G4 Emotions

As you reach this chapter the momentum of change has probably already fluctuated several times. Getting started was hard. It felt like an uphill battle. Fear and despair didn’t want to let go of you and you didn’t want to admit it had a hold on you. Doubting your emotions can feel like betraying a friend; breakups are never easy even when they’re good.

But honesty with self, others, and God has a great way of building momentum. You began to let go of the weights of sin that clung to you so you could run free (Heb. 12:1). This second phase is almost always exciting. People sometimes feel unsettled by the sense of freedom that comes with emotional liberty.

In the third phase, the one we’re starting now, life restructuring may begin to feel more like work again. “Implementation” is not an exciting word or process. Lasting change happens in incremental units and mundane moments. Change begins to impact moments that feel “less relevant” to your battle with depression-anxiety. The relief you’ve gained tempts you think you can risk a few of your previous bad emotional habits.

In this chapter you will evaluate the effectiveness and needed modifications to your life restructuring plan made in chapter six. This step will require the passage of time. Implementing (chapter seven) takes longer than creating a plan (chapter six). For this reason, if you are in a group program, it is recommended that you give at least two months to this step. You will need to see how your plan responds to the changes of settings, relationships, and emotions that happen more over months than days.

As this time passes, there are two areas of assessment that you will be performing from this chapter. First, you will be learning how to measure lasting progress. What is the difference between “I’m having a good day” and “My life is beginning to conform to God’s design”? Second, you will be looking at key areas of your life to make sure that you have not overlooked something that was not immediately relevant during the emotional crisis that precipitated your seeking help.

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Depression-anxiety crowds out peace and hope in our lives. Conversely, peace and hope can crowd out depression-anxiety from our lives. The more space we a lot for one set of emotions the less room we will have for the other. This inverse relationship sets up the approach we will take in this chapter.

We will take a two-fold approach – advocating strategies that decrease depression-anxiety and strategies that increase peace-hope. It is recommended that you implement a “balanced diet” – relatively equal numbers of approaches of each type.

This chapter is a buffet. If you consider every strategy presented to be an assignment, this chapter will overwhelm you. As you read, select those strategies that best fit your life circumstances, the dynamics of your struggle, and your personality. If you are working through this material with a friend or counselor, invite them to suggest which strategies they believe would have the largest impact.

To help you select a balanced set of strategies we have divided this chapter into six sections. Some of this material will be crystalizing and making more actionable what you have already learned. Other parts will be fresh applications of the gospel-truths we have been building upon.

1. Immediate Negative Emotion Response Plan
2. Stewarding Your Body
3. Extended Negative Emotion Response Plan
4. Life Management
5. Pursuit of Joy Plan
6. Strategic Spiritual Disciplines

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It is easier to see why we need to confess sins like anger or lust to others; these are sins that are more clearly against another person. But whatever lack of faith or self-destructiveness is present in anxiety-depression seems to be much more internally corrosive than externally offensive. This is not as true as we are prone to believe – rarely can we be emotionally disrupted and loving optimally – but it is a good place to start this conversation.

The pursuit of forgiveness is not the only reason we should confess our sin. However, if forgiveness is the only reason that comes to mind when you think about confession, then this chapter will likely produce a reaction of defensiveness or shame. These are the very emotions that push away from others instead of towards them. Unless we combat this misconception we’ll be fighting an uphill battle in this step.

Confession is what invites other people into our lives and points out to them where they can help. Confession is how we acknowledge our weakness and admit that we need their help. Confession is what ensures others that we have the humility and realistic expectations necessary to be safe to help. Confession is the door to community; the door through which we much enter if we do not want to be alone in the dark with our emotions of depression-anxiety.

Simply put; we confess to others because it is good for our pursuit of righteousness as much as because we’ve sinned. Often, with confession, we are like the child who is offended by their parents telling them to eat the vegetables so they can be “big and strong.” We perceive the remedy as an insult highlighting that we are “small and weak.” It makes sense, but as long as we think that way we’re trapped.

In this chapter you will be asked to go to the people in order to confess:

• Your weakness and need for help
• How your depression-anxiety caused you to mistrust God
• How your depression anxiety led you to neglect, offend, or control them
• How your depression anxiety resulted in your living in unhealthy ways

You’ve been honest with yourself (steps 1-3) and honest with God (step 4). Now you need to be honest with those around you (this step) in order to put yourself in the best position to enact lasting change (steps 6-8) and enjoy it (step 9). In order to help you take this pivotal step well, we’ll examine the subject of confession in two sections.

1. How to Confess
2. Preparing for Confession

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Let’s play with the double entendre (e.g., word or phrase with two meanings) “emotional repentance” for a moment. Many readers may be thinking, “My emotions are already down, why do you want me to repent? How does feeling bad about feeling bad help me feel any better?” The difficulty with this logic is that it confuses “feeling bad about something” with repentance; God does not forgive us because we are emotionally self-lacerating. That is masochism not the gospel.

The image behind the Hebrew word for repent is “U-turn.” When we repent we change directions. In step three, you came to understand the motive behind your anxiety-depression. In this step, you will turn from those empty-promising idols back to the God who wants to be your refuge, hope, strength, and Savior.

Until you grasp this picture of God and repentance, this step will feel like you’re being asked to fight fire with fire; depression with despair or fear with desperation. After you grasp what God is offering you will realize it is like putting down a glass of salt water for a glass of fresh water.

To help you on this part of your journey, we will examine repentance in three ways.

1. To Whom Are You Repenting?
2. Key Elements of Repentance
3. A Sample Prayer of Repentance

In the first section we want you to see that repentance is a relationship before it is an activity. In the second section we want you to understand the actions that comprise complete repentance. In the final section we want to help you get used to talking to God this way about your depression-anxiety.

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This is the chapter where we trace the smoke back to its fire. Hopefully the steps you’ve taken to understand your experience of depression-anxiety have equipped you to begin to answer the “why” question more accurately. Too often, in the intensity of our emotion, we come to the “why” question as a form of desperation; wanting deliverance more than an answer that would make the next step in our journey clearer.

One of the benefits of slowing this journey down with steps is that it allows us to arrive at the “why” question in a different frame of mind. We can come to it intentionally and with the information necessary to make a sound assessment; instead of being drug to it as a “question of last resorts.”

 In this chapter, we will explore the why question in three sections.

1. Our Personal-Family History of Anxiety-Depression
2. Biology and Our Anxiety-Depression
3. Our Cognitive-Emotional Motives for Anxiety-Depression

The first two areas of assessment reveal experiences of anxiety-depression which are more rooted in suffering than sin. If you find the primary explanation for your emotions in these sections, it is advised you switch to the compliment to this study which examines how Scripture speaks to anxiety-depression as a suffering experience.

The third section looks at how our beliefs, values, and lifestyle contribute to our experience of anxiety-depression. These are areas over which we bear personal-moral responsibility. This section will set up the remaining steps in this seminar, which examine how Scripture speaks to anxiety-depression as a sinful experience.

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Let’s be honest, acknowledging the breadth and impact of your depressive-anxious struggle is not going to make it better at first. If our only goal is relief, then this is a bad strategy. But if our goal is to overcome our depressive-anxious struggle, to whatever degree this is possible, then this type of assessment is the only strategy. Ignorance may allay our fear-despair in the moment, but compounds them in the long run.

Why bring this up? Because many who struggle with anxiety-depression get into the emotional habit of trading dimes for nickels because they are larger and perceived as having more value (a cruel joke big brothers have played on little brothers since the minting of coins began). The emotional equivalent is pursuing short-term relief in a way that increases long-term distress. Until we are willing to stop making this trade we will be emotionally bankrupt no matter how hard we work to earn more dimes to trade for nickels.

The hope this chapter provides is that it equips us to take every future step with greater effectiveness. The information gleaned in the midst of completing this step is what will allow cliché advice to become a well-tailored strategy. Knowing your struggle better will allow you to move from using God’s Word as a source of broad-general principles to targeted truths combating core lies that undergird your depressive-anxious struggle.

Remind yourself of this when you are tempted to say this chapter is “too hard.” Christians have always had to discipline themselves to remember key truths in hard times (Lamentations 3:21ff). Do not try to accomplish this on your own. Enlist friends, small group members, a pastor, or a counselor to become a support network that prays for you in this process and with whom you can share when the process is hard. Don’t forget to pray for God’s strength. He does not hear your cries for help as whining. Throughout the Bible he invites you to call upon him.

In this chapter we will seek to answer three questions in our effort to “acknowledge the breadth and impact of our depressive-anxious struggle.”

1. When is depression-anxiety sinful?
2. What kinds of thinking undergird depression-anxiety?
3. What areas of life are affected by depression-anxiety?

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Human beings are unique from all other creatures in our ability to experience anxiety-depression at times that do not immediately demand the response of fear or despair. Our twin abilities to anticipate and reflect, which account for the major advancements of civilization, also give these unpleasant emotions a chronic place in our lives.

Human beings can not only learn from the past, we can be shamed or traumatized by our past. We can not only plan for the future, we can project many different worst-case scenarios or unrealistic expectations for our future. The same abilities that allow for the greatest human achievements also generate some our most intense internal tortures.

When Satan tempted Eve, he said eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would make them “like God” (Genesis 3:4). He was right, not because Adam and Eve become small deities, but because we gained the partial ability – at least cognitively – to simultaneously live in the past, present, and future. We began to bare the weight of what was, is, and might be with only the ability to influence the present.

One result of this is that depression-anxiety became a very normal part of the fallen human experience. No longer were we willing to live each moment in contented, trusting reliance upon God. We began to want to know “what we would do if…” some bad thing happened (a non-issue before the Fall) and to be ruled by “what we should have done instead of…” some bad or untimely thing we did (another non-issue before the Fall).

In this we see that all depression-anxiety has its roots in sin. That is not to say that all depression-anxiety is the direct consequence of personal sin. Biology, environment, and choice all play a role in our emotions. A big part of this seminar will be learning to identify the role and implications of each.

But the human capacity for unhealthy, untimely depression-anxiety (emotions that are not a proportional response to some immediate dangerous stimulus) became possible at the Fall and are exacerbated as we seek to live lives that are increasingly independent from God. That is why, in this seminar, we will look at those aspects of depression-anxiety over which our choices and beliefs have influence and learn how to find the freedom God provides for these aspects of those emotions in the gospel through repentance, trust of God’s character, and obedience to God’s Word.

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It would 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. If we were grieving the loss of a loved one, we might resist the idea of a new normal. If we were processing a betrayal, we might prefer “things be like they were before the infidelity.” But with anxiety-depression, the tendency is often more cynicism and doubt than resistance.

Depression-anxiety made “normal” feel painful for so long we wonder if “normal” can be good.

Even if you are optimistic about this new normal, a new normal is scary. It is unknown. It sounds so permanent. It soon will be the part of your life that occurs whether you’re intentional about shaping it or not. But if you are intimidated by this step, do not let that convince you that you have not completed the prior steps adequately.

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.

The embedded deception in this kind of thinking is that the new strategy would have prevented the experience of depression-anxiety from ever occurring. If this were true, then you would be facing a sin-based experience of depression-anxiety rather than a suffering-based one.

The clearest example of this dynamic might be grief. Grief is clearly a form of suffering. But we are not powerlessly trapped in the experience of grief for a lifetime. There are things we can do to process the experience of grief and offset its impact. However, doing these things earlier would not have prevented our loved one from dying or our experience of grief at their death.

This is how we would encourage you to consider the strategies presented in this chapter. They are approaches to help alleviate the impact of depression-anxiety in your life. We present more strategies than you will be able to implement. Don’t get overwhelmed. Choose those that seem like the best fit for your experience. If you’re unsure which ones those may be, consult with the friends, pastor, or counselor with whom we’ve encouraged you to walk through this material.

If you believe that you need an approach to anxiety-depression that calls you take more personal responsibility for your emotional state, then we would encourage you to consult chapter six in the corresponding study that addresses these same emotions from a sin paradigm (www.bradhambrick.com/depression).

Your goal at the end of this chapter, and possibly in conjunction with chapter six of the corresponding study, is to identify the most impactful things you could do in your struggle with depression-anxiety. We want to help you break the sense of powerlessness to which it is so easy to succumb.

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