by Sissy Goff
Avoidance
Boy, do I see this one a lot in my office. And boy, do I see parents who unintentionally make the problem worse. Not long ago I met with a girl who was being homeschooled. Now, homeschool can be a really great thing, under the right set of circumstances. But unless the anxiety is so severe that a child physically can’t attend school, the decision to homeschool should not be based on anxiety . . . which was exactly why she was being homeschooled.
“She was struggling with friends,” her mom told me. “And so she started feeling sick at school. She’d call me every day after lunch to come pick her up. She really did seem to feel bad, so of course I did. Then she started getting sick earlier and earlier in the day, until she woke up feeling that way. It was just too much for her. So now we’re homeschooling and she loves it. But I thought it might be good for her to come in and talk to someone about it. I think maybe she’s anxious.”
Maybe just a little. And maybe she got exactly what she wanted. I’m not saying she didn’t feel sick or that she doesn’t have anxiety. I think she does. But if they’d started counseling a little earlier, she could have learned the Worry Whisperer’s tricks and her tools to fight him. She could have practiced before and while she was at school. I think it wouldn’t just have helped her stomach, but also her heart. And I believe she would have felt better about herself for having beaten the Worry Whisperer, rather than avoiding him entirely. She was avoiding the thing that made her afraid, but she was also avoiding the Worry Whisperer. He won. Which means she, really, was the one who lost.
The more things get out of control, the more we go after certainty. And comfort. And right back around to control. If all else fails, we avoid. Avoidance actually strengthens anxiety.
What is something you’re avoiding right now that you really wish you could do?
Now, if you’ve done this very thing—you’ve pulled yourself out of something you were afraid of, even school, because you were afraid, I want you to say, “One win for the Worry Whisperer doesn’t defeat me.” He’s beaten all of us at times. You can still do the brave thing and do it in small steps. The rest of this chapter is going to help you with how.
You’re always going to feel better about yourself when you do the brave thing. And to work through your worry and anxiety, you’re going to have to do the brave thing. The Worry Whisperer simply does not go away unless you face him. He just gets bigger and you get smaller. He doesn’t have to, though. You can do this.
You can do the brave thing and be more than okay, especially if you use your tools.
Brave Tools for Your Heart
These tools—these heart tools—are about deep, lasting change. The tools for our bodies bring peace and calm in the immediate, which we need. The tools for our minds bring change in our cortex, which changes the way we think and matters a lot too. But these tools, these tools for your heart, will change the way you live. They’ll help you learn to talk about your feelings in ways that create deeper relationship. They’ll change the way you approach life and obstacles and create more confidence. They’ll help you do the brave thing and enable you to discover more of you in the process.
Emotional Vocabulary
A psychologist named Paul Ekman said there are six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Another psychologist named Robert Plutchik named eight: joy, sadness, anger, fear, trust, distrust, surprise, and anticipation.3 According to a study of our faces from Glasgow University in Scotland, however, we only register four: It found that fear and surprise share the same facial expression, as do anger and disgust.4 Who knew?
My authority on emotions, however, says that there are five primary emotions. And their names happen to coincide with the emotion they represent: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. Sound familiar? I’ll give you another hint . . . “I would die for Riley.”5 Yes, I’m talking about the movie Inside Out. If you haven’t seen it, I’d highly recommend it!
In the little girls’ book, I have a feelings chart made of faces of Lucy, my dog. It’s SUPER cute, but I thought it might be a little young for you. The girls are supposed to fill in the name of the emotion under each face. We included sixteen emotions on the chart: happy, sad, worried, afraid, angry, brave, hopeful, jealous, grateful, disappointed, embarrassed, excited, frustrated, uncomfortable, proud, and safe. I’m including your own feelings chart in the back of this book. I want you to look at it for a few minutes and think about the last time you felt each of those emotions. Go ahead . . . now is a great time.
How many of those feelings do you actually talk about with other people? With your family? Friends? I have a feeling you might live more on the happy, hopeful, grateful, excited side of things. Actually, it’s not that you necessarily live there. It’s that you express there. I know we talked a little about this before. I think it’s part of your kindness. Most really kind girls I know don’t know how to talk about their anger. They’ll say to me, “No, I don’t get angry very often.” I think girls often have a harder time expressing anger, frustration, and sometimes even sadness and disappointment, thinking they won’t be perceived as kind. Or good. Or likable. You feel every one of those emotions, if you would only let yourself. And there is not an emotion that’s bad, or mean, or inappropriate, or even sinful. In fact, Ephesians 4:26 says, “In your anger do not sin.” That means our anger is not wrong—it’s what we do with it that can hurt us and others. The same is true of every emotion. As a friend of mine said, when we don’t process our emotions, our emotions will process us. In other words, if we don’t let our feelings out in healthy, appropriate ways, such as art or journaling or talking, our feelings will find their own way out . . . and often to the detriment of us and others.
In fact, I would venture to say that when you’re not talking about your feelings, they’ll find one feeling to use as their primary route. Mine come out mostly as anger and irritation. I will often find myself frustrated as I’m falling asleep. When I dig underneath that feeling, though, I realize that I felt hurt, left out, or worried at some point that day. Or maybe I hurt someone else. Only I didn’t process it in a healthy way . . . or at all.
You might be more like a friend of mine whose feelings seem to prefer the anxious route. It happens for her when she’s in the shower and in the car and when she’s falling asleep too. It’s those times when she’s quiet and not distracted. Then all of a sudden, she realizes she’s overwhelmed. Close to tears. Having trouble breathing, even. Her anxiety is processing her in those moments.
During the summer, we take our Daystar kids to a place called Hopetown. It’s a beautiful home on the lake where we have our own version of summer retreats, complete with tubing and worship and talking—lots and lots of talking. My friend Melissa, who started Daystar, owns Hopetown. She also does all of the Bible teaching and is my favorite Bible teacher to people your age.
Several summers ago, she talked about something I’ll never forget. She actually had the kids go sit in one of our vans in the driveway, and she talked about the importance of an oil light. She said that an oil light comes on as a warning signal. It’s telling us that something is wrong underneath the hood of our car. When that oil light goes on, it’s in our best interest to pay attention. Melissa compared our emotions to an oil light. I would add that each of our oil lights follows a certain pattern or emotion. They look a certain way. In the van that afternoon, she said that what we often do when our emotional oil lights flash, however, is ignore them. It’s the equivalent of taking a hammer and shattering the light. Our car, and our hearts, suffer.
What’s your emotional oil light? Circle one of the feelings below.
Anger Sadness
Anxiety Frustration
Despair Hopelessness
I didn’t even realize till now that I had an oil light.
The next time your oil light turns on, I want you to choose three additional emotions you are feeling—three that live under the hood of your heart in that moment. And I want you to
write or talk to a friend about what’s causing those emotions. I truly believe it will make your worry better.
I can’t tell you how often I’ve had girls come in to see me and say their anxiety is worse than usual and that they “don’t have any idea why.” The longer we talk, the more I’ll hear about one particular friend who has been hurting their feelings. Or I’ll find out that their parents are getting divorced. And I can almost always assure you that, whatever is going on underneath the anxiety, they weren’t talking about it with anyone in their life.
From an Anxiety Brain 101 perspective, talking helps too. Studies show that talking about our feelings actually reduces amygdala activation and stimulates the region of the cortex that helps with emotion and motivation.6 How awesome is that? Now, let’s talk about that motivation—or the things that get in motivation’s way.
Brave Ladders
I would guess there are some things you’d like to do that your worry stops you from doing. Maybe they’re things that you haven’t really admitted to anyone else. But you know, down deep, you’d like to do them. Maybe you even feel like God wants you to, but your anxiety gets the better of you. Rather than trying, you spend your time avoiding. Avoiding doing the thing . . . avoiding even talking about the thing. Maybe you get defensive when it comes up in conversation.
If we were sitting in the same room, this is when I’d lean toward you. I’d want you to know I get it and am with you. I know it’s hard. But I also know this to be true: Avoidance strengthens anxiety. It actually keeps the amygdala from learning. According to research, the only way to create lasting change in our amygdala is through experience.7 We have to do the scary thing. The more you do the scary thing, the more resistant your brain gets to anxiety. It develops its own set of anxiety-fighting muscles. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about with this idea of brave ladders.
Let’s pause for a moment. Before we get to the ladders, I want to start with thermometers. Here’s a thermometer. If you had to rate your worry right now, on a 1 to 10 scale, what would it be? Just for an experiment, do your square breathing four times. Now where is your worry on the scale?
The thermometer is a tool I want you to remember. We’re going to come back to it as we use the ladders. I know—your English teacher would be mad at me for mixing metaphors. But whatever. It works.
Now I want you to think of something you’ve been wanting to do but haven’t because you’ve felt anxious. Actually, I want you to think of five of those things. It may take a minute, and that’s okay. They can be little or big. It could start with eating brussels sprouts or something silly . . . all the way up to going on a school trip. But they need to be things you want to do. It could be speaking in front of people. It really could be anything that’s doable. Maybe, for now, don’t pick hiking the Himalayan mountains or something that might be a little more complicated to pull off. I want you to list five goals below.
Now give each of your five goals a rating on your thermometer for how anxious you feel when you think about trying to achieve them.
Now let’s pick the easiest one. The one that makes you feel the very least anxious. On this ladder below, I want you to write the actual goal on the top step. Then we’re going to think about the steps toward it.
Steps can involve real life, or they can be in your imagination. In therapy terms, in vivo (real life) or imaginal (imagination) exposure therapy is what this is called. Now you sound official. Let’s just say you’re terribly afraid of dogs, but you really want one.
The top of the ladder would be getting a dog.
One step below that would be housesitting for a friend’s dog.
One step below that would sitting on the floor and playing with a friend’s dog.
One step below that would be holding a little dog.
One step below that would be sitting in the same room with a friend’s dog, but not touching it.
One step below that would be going to a dog park but sitting outside the dog area.
One step below that would be watching videos of dogs on YouTube.
One step below that would be imagining yourself playing with a dog.
One step below that would be imagining a dog playing by itself.
If you’re a tapper or a checker or someone who has some type of ritual that you use to help with worry, it can feel like things aren’t “right” until you do the ritual. But that’s your Worry Whisperer talking again. The more you perform the ritual, the more you live by his rules. A first step, in this situation, would be to not let yourself do the ritual. It’s called response prevention, and it’s an important part of silencing the Worry Whisperer. Exposure therapy is gradually working your way, step by step, to doing the scary thing without obeying any of worry’s rules. There are, however, a few important steps with each step.
At the beginning, take your worry temperature.
You have to stay in that step until your worry temperature drops to half of what it was. It may take up to forty-five minutes or an hour. That’s okay.
You have to do the ladder several times (at least three) for your amygdala to learn.
It’s going to be hard. That’s part of the point. You can do hard things. You can do these things and a whole lot more. Your amygdala is going to activate in the beginning. It has to. To learn new pathways in your brain, the amygdala has to be triggered. Breathe. Practice grounding. Do the things you know to do to help in the moment. But if your amygdala doesn’t join the party, it won’t learn. Tolerating anxiety really does change anxiety, and as you work through it, you’ll start to see truths like these:
I feel anxious right now, but it will get better.
If I stay in the scary thing, I won’t feel as scared.
I don’t like to feel anxious, but I can handle it. It won’t hurt me.
My worry can’t stop me.
This is uncomfortable, but I can do it.
I’m stronger than my fear.
Exposures create lasting change. You are literally rewiring your amygdala to respond differently, which is amazing. The more you work your ladders, the easier it will be. Think about the last time you did something hard. How did you feel at the end of it?
I once rode four hundred miles on a bike to raise money for Daystar. It was the hardest physical thing I’ve ever done. I cried every single day, but I did it. (I did laugh and enjoy my friends who were doing it with me and sing a lot too. It wasn’t all uphill—just mostly.) I will forever be proud of myself for doing the brave thing. What’s something hard you’ve done that made you feel proud? I want you to feel proud of yourself. To feel capable. To experience the bravery I know is inside of you. I also want you to experience a few rewards along the way.
Rewards
We need your parents for this tool. Seriously. I want you to ask them to read this chapter, and maybe even the parent book too, because it has a whole section on this. You’re going to need rewards. I need rewards, still, as an adult. Even writing this book, I get up and get myself a treat from time to time or play with Lucy. Obviously, Lucy is the way bigger reward.
I want you to think of twenty things that would be rewards for you. You need little ones and big ones. Things that cost money and things that don’t. Your parents will, obviously, have to be on board with these, but here are a few ideas:
Getting to pick where your family goes out to dinner
An extra sleepover with a friend
A sleepover on a school night
A sleepover with several friends at once
Your parents’ paying for you and a friend to go to dinner
A new book
Going on a date with one of your parents
A new pet
A trip with one parent
Getting a manicure with your mom
Keep going. What else would feel like a reward to you?
Okay, so here’s the plan. Go back over your list and give each reward a number value. Then, go buy yourself a big mason jar and some fun pompons or someth
ing similar from a craft store. Any time you take a step on your ladder, or do something brave, your parents give you a pompon. You may have to remind them that you earned one. Then you can work your way toward little and big rewards that you can “buy” with your pompoms along the way. The biggest reward of all, though, is going to be the confidence I know you’ll find as you do the brave things. Okay, let’s be honest—confidence and a new pet might be a tie in my book!
Practice
We’ve talked about how the two pathways to anxiety are also the two pathways to lasting change: the cortex and the amygdala. You rewire the cortex by replacing anxious thoughts with brave ones. You rewire the amygdala through experience. Both are going to require practice. And when I say practice, I mean a LOT. The number one reason that people don’t work through anxiety is that they don’t practice. Just like avoidance strengthens anxiety, anxiety left alone only gets worse. It’s going to take time to create new pathways in both places. It’s going to be hard at times. You’re going to feel afraid. When you feel afraid, it just means the practice is working. Keep going. You can do this.
Problem Solving
Sometimes, it’s not our worry that blocks us. It’s someone else or our worry over what that someone else might think.
Maybe we’d offend them.
Maybe they wouldn’t think we were nice anymore.
Maybe they’d think we were weird.
Maybe it would create more drama.
Maybe they’d no longer want to be our friend.
Years ago, a girl said to me, “Sometimes it’s easier to let other people think for me than to have to think for myself.” When we live in those kinds of maybes, that’s really what we’re doing. We’re letting others think for us, AND we’re letting others solve our problems. Or prolong our problems, depending on the person and on the problem.
I want you to find your voice.