor would I say that when you’re distressed with fear or anxiety you should simply practice deep breathing and be grateful to an impersonal universe. While doing that might actually calm you down, at the functional level you’ve become your own savior.  

 

Instead, growing Christians choose to re-enact a storyline in which Jesus is their Savior both eternally and immediately. Long before Marcus Aurelius, God-fearing worshippers were practicing CBT-like spiritual disciplines. Christians don’t need scientific findings to validate our faith, but scientific discoveries do illuminate eternal truths that have always been there. When I can identify my fears, defy them and step into situations that call for engagement, I do so with the grace and wisdom of Christ who enables me to do what I would otherwise avoid.  And I thank God for that.

 

Because of Christ in you, you do have the resources needed to dispel and overcome your fears.