Attacking Anxiety: From Panicked and Depressed to Alive and Free

by Shawn Johnson

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...