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Chapter One

Have No Anxiety … At All!

Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.(Philippians 4:6–7)

Have no anxiety … at all? Yes, Saint Paul said it. But did he really mean it? He was just writing for effect, wasn’t he? Or maybe it was possible to live anxiety-free back then, when things were simple, and the only thing people had to worry about was, well, martyrdom and stuff. But surely, in our extremely busy, hyperlinked, post-modern, post-Christian, post-truth society, we have a right to be at least a little terrified? Surely, we moderns have more reasons than Saint Paul could have ever imagined to find ourselves lying awake in a cold sweat at four in the morning while our hearts beat out of our chest. Saint Paul couldn’t have been talking about us, right?

In fact, he was. He was speaking to all those who longed to follow Christ, both in his time and for ages to come. As the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, says, “Sacred Scripture of both the Old and New Testaments are like a mirror in which the pilgrim Church on earth looks at God, from whom she has received everything, until she is brought finally to see Him as He is, face to face (see 1 John 3:2)” (#7). Christians believe that God’s word is true for all times. We know our identity, our purpose, and our path, not by what we feel is true in this moment, but in the truth of the Word of God.

Saint Paul, both in his writings and in the example of his life and death, lived what he taught, enduring hardship, imprisonment, unjust persecution, and eventually death, not with terror, but with peace and grace. Paul, however, certainly didn’t invent this concept. Jesus constantly reminded his followers, “Do not let your hearts be troubled” (Jn 14:1) and “do not worry” (Mt 6:34). In John 14:27, Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.” In Mark 5:36, Jesus says, “Do not be afraid; just have faith.”

Throughout both the Old and New Testaments, the authors of holy Scripture offer us an ocean of spiritual encouragement:

Be strong and steadfast; have no fear or dread of them, for the LORD, your God, who marches with you; he will never fail you or forsake you. (Deuteronomy 31:6)

Say to the fearful of heart:

Be strong, do not fear!

Here is your God,

he comes with vindication;

With divine recompense

he comes to save you. (Isaiah 35:4)

Do not fear: I am with you;

do not be anxious: I am your God.

I will strengthen you, I will help you,

I will uphold you with my victorious right hand. (Isaiah 41:10)

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil, for you are with me;

your rod and your staff comfort me. (Psalm 23:4)

The LORD is my light and my salvation;

whom should I fear?

The LORD is my life’s refuge

of whom should I be afraid? (Psalm 27:1)

Cast your care upon the LORD,

who will give you support.

He will never allow

the righteous to stumble. (Psalm 55:23)

The LORD is with me; I am not afraid;

what can mortals do against me?

The LORD is with me as my helper. (Psalm 118:6–7)

For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control. (2 Timothy 1:7)

There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love. (1 John 4:18)

Cast all your worries upon him because he cares for you. (1 Peter 5:7)

Throughout Scripture, again and again, we hear that we are to not be afraid, that we must surrender our anxieties and worries to Christ, trust in the Lord, and be confident in God’s providence, his deliverance, his mercy, and his constant care. As theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once observed, “When one surveys even from a distance how often and how openly Sacred Scripture speaks of fear and anxiety, an initial conclusion presents itself: the Word of God is not afraid of fear or anxiety.” What a powerful observation. We may fear anxiety and all the pressures that contribute to it, but the Word of God eschews that fear and bids us to do the same. Franklin D. Roosevelt once famously said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” God, however, wants to help us overcome even this. Yet it can still be hard to square all these scriptural assertions with the “real world,” where anxiety seems like most people’s full-time job.

Life in the “Real World”

“God must think I’m a horrible person.”

Alison, a 34-year-old lawyer and mother of three, was struggling with anxiety that was seriously affecting her work and home life.

“I don’t get it. I’m so blessed. I have a great job. A good family. But I’m on edge all the time.” Her anxiety, which seemed to come from nowhere, had been building for several months. The last straw came when what she thought was having a heart attack at the office was actually diagnosed as a panic attack after an embarrassing ambulance trip to the ER. “I can usually accomplish anything I put my mind to, but no matter what I can’t seem to power through this.”

Alison discussed her situation with her pastor, who suggested both counseling and meditative prayer. While she welcomed his suggestions, she struggled with bringing her anxiety to God. “Every time I pray; I just feel so guilty. God’s been so good to me. What kind of a way is this to say ‘thank you’ for all the blessings I’ve been given? My pastor told me that my anxiety isn’t a sin, but it just feels so wrong on every level. I just feel like I’m letting God down.”

Even if you aren’t among the 20 percent of Americans who, like Alison, experience clinical levels of anxiety and panic attacks, chances are you are no stranger to at least the more common examples of anxiety. A friend of mine describes her tendency to “go from zero to widow in sixty seconds” when her husband is late from work. Another friend describes how he struggles to fall asleep every night because he is so worried about the problems at his workplace. I know so many good parents who constantly question whether they are ruining their children. How many of us watch the news with a growing sense of dread? And on Monday mornings, I’ll bet there isn’t a single reader who hasn’t at least occasionally woken up feeling crushed by the weight of the new week.

How Bad Is It?

The truth is, anxiety is such a commonplace experience that we often feel like there is something wrong with us when we aren’t feeling anxious. We wonder what new threat to our security or peace we are missing and concern ourselves with what “fresh hell” (as Dorothy Parker put it) is waiting just around the corner, or in the next email.

But how do you know whether you are experiencing normal, garden-variety stress and anxiety or whether you are struggling with something more serious? When does anxiety become a disorder?

To be honest, if you have been asking yourself this question, it’s probably time to at least seek a professional evaluation. People often wait for years (some research suggests an average of six years) before getting appropriate, professional counseling help. By then, the problem has been allowed to grow into something that has had a serious impact on the person’s life, career, and relationships. Anxiety disorders, even serious ones, are very responsive to treatment. The vast majority of people who seek counseling for anxiety experience significant relief. By getting appropriate, professional help early, even before you’re sure you “really” need it, you increase the chances of a shorter course of treatment and a quicker and fuller recovery.

That said, there are a few unmistakable signs that anxiety could be becoming a particularly serious issue for you. The quiz at the end of this chapter can help you decide if you are experiencing “normal” levels of anxiety or if you should seek an evaluation of your anxiety by a professional counselor.

The Good News

Regardless of the level of anxiety you are experiencing, the good news is that with proper help, you can find ways to stop worrying and significantly increase your peace. Better still, as a Christian, you can be comforted by realizing that whatever worry or anxiety you are feeling in this moment, it was never God’s will that you be anxious. Neither are you destined to live in your anxiety.

In his Theology of the Body, Pope Saint John Paul the Great reminded us that to really understand God’s plan for our life and relationships, we need to go back to the beginning. Saint John Paul proposed that there are three phases of human existence in the Divine Plan. Original Man is the first phase of human life before the Fall, when our first parents were still in total communion with God and each other and before God’s plan was disrupted by sin. Historical Man is the post-Fall, sinful age we are living in now. Eschatological Man refers to our destiny at the end of time, when God creates the New Heaven and the New Earth and we are raised up in glory to become everything we were created to be and live in complete union with him for all of eternity.

“Great, Greg,” you say. “What does any of this have to do with anxiety?” I’m glad you asked.

To figure out how things are supposed to be, and understand what God really intends for us, Saint John Paul II argued that it wasn’t enough to see how things are now. We have to look at both God’s intentions for us at the beginning of creation and what he intends us to become through his grace at the end of time. Too often, we are tempted to think that “what we see is what we get.” It is too easy to believe that the anxiety-choked world we live in is all there is, and any thoughts about what we could become beyond the boundaries of our present reality are just wishful thinking. But the historical phase we live in cannot accurately reflect God’s intentions for how we should live or relate or feel, any more than a defaced painting can represent the original intentions of the artist. Certainly, we can glimpse all the beauty that painting was meant to reflect, but only if we imagine what it looked like when it was first painted, or what it could look like again if it were to be restored.

Looking at the human condition from this perspective, we see that anxiety didn’t enter the scene until sin entered the world. Prior to the Fall, God, man, woman, and creation lived in harmonious union. Genesis paints a picture of Adam and Eve confident in God’s providence, safe in each other’s arms, and happy to do the productive work of tending the garden. It was, literally, paradise.

After the Fall, everything shifts. Suddenly, man and woman, separated from God for the first time, are intimately aware of how alone, how vulnerable, how tiny they are, especially in the face of the enormity of the universe. They are naked and ashamed of just how incomplete, insufficient, and incapable they are of handling anything about the events their actions have set in motion. When they hear God coming, Adam and Eve have what amounts to the first panic attack. They hide in the bushes, cowering, feeling the weight of the wreckage closing in on them and hoping against hope that it would all just … go away.

But God assures Adam and Eve, and us, that he did not intend to leave us this way. The Word would become flesh in the person of Christ, entering into the experience of historical man to tell us again and again to “be not afraid.” He reminds us that when the new heavens and new earth are created at the end of time all will be set to right and peace will reign in the world and in our hearts once again.

I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them [as their God]. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, [for] the old order has passed away.” (Rev 21:3–4).

Through all this we see that although anxiety is common enough in this present, historical phase of human existence, it is not God’s intention either for our beginning or our end. The even better news is that we don’t have to wait until the end times to be delivered from most if not all of our anxieties! God is already hard at work, healing us day by day by drawing us deeper and deeper into relationship with him, where we can encounter the perfect love that casts out all fear (cf. 1 Jn 4:18).

The “Mystery” of Anxiety

To illustrate how God is working in our present lives to free us from anxiety, let’s briefly turn to what we know about anxiety and spiritual development. Classic mystical theology teaches that there are three stages that each person moves through, by God’s grace, on his or her road to sainthood: the Purgative Way, the Illuminative Way, and the Unitive Way. Most of us could count ourselves truly blessed to make it to the end of the first stage in our lifetime, the Purgative Way, where we learn self-mastery and surrender our attachment to neurotic comforts. Some may make it to the second stage, the Illuminative Way, where the soul experiences both the practical wisdom that comes from living a well-integrated life and a special sense of zeal for proclaiming the gospel not just with our words but also in the way we live and relate to others. A small few will be graced in their lifetime to achieve the third stage, the Unitive Way, where one experiences the beginnings of total union with God this side of heaven. The Unitive Way is the realm of living saints.

In his book, Spiritual Passages, the late psychologist and spiritual director Father Benedict Groeschel studied people he encountered along each of these three stages of the spiritual walk. He observed a steady decrease in anxiety and an increase in peace and trust in God’s loving care, despite the trials a person encounters while moving through these stages and toward deeper communion with God.

This makes sense from both a psychological and spiritual standpoint. As we experience the integration that comes with self-mastery, the peace that accompanies finding healthy and godly ways to satisfy our deepest longings, the wisdom that helps us confidently discern the right thing to do at the right time and in the right way, and the all-encompassing love that comes from entering more and more deeply into the intimate presence of God, it stands to reason that anxiety would have less claim over our lives. We may have to wait until the next life for complete and total deliverance from anxiety. But it is God’s will to allow us to experience however much peace we can — the peace the world cannot give (cf. Jn 14:27) — even while we are still in this world.

Are You Saying It’s My Fault?

Upon learning that it was never God’s intention that we would be anxious and that a decrease in anxiety usually can be expected to accompany greater spiritual maturity, many people can be left feeling that they are somehow to blame; that if they just worked or prayed harder, or somehow cared less about worldly things, maybe they could leave their worries behind. It can be easy to believe that having feelings of anxiety is somehow letting God down, or even sinful. People who are given to a type of anxiety known as scrupulosity are especially prone to this kind of thinking. The good news is that our anxiety cannot, does not, and could not ever let God down. No feeling — especially anxiety — can ever be sinful.

To commit a sin, we have to consciously choose to do what we know is wrong. Our actions must be willful, conscious, and at least reasonably informed (cf. CCC 1860–62). An emotion is none of these. Emotions, like anxiety, begin as pre-conscious, embodied experiences that bubble up, unbidden, from the limbic system (our emotional/reptilian brain) several milliseconds before our conscious mind is even aware of them. Emotions, including anxiety, can never be sinful because sin requires us to make a choice. Even though we can learn to change what we feel and how we act once an emotion appears on the scene, we can never choose what we feel in the first place. Anxiety, in particular, is a physiological and psychological response to the perception that, for some reason, we are not safe; that our physical, psychological, relational, or spiritual wellbeing is in jeopardy. Anxiety is meant to be a sign that we are facing imminent danger and that we should prepare to fight off the threat, flee from it, or freeze and hope it will just go away. Sometimes the reasons we feel threatened are obvious. Sometimes they are not. We’ll look closer at this threat-basis for anxiety and where it comes from in a later chapter. But for now, you can see that the simple fact that a person feels unsafe — even extremely unsafe (and for not especially obvious reasons) — could not possibly be considered sinful. Anxiety is the perfectly predictable response to life in a fallen world where things truly are so often unsafe. More importantly, anxiety is an opportunity to experience the mercy and loving-kindness of a God who understands, better than we, how cruel this fallen world can be.

“My Grace Is Sufficient”

But beyond knowing that anxiety is not sinful, it is encouraging to note that God doesn’t require us to achieve anxiety-free status as a prerequisite for sainthood. NYU professor-emeritus of psychology, Paul Vitz, once published a paper noting that Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (who is not only a saint but also was proclaimed a “Doctor of the Church” for the wisdom of her writings) struggled with a serious separation anxiety disorder and anxiety in her younger years as a result of her sainted mother’s premature death. Likewise, both Saint Alphonsus Ligouri and Saint Ignatius of Loyola famously battled with scrupulosity, which today can be understood as a variety of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder that makes people anxious about spiritual, rather than bacterial, contamination. We should take comfort in knowing that sainthood depends much more on God’s infinite mercy than upon our ability to achieve psychological perfection on our own merits. When Saint Paul experienced anxiety about his own inability to overcome certain flaws (2 Cor 12:9), God reassured him that, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”

So What?

At this point of the conversation, my clients often say something like, “Well, that’s great and all, but knowing this doesn’t make me feel any less anxious. What difference does any of this make to me?”

It makes all the difference in the world! We have a tendency to identify with our “emotional problems” in a way that we don’t identify with “physical problems.” I put these two terms in quotes because research shows that emotional problems are also physical, and many physical maladies (like heart disease, high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, and fibromyalgia) have strong emotional connections. Regardless, when we get a virus, we don’t say, “I am flu.” We say, “I have the flu.” But when struggle with anxiety, especially if we deal with chronic anxiety disorders, we do often say, “I am anxious” or “I am high strung” or something similar. It becomes an identity statement. Like, “Hi, my name is Bob. I have blue eyes and brown hair, and I am an anxious wreck.” Um … nice to meet you?

The problem is, when we identify with the anxiety we feel, we begin to think of it as a necessary part of who we are. We may not like it, but there it is. We think we can’t do anything about it. It’s just part of us, so we have no choice but to accept it. As clients regularly tell me, “It’s just how God wired me.”

But think of how ridiculous this is. Even the person with an illness they can’t do anything about still thinks of his or her “true” self as healthy. We say this all the time. “I woke up feeling under the weather. I can’t wait to feel like myself again.”

With anxiety, we have a tendency to assume that this is who we are. But if God did not create you to be anxious, and if he plans to deliver you from all anxiety in the fullness of time, then you may have anxiety today, you may even struggle against it tomorrow, but you are not “an anxious person.” You are not defined by your anxiety, but by God’s grace and the mighty work he longs to do in you. One day — whether in this life or the next — God intends to strip away your anxiety, and you will be free to be the peaceful person God created you to be. This is more than antics with semantics. It is a verbal recognition that you are meant for more; that the anxiety you feel is not a God-intended part of your make-up. With your good effort and God’s grace, the odds are very good that you can make significant progress in lessening your anxiety (or even overcome it altogether) and feel like your “true” self again.

Whole, Healed, Godly, Grace-Filled

I like to ask my clients to imagine what I like to call their whole, healed, godly, grace-filled self (WHGG). This is not the super-hero self that doesn’t have any problems. Rather, it is the ideal self that responds well to the various problems of life. Imagine, for a moment, a peaceful, confident, secure, strong, grace-filled you, who can face the various challenges you experience in your life with real courage, wisdom, and aplomb. It might seem like a fantasy, but humor me for a moment and imagine this person, who contends with the same things you manage, but does it with real grace, certainty, and peace.

Now here’s the really shocking news: your WHGG self is not a fantasy. In fact, it represents who you truly are. When God looks at you, your whole, healed, godly, grace-filled self is who he sees, and who he is working to help you to become.

This may seem like utter nonsense the first time you consider it. Many of my anxious clients feel this way, but if you have children (or even know a child that you love), you might be able to naturally understand my point. Even if your child is having a bad day and making lots of mistakes, no loving parent would write their child off as a screw-up. You may see that your child is struggling, but you know who they really are. You know the good, strong, confident, talented person they are — even if they can’t see it themselves or aren’t currently behaving accordingly — and you dedicate yourself to helping them live up to all you see in them, all they can be. You want to help them discover that strength and lean into it so that they can exhibit those qualities consistently and confidently.

The same thing is true of the WHGG self. If you are feeling anxious, you might not feel like you are a strong, confident, courageous, secure, faithful, person today, but your heavenly Father sees through all that. He knows who you are underneath it all, and he has dedicated all of his grace to helping you become that. That doesn’t mean you have to go from being an anxious wreck to being something else. It means that you already have the capacity to be a peaceful, strong, confident person dwelling within you in the seed God planted while you were still in your mother’s womb.

Theologian Paul Tillich argues that God is the “ground of our being.” In a sense, everything we are meant to be already exists in God. As we draw closer to God, all the stuff that isn’t authentically part of us gets stripped away, and his grace allows us to become more ourselves. Grace does not take something that is horrible and turn it into something else. Grace peels away all the false layers our fallen world applies to us so that we can become more of who we truly are.

If you struggle with anxiety to any degree, I want you to understand that God is not asking you to become something that you are not. He simply wants you to learn how to nourish the seeds of peace, confidence, courage, strength, security, and all the rest that he has already planted in your heart so that those seeds, once germinated, can help you become the whole, healed, godly, grace-filled self that is already present in you but not yet fulfilled.

God literally created you with the physiological, psychological, and spiritual capacity to be the peaceful person you long to be. You just have to learn how to lean into that vision of yourself to “become what you are” (as Saint John Paul II was fond of saying). God has great plans for you. He wants to free you from your fears and deliver you from your anxieties so that you can rest confidently in his love and care like a child rests in its mother’s arms. That was his intention for you from the beginning, and it is your destiny to be fulfilled through his grace. The first step is learning to stop clinging to our anxiety as if it was a necessary part of us, and cling, instead, to the perfect love of God, which will cast out all our fears.

That said, anxiety is a multifaceted problem with physical, psychological, emotional, relational, and spiritual factors contributing to it. Because these different factors come together in different ways in each person, everyone’s anxiety profile is a little different. Over the next few chapters, I’ll help you create a battle plan by enabling you to discover how, and to what degree, each of these factors may be contributing to your experience of anxiety. After that, we’ll look at what you can do to help your body, mind, relationships, and faith start working for your good and strengthening your peace of mind. As we go along, I’ll offer you several exercises that will help you apply the various concepts in each chapter to the specific circumstances of your life. To get the most benefit out of these exercises, I recommend grabbing a notebook and a pen and keeping them with you while you read so that you can complete them as you go.

Anxiety Quiz: How Bad Is It?

Answer True (T) or False (F) to the following.

1. Feelings of anxiety are making it difficult to fulfill my professional or personal obligations.

2. My anxiety causes me to feel uncomfortable around people or actively avoid opportunities to get together with others.

3. I have been forced to make changes in my life, work, or relationships to accommodate my anxiety.

4. When I feel anxious, I can’t calm down unless I seek out repeated assurances from others.

5. My anxiety is making me irritable (whether you notice this or others tell you).

6. Worry and anxiety cause me to lie awake for at least some period most nights.

7. I constantly replay social interactions looking for mistakes I may have made or offenses I may have committed.

8. My doctor says I am healthy, but I experience consistent physical problems with (1 point for each). fatigue muscle aches bowel problems sweating dizziness shortness of breath

___ fatigue ___ muscle aches

___ bowel problems ___ sweating

___ dizziness ___ shortness of breath

9. I have experienced any of the above for the last six months or more (2 points).

Scoring

Unless otherwise directed (e.g., #8, #9), give yourself 1 point for each T answer.

Explanation of Results

Please note that this is not meant to be used as a tool to diagnose a specific type of anxiety disorder. There are many different anxiety disorders, and only a professional can help you properly identify the exact nature of the problem you are experiencing.

That said, because each of the above questions points to a symptom potentially associated with a serious problem with anxiety, if you have 2 or more points, you should speak to a professional counselor to discuss possible treatment options. Remember, anxiety is highly treatable. The quicker you get appropriate help, the sooner you can experience full recovery and start leading a more peaceful, confident, enjoyable life. If you are unaware of faithful, professional counseling resources in your area, contact the Pastoral Solutions Institute for assistance at CatholicCounselors.com or 740-266-6461.