Attacking Anxiety: From Panicked and Depressed to Alive and Free

by Shawn Johnson

No matter what level of anxiety or depression you are dealing with, no matter how long it has been or how hopeless you feel: You are not crazy. You are not alone. And this will end.

Past abuse was the starting point for me. Throughout my life, I’ve experienced emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. The details of my experiences with each of those aren’t important, but if you have abuse in your past, there’s a good chance it’s feeding into your anxiety today. No matter how many years ago it was and how “over it” you may think you are, abuse causes wounds deep in your soul. I went decades thinking I was over it. After all, I was a grown man. I was a husband, a father, a lead pastor. Surely somewhere along the way, I’d managed to get over my abuse, right? In reality, I was just pretending. At times I convinced myself it hadn’t happened. At other times I minimized the effects it had on me. Both approaches are toxic. Both cause our bodies and minds to hold on to past hurts. And both feed into our anxieties. In his fantastic book The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk says it this way: “As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself. . . . The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.”3 Explaining how mental suppression impacts the body is well beyond the scope of my book, but I’d encourage you to check out his work if you are ready to take a deeper dive. If you are on edge while reading this section, consider talking to a professional. Seriously. Forget about any stigma on counseling. Getting help was a game changer for me. It helped me ackno...

We don’t want to push people away, but eventually the loud voice wears us down and convinces us not to share the depths of our pain with anyone. The more we believe the lie, the more we will be tempted to keep the depths of our anxiety and depression to ourselves.

When I saw the results, I remember feeling two strong emotions. The first was pain; it hurt my soul to think about how many people are struggling. But I was also incredibly proud of our church for stepping up and being honest. We should be leading the way in this conversation. Gone are the days of pretending like we have it all together; it’s time for the church to talk about anxiety and depression. Because as it turns out, even some of the greatest names in the Bible, heroes of the faith, fought the same battle and were courageous enough to admit it. You are not alone!

I want you to know right now that no matter how long you’ve dealt with anxiety or depression or no matter how long your loved one has struggled with it, this does not have to be the way the story ends. But it is time to start fighting.

However, before we talk about assembling this army, we first need to address a bigger problem. If you are anything like me, you try to portray an external picture of yourself that is a lot more put together than what’s really there internally. Sound familiar? We all do it. It’s human nature to want to present ourselves in the best possible light. All too often, we want people to fight for us, but they have no idea what the fight even looks like because we’ve kept our struggles to ourselves all these years. You may have the most incredible people in the world surrounding you, ready to fight for you, but if they can’t see the Enemy they are fighting, how could they possibly know how to help? Complete honesty with those you love is a necessary step toward freedom. The question we need to answer honestly is: Are we willing to let our loved ones in on everything? And I mean everything.

When we are going through seasons of anxiety or depression and are crying out to God for help, it’s easy to give up hope and determine that God either isn’t there or isn’t listening to our cries for help. But God is always on the move, working all things together for good. It’s just that we can’t always see what he’s up to. We order the pizza, but when it doesn’t immediately arrive at our doorstep, we give up. Don’t lose hope.

Whenever I go through a difficult season, I always remind myself that my pain will become my platform. Because anytime I go through a struggle, I also know I’m going to turn around and share the experience with those who struggle. That’s the reason I wrote this book. God changes people’s lives, and oftentimes, he uses our stories to do it.