by Sissy Goff
“Yes,” your parents say. “This is Daystar.”
(Daystar is where I get to sit with girls like you and their families every day, and have for almost thirty years. I sound a lot older than I feel, by the way.)
You walk in the front door of Daystar to find a lobby that looks more like a Pottery Barn living room than an office. Not exactly what you were expecting from a counselor’s office.
You’re greeted by smiling faces and given a tour of the house. You’re even offered popcorn in our kitchen. After a few minutes, I come down the stairs to meet you, followed by my little therapy assistant, Lucy, a black-and-white fluff ball of a Havanese puppy.
Then we’d go upstairs to my office. I’d sit across from you, Lucy would likely sit right next to you or crawl up in your lap, and we’d start talking.
Actually, I’d start by telling you that anything you tell me is confidential and that I want Daystar to feel like a safe place for you. In reality, as much as a book can, I want you to feel this book is a safe place too.
A place for you to learn more about not only what’s going on inside of you, but who you are.
A place for you to write about what you’re feeling and learning.
A place for you to discover more of who God has made you to be and the immense strength and courage He has placed inside you.
This book is called Brave because that’s what I believe you are already, even though we haven’t actually met. There are a few reasons I know you’re brave, which we’ll get to later. For now, just reading this introduction means you’re brave—that you know worry is something you struggle with and you’re ready to fight it. I absolutely trust that you can.
I have a feeling whoever bought this book for you believes the same thing. So even though we haven’t met, consider me a part of your team. That really is what I do for a living. I have the profound privilege of cheering on some of the most amazing girls in the world—girls just like you. My dog, Lucy, and I both do. It’s a pretty incredible job. Plus, who wouldn’t want to take their dog to work?
I hope I’ve already earned a little bit of your trust and that you’ll keep reading. I really do think you’ll finish this book not only knowing practical ways to fight your worry and anxiety, but also having found more of you along the way—with all of the bravery, strength, and heart God has placed inside of you.
Rules for Reading
Okay, they’re not really rules. I don’t want you to shut this book immediately. They’re more like guidelines or even just things to remember. So cross out “Rules for Reading.” Literally—take your pen and cross that statement out right now.
A Few Things to Remember
There is no wrong answer. The goal is for you to discover more of you, remember? What you feel and think is important. So I want you to write it, or draw it, if you’re more of a draw-er.
Don’t worry about someone finding this book and reading it. Okay, your little sister might, so maybe you should hide it somewhere good. But that’s why I wrote the note in the beginning to your parents, letting them know this book is for you—to process your emotions on your own. Don’t worry about them finding the book and reading what you’ve written. It’s so important that you write about or draw your feelings. At some point, I’m also going to encourage you to talk about them.
Be honest with yourself. It’s going to be hard to admit some of the things we talk about. It’s hard sometimes to talk about struggles. It’s especially hard when you want to do things right, which I imagine is true about you. It’s true about me too, which is why I know. This book will only help, however, if you’re honest.
Practice. This is actually the most important guideline. The number one reason girls—and really anyone—don’t work through their anxiety is that they don’t practice the skills they learn to fight the anxiety. So as we go through this book, I’m going to give you different types of homework. I know—not a fun word—but this homework will be fun. Actually, what’s fun is the confidence I KNOW you will gain, although the work might be hard at times.
Share. I guess in number 3 I made it seem like you could just write or draw about things, but I really do want you to talk. I want you to know you’re not alone in what you’re feeling, which is why I’m including the stories of other girls in these pages. But I also want you to be talking to people you can see in-person, people who will be able to respond to you in real time. I want you to have other people on this team who are cheering you on—just like I am.
Here we go. . . .
1. Defining the Worry Words
I don’t think it’s ever been harder to be a teenager than it is today. Especially a teenage girl. Again, I’ve been counseling girls for almost thirty years. That’s a lot of years. And a lot of girls.
I’ll share reasons why I believe the teen years are hard, but first, I’d love to know what you think. Do you agree? Why do you think it’s especially hard to be a teenage girl today?
That’s a great list, I’m sure. Here’s something I want you to know as we go through this book together. What you’re saying makes sense. I know, I know—I can’t hear you. But I still know it’s true. The most important thing is not even what you say, but that you’re saying it. For that reason, there is going to be a lot of space in this book for you to journal—and draw too, if you’re more of a draw-er than a journaler. I’d love for you to do a little of both.
Worry’s Best Tricks
Anxiety has a lot of tricks it tries to play on you. We’ll talk about specific tricks and tools in the “Help” section, but I’m going to go ahead and tell you two of worry’s biggest tricks.
Worry tries to make you think
something is wrong with you.
you’re the only one who feels this way.
Anxiety—we’ll give him a better name later—is a big fat liar. Both statements above are untrue. Sadly, though, almost every girl I’ve met has believed those two things. It’s why I want to disprove them both right here in the beginning. They’re his best tricks, and he’s the worst for trying to tell you those things.
Nothing is wrong with you. We’re going to talk in chapter 2 about why you specifically might struggle with worry and anxiety, but I’ll go ahead and tell you that rather than something being wrong with your brain, it means something is really right. And you’re in good company. Actually, almost one in three kids struggle with anxiety,1 and girls are twice as likely as boys.2
That means there’s a good chance it’s also happening to the girl who sits beside you in class, or the one whose locker is next to yours, or even the girl in your grade who intimidates you the most. It might be happening to your best friend too, and you don’t know because neither of you has said it out loud. That’s what happens with worry and anxiety. We have these thoughts . . . these scary thoughts that feel like they consume us at times. We feel like we’re the only ones, so we don’t say anything to anyone. The thoughts make us feel like something is wrong with us. Again, I can promise you that it’s not. And we’ve already started to disprove the second idea; you can tell from the statistics that you’re not alone. I sit with girls every day who have those kinds of thoughts looping around in their very normal, very smart brains. More on that later too.
You’re not alone. C. S. Lewis wrote, “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You, too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”3 Anxiety tries to make you feel like you are the only one who’s ever worried this much or who has ever worried about something that sounds this silly. (It’s really not silly, no matter what it is. It might sound silly to you when the worry passes, but it sure feels real when you’re in the worry.)
Anxiety is an isolator. Because it makes us feel like something is wrong with us, we don’t end up talking about it.
We’ve established that anxiety is a liar and an isolator. It’s also very confusing, which is one reason it’s particularly hard to be a teenage girl today.
I remember sitting with a group of g
irls your age not too long ago. We were talking about how common it is for teenage girls to use the word anxiety when describing themselves or how they felt about a certain situation. “I have anxiety,” or “I had an anxiety attack last night,” or “Such-and-such gives me anxiety.” You know. You’ve heard these statements too. I will never forget the words one girl said: “We probably use the word so much because no one would listen if you just said you were stressed.” All of the other girls agreed. Have you ever felt that way?
▢ For sure ▢ No, not really
When I was growing up, if we wanted to really upset our parents, we might say, “I’m going to run away!” Now girls as young as eight are threatening to take their own lives when they’re mad at their parents. I would imagine that you hear people talk about how “depressed they are,” mention that they had a “panic attack” the night before, or throw around words like suicidal and bipolar and PTSD at the lunch table almost daily. Now, don’t get me wrong—some of those girls might really be experiencing those struggles. But here’s the problem: Some aren’t. You know that already. Some just want big words to describe their big feelings. Others want someone to listen and feel like no one is, including their parents or their peers, so they think the bigger their words, the more likely someone will be to listen.
Here’s another problem: When girls use those words when they’re not really experiencing those things, the words lose their meaning. Then, when you’re struggling, it’s hard to know what the word really does mean or whether anyone will listen to you, because it feels like everyone your age today has anxiety.
That’s where we’re going to start, with the definitions of the words you hear thrown around a lot among girls your age. You might have even noticed that I’ve been using the words worry and anxiety interchangeably. Fear, worry, anxiety, stress, pressure, and even anxiety disorders are all important to understand in today’s world. I truly believe that the more we know about worry and anxiety, the easier they are to beat. So let’s start with a few definitions of these worry words, from a counselor’s perspective.
The Worry Continuum
In the book for your parents, I talked about what I call “the worry continuum.” It looks a little like this:
Fear
It all starts with fear. Fears are those things we’re afraid of . . . that maybe make us jump or even scream sometimes. You might be afraid of spiders, snakes, or jellyfish in the ocean. Those are three of my biggies. An important word with fear is that we’re afraid of something. Fears are objects that our amygdala has developed an unpleasant emotional attachment to. We’ll talk more about the amygdala later. But fear is usually attached to something, or even the threat of that thing. When the thing or the threat comes, our emotions take over. (According to my babysitter, Lauren, I’d only let her pick me up if there was a bug near me—or I thought there was. I’d scream, cry, and run to her.) When we are in the presence of the object we fear, we have a great deal of emotion, but once it’s gone, so is the emotion. We move on.
What are your top three fears?
Worry
Fear changes to worry when it hangs around a little more. Worry is more pervasive, meaning it doesn’t go away just because we get away from the bug. We’re not worried of something, we’re worried about it. It revolves around more of a general subject than a specific object. We worry that someone we love might get cancer. We worry we won’t make good enough grades or won’t be able to beat our personal record in a track meet. We worry our friends are mad at us, or that we come off as awkward sometimes with other people.
What are three things you worry about?
Anxiety
Then there’s anxiety. The word anxiety really has replaced the word worry for most girls your age I know, but anxiety is different from fear or worry. Anxiety can be about any of the things we feel afraid of or worried about—but instead of the fear or worry passing through our minds, it gets stuck. I tell girls all the time in my counseling office that it’s like the one-loop roller coaster at the fair. You know it, if you’ve seen one. It’s a roller coaster, but it doesn’t go anywhere but the same loop, over and over and over. When you have anxiety, your scary thought circles around and around, and you just can’t seem to make it stop.
If you had to say right now the thing that loops around the most in your brain—that you worry about and can’t seem to make stop—what would it be? It can be something that makes a lot of sense, or even feels silly. I’ve talked to girls who have looping thoughts about everything you can imagine. What’s yours?
You might even have a couple of things that loop in your brain. It could be that you had one thing a few years ago, but now you have a new thing that’s replaced it. Maybe, when you were younger, you worried that something terrible would happen to your mom or dad. You could hardly stand to have a babysitter or for them to go out of town, you’d get so worried. Now maybe you worry about getting a bad grade or doing something wrong. Maybe you even feel like you have to tell your parents every single thing you ever do wrong, or even things you think you might do wrong. Maybe you got sick and threw up a few months ago, and now every time your tummy feels a bit off, you worry you’re going to throw up again. Maybe you worry your friends don’t want to be your friends any longer. That they think you’re annoying and they’re only being nice because they don’t want to seem rude.
Naming the Worry
Here’s the thing about anxiety. It’s a little like the Whac-A-Mole game at Chuck E. Cheese. You remember—you are standing over a board, holding a hammer. A little mole pops up. And just when you bang the hammer down, he pops up somewhere else. And again. And again. The mole knows how to get under your skin. Anxiety is the same. It’s not only a liar and an isolator, but it’s smart. In fact, I think it’s time to interrupt this information on anxiety to go ahead and give him a name. It could be a him or her. It could even be an it. But my guess is that you already know his voice. He’s the one who tells you things like these:
“You can’t.”
“It’s too hard.”
“You’ll never do enough.”
“The worst thing you can imagine happening is the thing that most likely will happen.”
“You’ll fail.”
“They’ll laugh.”
“Your mom is going to get cancer.”
“If you don’t check and recheck the door, someone might come in and hurt your family.”
“Someone already has come in and hurt your family, and they’re on the way up the stairs to you.”
That last sentence is something that used to loop in my brain when I was in high school. I’d lie awake in bed at night, terrified. I would imagine that someone had already killed my parents and was coming up the stairs to get me. I had this strange game I played with myself where I’d watch the clock and think, If I just make it to 3:20, I’ll be okay. And Now I have to make it to 3:30. Then I’ll be okay. And so on. Not only was the worry telling me the worst-case scenario had come true, but it was also telling me something I had to do to make myself feel better. I’d lie there in my bed, watching the clock, listening and obeying everything that worry told me. Only I didn’t have anyone telling me that the voice wasn’t true, that it was worry lying. And I certainly didn’t know anyone else had ever felt the same way. I wish I had. I wish I had known that I could beat him. I think it would have helped me learn how to fight anxiety much younger than I did. Now I know how to recognize his voice and know not to give him any power. He doesn’t deserve it. Not in my world or in yours.
What are some things worry says to you?
Let’s come up with a name for that lying, isolating, smart, truly annoying voice that whispers those kinds of lies to you. We want to give him a name because I want you to remember that his voice is not yours. It’s not yours, and it’s not true. Many of the younger girls I work with call him the Worry Monster. One calls him Bob. I know some high school girls who call him things like the Great Exaggerator or He Who Must Not Be Named or just p
lain Worry, and I know one girl who named hers Agnes. The point is, we want to separate his (or her) voice from yours. Plus, it’s easier to talk about him when he has a name.
As a side note, when we talk about someone who isolates and lies and is smart, it sure reminds me of someone else that you may be thinking of too. I did a podcast not too long ago with my friend Annie F. Downs. I don’t know if you’ve read her books, but I highly recommend them. When we were talking about the Worry Monster, she looked at me and said, “Is it demonic?” I laughed and thought she was kidding, mostly because that’s not a word I use to describe things very much. She wasn’t kidding—and yes, it is, although calling it demonic might not be the way you normally talk about things either. Basically, she was saying, “Is that Satan’s voice disguised as the Worry Monster?” It sure is. Satan, in Scripture, is called the Father of Lies. John 8:44 says, “He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” I absolutely believe that his voice and the worry voice you hear in your head are one and the same. Call him the Enemy if you’d rather—but only if thinking of him that way won’t cause you more anxiety. I don’t want you to have a looping thought that Satan is in your head. He’s not. He just tries to lie and trick you into worrying, just like he tries to trick you into other destructive things. The great news is that Jesus has already beaten him and given you the power to beat him too—whatever name you call him.
Because of how smart and sneaky he is, I’m going to call him the Worry Whisperer for now. Regardless of what we call him, we need to understand his ways. The more we learn about him, the easier it is to fight him.