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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