G4 Emotions

Are you enjoying where you are? Even if you are not “there yet,” can you identify aspects of this part of your journey that make it significantly better than where you’ve been? Unless you can answer “yes” to this question and take delight in that answer, perseverance will be grueling. Striving without delighting is exhausting.

One of the keys to persevering, especially with a struggle as recurrent as anger, is the ability to enjoy an imperfect, in-process life. God does not just delight in you at the culmination of your sanctification. God delights in you right now. He invites you to agree with him; where he has you in this process is good. This provides the emotional stability and security to persevere in your journey.

With that as our starting point, let’s ask the question, “What does it look like to continue to follow God from here?” Chances are that you’ve put so much energy into getting “here” that it is not entirely clear how to prepare yourself for life after an intensive focus on change. What do you do when your life is not focused on overcoming anger? That is the topic of this step and the next.

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We are now squarely in the present tense. Admitting, acknowledging, understanding, repenting, and confessing were all focused on things we had done or experienced (past tense). Restructuring life was all about what we intend to do (future tense). In the first six steps we were protected from dynamic things like the pressures and nuances of daily life. To this point, we have scripted and rehearsed our social interactions but now we are leaving the scripts behind.

In order to engage with implementation effectively, we must have our perspective on temptation transformed. There is a tendency to view temptation as failure. If our plan is merely to avoid or prevent temptation (irritating situations), then we will fail and think, “What’s the use?” 

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As we get to the most “practical” part of the study, hopefully you are at a better place spiritually, relationally, emotionally, and in terms of self-understanding than you have ever been before (or at least in a long time). This foundation allows you to enact the plans you are about to make in a way you could not when you felt distant from God, isolated from people, emotionally frazzled, and your self-understanding was filled with lies and distortions.

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If we became active in Step 4, then we are going public in Step 5. Confession that is less public than the sin which prompted its necessity promotes short-lived change. Confession is when our new allegiance (from self to God) becomes public. Confession is to sanctification what baptism is to salvation – public evidence that a change has occurred and is impacting the core of our identity and how we relate to the world.

Confession is often hard for someone who struggles with anger. Anger is about being strong. Confession feels weak and vulnerable. Anger is bold and in control. Confession is humble and patient. Anger intends to make certain things happen. Confession does not know what response it will get. You are being asked to buck this trend in ways that may be scary or unnatural, but that is what change is.

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This material is not another trip around the “try harder” merry-go-round!

It is at Step 4 that you begin to experience the difference. Hopefully, you have a more complete understanding of your struggle with anger than you’ve ever had before. You probably have more ongoing Christian support than you’ve had in previous attempts to control your anger. But understanding, the absence of blame-shifting, community, and direction are not the source of change. God is.

Change doesn’t involve white knuckles; it requires the empty hands and bent knees of humble repentance.

In order to see the relevance of repentance you must see your sinful anger the way that Bible does – as an offense primarily against God. We don’t view most sins this way. We see that we hurt other people with our sin and assume that God is disappointed in us for failing to love our neighbor (i.e., wife, kids, co-workers, etc…). But we do not think we have sinned against God.

Until we see this reality we will not realize that we have voluntarily unplugged from our source of love, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23). Further, we will try to produce these qualities in our own strength and character not realizing how futile and silly those efforts really are (John 15:4-17). We become like the person flipping switches in their breaker box during a power outage. The solution makes sense but there is still no power even when we have taken all the right steps.

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It is unfortunate that this step will likely not be as satisfying as we would like. We often fall into the trap of thinking that if we understand the “why” better, then the “what” will be easy, or at least easier. There are at least two realities that disrupt this seemingly sound logic.

First, sin is not rational, so it refuses to play by our rules of logic. Sin is not a simple behavior that plays by single-variable motivations. Rather sin is a condition and a predator. Sin has its roots in our fallen human nature. Sin is aided and abetted by an enemy who desires our destruction (I Peter 5:8). This means that sin both has the home field advantage and is willing to cheat to win. This is why simple, temporary measures will never be sufficient.

Second, our goal must be effectiveness-at-change rather than ease-of-change or our best intentions will lead us back into destructive anger. Satan is always willing to wait for a more opportune time (Luke 4:13) if its interests are not best served in a given moment. The moments when we let our guard down are the times when our intelligent adversary will strike. Anything that undermines our vigilance is an asset to our adversary.

But these realities do not make an examination of the history and motives of our anger fruitless. It just means that what we intuitively want from this examination is overly optimistic. What we can gain is a better understanding of (a) what motives drive our anger, (b) the context in which those desires became excessively dominant, and (c) how those desires began to take on a god-like function in our lives.

The more honestly and accurately we are able to make these assessments in real time, the more effectively we will be at relying on God and reaching out to our support network for help. The more “foreign” or “crazy” our motives feel to us, the less likely we are to tell others what is going on. The more these things make sense to us, even if we disagree with the values behind the motives, the more willing we will be to ask for help.

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It is hard to admit how “off” we get when we are angry. One reason is because we often get angry for right reasons or legitimate causes. We must start Step 2 by admitting that a legitimate trigger is only the first test of righteous anger.

Below are seven test questions for righteous anger taken from David Powlison’s article (bold text only) “Anger Part 1: Understanding Anger” from The Journal of Biblical Counseling (Fall 1995). The journaling tool provided in Step 3 will include these seven tests, but only use the words in parenthesis to reference each test. Your goal here is only to understand each test, so you can use them later to evaluate your anger.

1.    Do you get angry about the right things? (Right Trigger)

2.    Do you express anger in the right way? (Right Response)

3.    How long does your anger last? (Duration)

4.    How controlled is your anger? (Controlled)

5.    What motivates your anger? (Motive)

6.    Is your anger “primed and ready” to respond? (Primed)

7.    What is the effect of your anger? (Effect)

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Do you hear yourself in any of these statements?

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At the end of chapter 8 we began to discuss the question, “What am I living for?” That is an essential question in our grief journey. Unless we answer it, our past will remain brighter than our future, and we will be set up for despair. With a question like this, however, you will be doing most of the writing in this chapter.

The goal is that you would find things that you could engage as passionately as you engaged your loved one. This is not a form of replacement, but a necessity of enjoying life. Being passionate about something now does not in any way diminish your love for them then. In effect, you are unleashing more of what they loved in you. You can rightly imagine your loved one with God in heaven saying, “See, that is what I loved about then all along. Now they are getting more of an opportunity to impact the world with the gifts and passions You put in them. I love getting to watch them serve You in Your presence. It is glorious!”

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. For most of us, at this stage in our journey, we still do not want a new normal. The residual grief in our heart still longs for the old normal. If this conflict exists within you, do not let it pull you backwards on your journey. It is not hypocritical to pursue a new normal against your heart’s desire when reality insists that you must.

Even if you are optimistic about this new normal, a new normal is scary. It is unknown. It is relatively permanent. It soon will be the part of your life that occurs without thought or reflection. The disruption of this new normal will be what triggers your next pilgrimage through grief. 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 what your expectations of life will be by activity, relationship, and season. As you grieve well and clean, a new normal will happen. A big part of 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.

Second, guidance will be provided to help you think through how to prepare to transition from your current Freedom Group, counseling relationship, or mentor relationship into general small group ministry of the church for continued encouragement and growth. You are about to enter a new season of transition: from healing to living. These materials are meant to provide guidance on what “healthy” looks like after grief.

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Goals and grief can be hard concepts to mesh. We wish they got along better. We want to be able to say, “I have Saturday open so I plan to get half my grief out by journaling, looking at pictures, having an extended time of candid prayer, crying several times, and then updating my good-bye letter to capture the progress I’ve made during the day.” But thinking of goal setting as a time table or schedule, will become extremely frustrating and ineffective.

Also, if we think of goal setting as “overcoming” grief, then we will have a sense of failure whenever grief returns around special occasions, triggered by a song or quote, or randomly interrupts our day. This is why we say we are identifying goals to “combat the impact of my suffering.” Grief is something we experience rather than conquer. Therefore, we will grow from it rather than eliminate it.

We did not cause grief, so we cannot “uncause” it. Grief is not a character defect or sin, so we cannot “put off” grief. Grief is part of our story and because of that there will be times when its significance continues to impact our life. Our goal in this chapter is to further understand what healthy grief is, what healthy grief looks like, and what we can do to “grieve well” during some of the difficult times ahead.

The material for this chapter will be divided into three sections: (1) What does it mean to “progress”? (2) How to prepare for predictably hard times? (3) How to respond to unpredictably hard moments?

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There are two competing narratives for our grief: God’s and Satan’s. Every experience surrenders to an interpretation. Our interpretation of grief will influence how we understand past, present, and future events. It reinterprets the past when we think things like, “Maybe God is not who I thought he was. Maybe life does not operate the way I thought. If I had [blank] to do over again, I would do it differently.” It reinterprets the future as we apply what we learned (accurately or inaccurately) from our grief experience to make “wise” or “common sense” choices.

As we enter into this chapter, however, we have to be careful to understand what we are seeking to accomplish. Challenging wrong interpretations of grief will not end grief or make it go away. In this case, right “answers” will not necessarily result in pleasant emotions of relief and joy. It will allow for a clean grief preventing your loss from becoming an entry point for foundational lies that change your identity, definition of safety, or sense of purpose in unhealthy ways. These are the changes that would result in a residual disruption of life after the sorrow of grief has passed.

In this chapter we will look at five questions that shape our suffering story: who am I, who is God, what is death, is love worth grief, and what am I living for? We will look at them in light of grief. Our goal is not to provide a comprehensive theological answer, but to provide the foundational framework for a healthy understanding of grief.

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No matter how “clean” our interpretations or how pure our story, the sadness of grief will remain. It will hurt because someone precious is missing. Mourning (which has been happening before we named it as “step five” and will continue to happen through step nine) simply acknowledges that we will never “master grief” to the point that it does not hurt.

Sometimes Christians can believe (or at least feel) as if any negative emotional experience is a lack of confidence in God or a violation of the command to rejoice always (Phil. 4:4). We know this is not true because the sinless Son of God wept at the death of his good friend Lazarus (John 11:35). In addition to Jesus’ example we have commands to weep with those who weep (Rom. 12:15).

In this chapter we are going to examine the sadness of grief, the painful sense of unchanging absence. In this step, we are going to explore what it means to walk through this sadness (Psalm 23:4) rather than around or away from it. In many ways the first four chapters have prepared you to mourn your loss in its entirety (both physical and symbolic aspects of the loss) with less emotional distractions from unhealthy themes. But even “clean grief” is not a muted grief.

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At several points in the study you have probably begun to question God, doubt Him, be angry at Him, or wonder if what you think about Him really makes any difference. We’ve brought many painful pieces of grief to mind. When we look at it, we naturally ask, “Where does ‘the buck’ stop?” It stops with God (or whoever, whatever is in control… if anything is).

It has been said that animals divide between herbivores (those eating plants) and carnivores (those eating meat), but the humans are verbivores – we live off of words, or, more accurately, off of the meaning we give to life through words. This is why we’ve emphasized the themes of story, journey, and identity so much. They are how we “digest” life.

“No one is more influential in your life than you are, because no one talks to you more than you do. You are in an unending conversation with yourself. You are talking all the time, interpreting, organizing, and analyzing what’s going on inside you and around you (p. 56).” Paul Tripp in A Shelter in the Time of Storm.

We are now going to explore how we give meaning to all the facts, experiences, influences, and changes we have unpacked in the first three chapters. It is by giving meaning to these things that we will “process” our grief – for better or worse, healthily or unhealthily. Trying to make meaning of death requires that we wrestle with things beyond this life. Just as making sense of a tadpole becoming a frog requires considering things outside the pond.

“The life of the most insignificant man is a battlefield on which the mightiest forces of the universe converge in warfare—this elevates the status of the lowliest and least person on earth (p. 108)!... Suffering has no meaning in itself. Left to its own, it is a frustrating and bewildering burden. But given the context of relationship, suffering suddenly has meaning (p. 127).” Joni Eareckson Tada & Steven Estes in When God Weeps.

But we must not think that this requires us to think only “nice,” theologically precise thoughts about life, death, and God. We do not approach this search for meaning as an academic exercise – like a scientist looking for the cure for cancer – but in an intensely personal way – like a cancer patient asking, “Isn’t there anything that can be done?” In order for the meaning to be satisfying or healthy it must emerge from asking the question as we are living the question – raw.

With this in mind, this chapter will ask dark questions; questions for which there are no “good” answers, only honest answers. Recognize that it is not irreverent to ask God painful questions full of honest emotion when a storm of suffering engulfs us. The fact that we bring God our questions honors Him. God knows the limitation of our mind, heart, and body. God hears them like a parent whose child is screaming because of a doctor’s shot – while the scream may sound and be meant as defiance and doubt it is an expression of faith in the parent’s love and the parent’s willingness to help if something could be done.

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The most common way to “understand” grief is to think of it in terms of stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) developed from the research of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. While useful, stages miss much of the personal significance that is present in grief. Stages may prepare us for what is probable (which means not everyone will follow the same path), but they do not help “me” understand or process that pain of “my grief.”

In this study we will focus more on story and journey than stages. These concepts are meant to capture more of the personal, messy, and non-sequential nature of grief. Grief changes the way we view life, interact with people, the meaning we attach to things, our levels of trust or security, and our sense of identity. When people or things that we love and rely on can be removed from our life, we can begin to question everything.

This changes the way we commonly classify grief. Grief is more than an emotional struggle (like depression, anxiety, guilt, etc..). Grief contains so many changing emotions that the experience itself has to be more than an emotion. Grief is more foundationally a struggle of identity. Who am I now? How has my loss changed me? How will I relate to other people? What is different about me and what is the same? Notice how Winston Smith describes one element of the story-change that occurs during the grief of a divorce.

“Your marriage gave you a roadmap for the future. Your life seemed predictable (p. 6).” Winston Smith in Divorce Recovery: Growing and Healing God’s Way

As you seek to understand the impact of your grief in this chapter, the discussion will focus upon how different factors can influence the meaning you place on your grief. In chapter four we will examine common ways these factors can be tailored into a destructive story—one that is emotionally or relationally crippling and makes God seem mean, powerless, or irrelevant. In chapter six we will examine how the Gospel gives healthy meaning to your grief without minimizing its pain.

It is here we will begin to introduce a phrase that will capture much of our objective in this study: clean grief. With this language we are comparing grief with a physical injury comparable to a cut. We cannot make such a wound heal, but we can keep it from becoming infected and, thereby, assist the natural, God-ordained healing process. The “infections” that can come with grief are the destructive interpretations we place on the experience. In this chapter we will begin to ask the kind of questions from which we make these interpretations.

“Understand”: It is important to clarify what “understanding the impact of my suffering” does and does not mean at this point. Understanding will not mean knowing “why” you experienced this loss. It does mean that you can see the number of ways that this loss is affecting you, grasp how those influences are connected with your loss, and continue to trust God as you see how He will bring comfort and redemption in the midst of your grief.

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Too often we hear the word “denial” and we think it means simply the willful resistance to acknowledging an obvious fact. When you’re in the midst of denial, you wish it were that simple and overt. The question, “How do I live as if they are really gone?” is not a simple question.

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Even though it is only the beginning of this study, thank you for getting this far. It is a testimony to your strength and courage that in the midst of your loss and pain you have not abandoned the search for hope. You may not feel strong or courageous at this point. In reality, you probably feel numb, weak, afraid, intimidated, or overwhelmed. But the mark of courage is not the absence of fear, but continuing on in the face of fear. That is what you are doing. It is commendable and good. We are praying for you and trust that God will bless this step of courageous faith with the hope and peace you desire.

The fact that you are at this point is also a testimony to God’s faithfulness and presence. You feel like your loss and circumstances could crush you, and you are right. It is an interesting study to consider how the phrase “my strength” is used in the Psalms (18:1, 22:15, 28:7, 31:10, 32:4, 38:10, 59:9, 59:17, 71:9, 102:23, 118:14, 138:3). It is as if they alternate between cries of desperation and pronouncements of praise. Grief is an experience that causes me to find the end of my strength (my abilities or emotional resources) and realize it is only My Strength (God) that can sustain me in the painful moments when death touches my life.

The goal of this study (and the relationships in which you will go through this study) is to help you access Your Strength (the one true God) in the midst of your grief. God loves you (1 John 4:19). God longs to care for you and is not just waiting for you to “get it together (Psalm 147:3).” God is not offended by your tears, but values them (Psalm 56:8). God is not repelled by your questions, even if they are angry ones (Psalm 44:23-26). God does not intend to leave you alone in your pain (Joshua 1:9). God will be patient while you grieve (2 Peter 3:9). 

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If the law of God can be summarized in a positive command, then we must end this study talking about how to “run to” God rather than merely how to “run from” sin. Life is not about what we avoid, but what pursue. How we run to God’s design for our life finds a unique expression in each person’s life. For this reason, you will do most of the writing in this chapter. It is your life that is being stewarded for God’s glory.

The goal for this chapter is that you would find things that you could give yourself in a way that is more emotionally captivating than your depression-anxiety was. But not just temporal, slightly healthier things that would quickly become the next edition of ruling desires; and not things that you give yourself to in private so that they foster selfishness and excess. Rather, eternally significant things that you give yourself to in a community of faith to maintain endurance, temper desire-excess, and become an example to others.

As you read through and answer these 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 will also be ways you want to serve God that will require you to mature more 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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Are you enjoying where you are? Even if you are not “there yet,” can you identify aspects of this part of your journey that make it significantly better than where you’ve been? Unless you can answer “yes” to this question and take delight in that answer, perseverance will be grueling.

Striving without delighting is exhausting.

One of the keys to persevering, especially with a struggle as recurrent as depression-anxiety, is the ability to enjoy an imperfect, in-process life. God does not just delight in you at the culmination of your sanctification. God delights in you right now. He invites you to agree with him; that where he has you in this process is good. This provides the emotional stability and security to engage a struggle like depression-anxiety.

With that as our starting point, let’s ask the question, “What does it look like to continue to follow God from here?” Chances are that you’ve put so much energy into getting “here” that it is not entirely clear how to prepare yourself for life after an intensive focus on change. What do you do when your life is not focused on overcoming depression-anxiety? That is the topic of this chapter and the next.

In this chapter we will look at post-temptation temptations—those temptations that uniquely arise when we’re doing “better.” In order to help you finish strong, we will look at three subjects for this stage in your journey.

Common Lies and DistractionsVictory Changes TemptationPreparing for Transition

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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.

Immediate Negative Emotion Response PlanStewarding Your BodyExtended Negative Emotion Response PlanLife Management Pursuit of Joy PlanStrategic 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:

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.

How to ConfessPreparing 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.

To Whom Are You Repenting?Key Elements of RepentanceA 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.

Our Personal-Family History of Anxiety-DepressionBiology and Our Anxiety-DepressionOur 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.

“The first step toward overcoming your fears is to locate them… The attractiveness of God's words to you depends on it. If you can't see your fears and worries, then God's words of comfort won't go deep (p. 5).” Ed Welch in When I Am Afraid

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.”

When is depression-anxiety sinful?What kinds of thinking undergird depression-anxiety?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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Chapter four may have left you without a story. You looked at the events and impact of your depression-anxiety in chapters two and three, then let go of the destructive narratives that you used to explain them in chapter four. In chapter five you learned to mourn the presence of depression-anxiety without giving in to unhealthy wallowing.

To this point it is as if you found an old pocket watch on a walk through the woods. It was dirty and tarnished. You’ve disassembled its parts to clean and polish them. You appreciate its value enough to be sad for the person who lost it. Now we’re about to begin the process of putting it back together again.

Chapter six is intended to give you the right story out of which to live out the practical directives you’ll find in chapters seven and eight. Just like an athlete can train hard for revenge (one story line) or to reach his full potential (a different, healthy story line), we can strive for healthy emotions with several different narratives fueling / explaining our actions.

The reason we take the time for this step is not primarily about effectiveness; many athletes train very well when they are seeking revenge. Our goal in this chapter is to ensure that our pursuit of emotional heath is spiritually healthy.

In this chapter we will seek to answer six questions that often become distorted in our struggle with depression-anxiety. We will offer key points of clarification that are commonly helpful for re-orienting people’s struggle through anxiety-depression, but encourage you to take the time to write out your thoughts on what a healthy response to your experience of depression-anxiety would be.

Who Am I Now? Who and Where Is God?What Should I Expect from My Friends?What Is Sin If This Is Suffering?Is Hope Worth Disappointment?What Am I Living For?

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What are we supposed to do with bad news? Step four reveals a large amount of “bad news” – narratives we place upon our experience of depression-anxiety which leave us feeling shame or like God is absent. What are we supposed to do with that kind of bad news?

The tempting answer is “make it better… spin it positive… fast… if we can use the Bible, all the better; that way we’re more likely to believe what we’re telling ourselves.” Chances are you’ve tried that and have the scars which rushed emotional change produces to prove it.

So let’s ask a better question, “How does God want to care for you as you come to grips with these false narratives?” Does God want to free you with truth (John 8:32)? Yes, but he also wants to free you in a way that is bearable and sustainable. God wants your change to last and to be motivated by grace instead of shame or fear.

That means God wants you to grieve the presence of suffering in your life. God does not think you are whining when you acknowledge that depression-anxiety has been a heavy burden. God wants you to know his care during your suffering so that we will rely upon his care in the midst of future blessings and hardships.

Mourning is the focus of this chapter. We want you to feel free to mourn the presence of depression-anxiety (agreeing with God about the hardship of suffering) instead of feeling shame about it (hiding it from God and others in order to appear strong). Mourning our suffering allows us to quit faking strength so that we free to rely on God’s strength and his people.

We will examine the subject of morning in four sections:

What Is Being Mourned?Differentiating Mourning from WallowingHow to MournThat’s Not Helpful: Things Not to Say

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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:

What Does My Depression-Anxiety Say? 10 Potential ThemesFrom Facts to Themes to Story 

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After acknowledging the history and realness of your depressive-anxious experience, you need to understand the impact of these experiences on your life. Unless we understand the impact, we will be forced to “just try to feel better;” which leads us to the trapping question, “How can I change my emotions when they do not respond to my will like my hands and feet do?” Merely trying to feel better reinforces a disposition of helplessness and despair.

But the other rebuttal is, “Looking at the impact will only make me feel worse.” This is partially true, and why it is highly recommended you go through this study with a friend, pastor, or counselor. But it is also largely false. Consider the parallel example of debt. Many people in debt fail to itemize and total their debt for fear it will be overwhelming. But that leaves them powerless and with a “haunting ambiguous” sense of how big it must be.

In this chapter we will seek to understand the impact of your depressive-anxious experience in three key areas.

Factors that Contribute to ImpactChanges in Lifestyle that Add to ImpactImpact on Family and Relationships

While difficult, this examination will do several things. First, it will show you where and how you can begin to engage your depressive-anxious experience without trying to artificially “make yourself feel better.” The information gathered will be even more important in step seven.

Second, it will de-mystify the experience of anxiety-depression. Often the question, “How did things get this bad?” paralyzes and shames us with bewilderment. No piece of the depressive-anxious experience seems to account for the whole. Looking at the pieces can give you the hope and strength to continue the journey.

Third, it will begin to reveal the unhealthy ways you have made sense of your anxious-depressive experience. This will be the primary focus of step four, but understanding impact is a great way to make the unhealthy “story” we build around our depressive-anxious experience more obvious and, therefore, possible to change.

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“It’s not that big of a deal. I’ll just press through this. What is a little sadness or anxiety? I can still do my job, pass my tests, take care of my kids, etc… I don’t want people to think I’m weak, weird, needy, ‘have issues’ etc…” These are the kind of thoughts that are often used to minimize or dismiss the experience of depression-anxiety.

Some of these messages may be good and true. Assessing how well you care for your self, family, and responsibilities is important. Often we are “just sad.”

Other messages are purely stigmatizing and lead us to believe that asking for help would make us sub-human or a drain on our friends. These messages will tempt us to “be strong” until we are at “code red” and despair-panic has us firmly in its grip.

Your goals in this chapter are simple – (a) to assess how severe your struggles with depression-anxiety are, (b) to determine the different expressions of depression-anxiety you struggle with, and (c) to identify who you need to ask to come alongside of you in this journey towards hope and peace.

In order to help you in this process, we will provide you with two tools.

1.    A Depression-Anxiety Evaluation

2.    A Depression-Anxiety Daily Symptom Chart

The evaluation will provide an overview of the various expressions of depression-anxiety you may be experiencing. This information will help you to identify which symptoms it would be beneficial to track on the daily chart. Becoming aware of the various types-frequency-intensity of our emotions will help you gain important aspects of insight to look for in chapters 3-5 and tangibly measure progress by in chapters 6-8.

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What is the only thing more overwhelming than being asked to lift an unbearable load? Being asked to move while carrying an unbearable load. That is what many people feel is being asked of them when they begin a journey like this one. When you’re emotionally taxed beyond your max, then even the most practical and compassionate advice either feels like it comes from an enemy (someone against you) or a stranger (someone who “just doesn’t understand”).

There is no way around this obstacle, so let me begin by acknowledging the level of faith and courage represented in your willingness to read these words. To you it may feel like doubt and fear, but your willingness to engage this material is noble and virtuous. I wish, and I’m sure you do too, that we could just rename your depression-anxiety as something positive and it would go away, become a blessing, or become an indicator of some unseen virtue.

Those options do exist. Over the course of this study your depression-anxiety may…

But we don’t know that now and there is little value in trying to predict in how God will work in your experience at this point in the journey. Likely those things seem far away; as if they belong in a fairy tale. If so, focusing on them will serve as a discouragement rather than an encouragement in the early stages of your journey.

Instead, let’s ask a less ambitious questions; not, “Where are we going and what are all the steps and challenges to getting there?” but, “What is the next step and how do I prepare myself to take one step in the direction of hope?” At any moment we can take one step towards hope. If you are already feeling overwhelmed, it may do you little good to think about more than that.

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It might 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. In steps 2-4, you looked at the things that disrupted your old normal. In step 5, you grieved the loss of your old normal. In steps 6-7, you began to piece together a new, healthy normal. Now, in step 8, you will begin to rest in that new normal and allow it to solidify.

Unfortunately, the post-traumatic responses of intrusion, constriction, hyper-arousal, shame, and fragmentation created a way of life that made it easy for us to wonder if “normal” could ever be good again. Hopefully that skepticism is beginning to fade by the time you’ve reached this point in your journey.

Realize, 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.

In order to help you avoid this mindset, we will arrange the strategies for combatting the impact of your suffering around the three areas of symptoms most common to the post-traumatic experience.

Settling Hyper-Arousal SymptomsCountering Intrusive SymptomsLessening Constrictive Symptoms

The intent is to help you see that, because the presence or magnification of these symptoms did not begin until you experienced your trauma, that they are not things you “should have been doing all along” that would have “prevented the trauma in the first place.”

Many of these approaches do have application in normal-everyday life. This is because re-engaging life and relationships is a very normal-everyday activity. Don’t allow this to become a point of self-condemnation (i.e., “I must be an idiot if this is all I should have been doing”) or short-cutting (i.e., “I can stop this study now, the information is getting simple”).

These are the steps that solidify the progress you’ve made on your journey. These are the steps you’ll return to when you face an unexpected, intense trigger in the future. These are the steps that will help prevent future experiences of suffering from revitalizing your old suffering story (step four) by making your progress seem like a façade. 

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When you experienced your trauma, life stopped, at least parts of your life stopped, yet the rest of life has continued in a way that can be both disorienting and offensive. So far this study has been a major deconstruction project; we have broken down your experience and its fallout in many ways. The result is, while you may feel like there is hope for things to be better, you likely also feel like a person without a story.

That is what this chapter begins to address. In this chapter you will begin to put the pieces you deconstructed into a new narrative; not a narrative that makes the “sad things untrue” but a narrative that allows you to understand yourself, God, your life, and the future in ways that are healthy and hopeful.

This new narrative will likely not answer the nagging “why” question. Think about most suspenseful movies you’ve seen or books you’ve read. When is the “why” plot revealed? At the end. Where are you in your journey? Still in the middle. It is unlikely at this stage in the journey that, however God intends to redeem your experience, that this could be clear to you now. Guessing at God’s intention will likely place you in a series of all-or-nothing moments where you try to seize a moment to make your trauma experience seem “worth it,” only to be disappointed or make the experience worse.

Instead, at this stage in your journey, it is recommended that you seek to understand yourself, God, others, your setting, and your future in a way that both sets you up for stable-healthy living now and allows for redemptive moments where your experience can be used for a larger purpose when the situation is wise. We will seek to do this by walking you through five questions that help you identify key ways God would have you understand your experience.

Who Am I Now? Who and Where Is God?Where Am I?Is Hope Worth Fear?What Am I Living For?

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What are you supposed to do with the heaviness of step four? Those narratives are very “sticky” or wouldn’t be able to create the level of disruption that they do. They are also plausible; if they didn’t make so much sense in light of a trauma, then we would just shake them off and move on with our lives.

The fifth step may not seem intuitive at first, but once you think about it, it should seem very logical. You need to take time to mourn the trauma you experienced and its impact. Now that you’ve begun the process of removing the destructive suffering messages, you can grieve the experience without the emotional contaminants that are so tempting (i.e., blaming yourself, being angry at God, isolating from safe people, or generally be cynical about life).

Until we remove the destructive narratives that attached to our suffering from our experience of trauma our, sadness is perpetually interrupted by arguing against the things we fear our trauma means. We get stuck trying to solve theological riddles about God or reasoning ourselves into trusting again.

“This is exactly why Lamentations was inspired by God as sacred Scripture—it teaches us how to mourn overwhelming losses and yet find hope in God (p. 155).” Steven R. Tracy in Mending the Soul

Grief is a process by which we embrace the fact that God agrees with our sorrows. We don’t have to convince anyone of anything. We can be weak, sad, and cared for like we longed to but didn’t feel safe to ask for. The counter narrative that the gospel provides for our experience of trauma only makes sense from a context of safety; otherwise we are only frantically arguing with fear, which is like trying to put out a grease fire with water (makes sense, but doesn’t work).

To help you understand what it means to grieve your experience of trauma and the impact it has had, we will consider the subject of mourning in three sections.

What Is Being Mourned?Mourning’s Traumatic Twin: FixationHow to Mourn

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This is not the step in which you will answer, “Why did this happen to me?” But that is the question that drives us to make sense out of the defining experiences of our life, of which traumas are typically included. From the time we begin to annoy our parents with the incessant question “Why?” people seek to make meaning of and find order in life.

Trauma crashes the narrative. Life no longer makes sense when something traumatic happens. If an event fit our existing narrative, it would have been “interesting,” “sad,” or “shocking” but not “traumatic.” By definition trauma, explodes our categories for living a life that seems to have coherence and direction.

“Trauma can shatter an entire worldview in less time than it takes for the trauma to occur (p. 161).” Diane Langberg in On the Threshold of Hope

In this chapter we will look at the unhealthy ways people commonly make sense of trauma. Do not feel guilty if the way you make sense of your trauma is false. An abused child should not feel guilty for believing their abuse happened because they were “a bad kid.” The story is false, but seeing its falseness should bring hope not shame. God invites you to be very honest.

“One bold message in the book of Job is that you can say anything to God. Throw him your grief, your anger, your doubt, your bitterness, your betrayal, your disappointment—he can absorb them all… God can deal with every human response save one. He cannot abide the response I fall back on instinctively: an attempt to ignore him or treat him as though he does not exist. That response never once occurred to Job (p. 235).” Phillip Yancey in Disappointment with God

Don’t get locked down trying to put your confusion into words perfectly or capturing your beliefs just right. Your hope is not rooted in your ability to articulate your experience perfectly, but in the freedom that comes when you doubt these false narratives enough that God can begin to replace them with truth.

"There’s no single correct way to construct a person's abuse story (p. 147).” Steven R. Tracy in Mending the Soul

One final introductory remark, you should realize you will not reason or re-narrate yourself out of having post-traumatic symptoms. False narratives may enhance post-traumatic symptoms, but they do not cause them. Identifying (step 4), grieving (step 5), and replacing (step 6) these false narratives help to disempower the memories of trauma so that the strategies of reconnecting with life and relationships (steps 7 and 8) have an easier time taking root.

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Scars and casts, as painful as they are, come with advantages; they can be seen, they elicit sympathy, and they make our limitations understandable. Trauma does not afford us these luxuries. The impact of trauma is usually unseen, unknown, and therefore the limitations it creates are deemed “unacceptable.”

It is not just “them” who are guilty of these reactions. We, those who have experienced the trauma, often do not understand its impact because we cannot see its injuries; so we are often harder on ourselves than anyone else. We long to forget. We wish it was “just in the past” so we are more motivated than anyone else to respond in this way.

“Any treatment approach that is not predicated on a basic comprehension of the nature of trauma in what it does to human beings will be ineffective and possibly harmful (p. 45)… Too often the survivor is seen by herself and others as ‘nuts,’ ‘crazy,’ or ‘weird,’ unless her responses are understood within the context of trauma (p. 68).” Diane Langberg in Counseling Survivors of Sexual Abuse

The goal of this chapter is simple – to help you understand the impact of trauma so that you feel less crazy.

Understanding the impact of your trauma is part of establishing a sense of safety – it is what allows you to feel safe in your own body and mind, even when your instinctual responses to life events are unpleasant. Understanding is what provides the sense of stability and insight necessary to begin to counter those impacts.

We will examine the impact of trauma in three sections:

Stages of Identity in Response to TraumaFactors that Influence ImpactTypes of Impact to Expect

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There is nothing “fun” or enjoyable about this step. However, it is a good and needed part of the process. But do not allow these first two statements to cause you to think, “Alright then, let’s get it over with as quickly as possible.” That would be a mistake that could result in re-traumatizing yourself.

“Though the single most common therapeutic error is avoidance of the traumatic material, probably the second most common error is premature or precipitate engagement in exploratory work, without sufficient attention to the task of establishing safety in securing a therapeutic alliance (p. 172)… Therapy always involves juggling the survivor’s need to face what has happened and her need to feel safe. To tell is to feel unsafe. To remain silent is to be stuck and alone (p. 164).” Diane Langberg in Counseling Survivors of Sexual Abuse

Before engaging with the material in step two, please be sure you’ve firmly established the sense of safety that was the focus of step one. Significantly more so than any other seminar, thoroughly completing step one before starting step two is important when dealing with post-traumatic stress. Realize that God wants to see you made whole at a pace you can endure.

“The damages suffered may have been done in one or more terrible moments; the healing and restoration unfolds at a human pace. It unfolds at your pace. It unfolds as a part of your story, and it unfolds over time (p. 3).” David Powlison in Recovering from Child Abuse

In this chapter we will examine three subjects to help you acknowledge the history and realness of your trauma. These are arranged in an intentional chronological order; beginning with present symptoms and moving towards past events. The purpose of this order is to allow you to better put into words the experience of PTSD so that you can better invite support from others as you may experience an initial increase in symptoms as you work on this step.

Note: It is not advised that you work on this step in isolation. Having a support network, preferably both caring friends and an experienced counselor, is recommended.

PTSD Assessment – This will help you understand the different types of common responses to trauma. It is meant to help you feel less “crazy” when you have experiences that might otherwise cause you to question your mental-emotional state. Remember, the symptoms of PTSD are a normal response to an abnormal circumstance.PTSD Daily Symptom Chart – This will help you monitor your experience of PTSD as you work through these materials. When you see spikes in your post-traumatic symptoms, take a break from the study. Allow your emotions to settle and re-establish your sense of safety (step one material) before resuming.Key Questions – In this section we will examine four questions: (a) To whom is it beneficial for me to acknowledge what happened? (b) In what level of detail do these acknowledgements need to occur? (c) When is it beneficial to begin this process; how do I know if I’m ready? (d) What benefits can I expect from this step?

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Thank you for the courage represented in your willingness to engage this material. After a trauma any act of recovery, which involves memory, can be very frightening. While you may not feel courageous, it is important to remember – courage is not the absence of fear, but facing your fears wisely. This material is designed to help you do that.

“Often it is necessary… to reframe accepting help as an act of courage. Acknowledging the reality of one's condition and taking steps to change it become signs of strength, not weakness; initiative, not passivity. Taking action to foster recovery, far from granting victory to the abuser, empowers the survivor (p. 159).” Judith Hermann in Trauma and Recovery

For the moment, we will simply define trauma as an event that is more than we are prepared to handle at the time we experience it; resulting in prolonged emotional, relational, and spiritual disruption. This event might be exposure to war conditions, abuse, natural disasters, or comparable events. In the next chapter we will provide a more robust definition of trauma based on the symptoms it produces.

Take your time going through this material and take as many breaks as necessary. You were not in control during your experience of trauma. You are in control during the recovery process. Here are several suggestions for how to use this material.

Where Are We Going?

One goal of this study will be to minimize surprises. You have had enough experiences that were unpredictable; the unknown understandably feels unsafe. The nine steps of this material can be thought of as representing three stages of recovery.

“Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central task of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life. Like any abstract concept, the stages of recovery are a convenient fiction, not to be taken too literally. They are an attempt to impose simplicity and order on a process that is inherently turbulent and complex (p. 155).” Judith Hermann in Trauma and Recovery

Stage One: Establish Safety (Steps 1-3)

1.    PREPARE yourself physically, emotionally, and spiritually to face your suffering. In this step, we want you to understand the journey of facing your suffering and place yourself in the best position to complete the journey well.

2.    ACKNOWLEDGE the specific history and realness of my suffering. In this step, we want you to learn to feel safe while remembering the events you experienced.

3.    UNDERSTAND the impact of my suffering. In this step, we want you to grasp (a) why past trauma can have so many present effects, and (b) the factors that contribute to the impact of the specific trauma you experienced.

Stage Two: Disempower the Memory (Steps 4-6)

4.    LEARN MY SUFFERING STORY which I use to make sense of my experience. In this step, we want you to identify the false, destructive messages you attached to your trauma that give it greater impact in your life.

5.    MOURN the wrongness of what happened and receive God’s comfort. In this step, we want you to grieve the wrongness of your trauma in a way that emotionally distances you from the destructive messages of step four.

6.    LEARN MY GOSPEL STORY by which God gives meaning to my experience. In this step, we want you to experience God’s presence and care even when you remember the harshness of your trauma.

Stage Three: Re-Connect with Life and Relationships (Steps 7-9)

7.    IDENTIFY GOALS that allow me to combat the impact of my suffering. In this step, we want you to select strategies that will reclaim areas of life that have been dominated by or neglected because of your trauma.

8.    PERSEVERE in the new life and identity to which God has called me. In this step, we want you to identify those life practices that are most essential for you sustaining the growth that will have been established at this point.

9.    STEWARD all of my life for God’s glory. In this step, we want to ensure you realize that God wants to see you flourish as you fulfill all the purposes for which he created you.

“But life is not this neat…?!?” You are right. Memories come before we can establish a sense of safety. We must engage life and relationships before we are able to disempower memories. This was already happening before you had a plan. This outline should help you better understand why things are harder than they should be until you get to that point in your journey.

“I don’t think I can do all of this!?!” Don’t get overwhelmed. Just because you’ve seen the map doesn’t mean you need to take the whole journey. The map is meant to reduce surprises; not create pressure. Right now you are still preparing for the journey.

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