Anxiety and Depression

Transcript of a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Lightly edited for readability; speaker labels omitted.

You're listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. Sage Hill is a social impact organization that helps people see who they are made to be so they can do what they are made to do. In this podcast, Chip sits down with his longtime friend, Stephen James, to discuss how anxiety and depression are not abnormal, but are actually experiences that are common in life. Listen to learn more about what your heart may be telling you when you're experiencing anxiety or depression. Chip, recently, we did a podcast and a couple of blogs on the Sage Hill Institute site, the chip..com site about anxiety and depression. Mhmm. And we had a lot of feedback on that. So there's a lot of interest in that. So we wanna talk more about it. We talked we talked in that podcast about them being in the nature of addiction, that we talked about anxiety and depression being being addiction like, and that they follow the same patterns of addictions and process of addiction, that they're more than just neurological problems. It's a way of being that interrupts our whole whole life and keep from joy. But can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah.

You know, if we put the center of our lives on a line and we extend our hands out to our right and to our left as if they could go a long way, the center of that line is is the middle of ourselves or our hearts. Okay? So the polarity of the right hand, the polarity of the left hand. So I want us to think in terms of anxiety and depression actually as extensions. The farther out away they are from the center of our beings, the less normal they are and the the more help we need. But I also want us to say metaphorically to the end of each of our hands, the right hand and the left hand, anxiety and depression is normal to a life that is intensely difficult. In the center of our beings, like, for example, fear, fear is a feeling that we've been given that allows us to know or to experience or anticipate danger and cry out for help to receive it. Mhmm. And faith in fear is the belief and the recognition and the experience that their help came because I cried out. Like, I cried out. I took a risk and help came. Yes. That was birthed in fear. Like, I'm afraid it's not gonna come to be. Yes. I still take the risk and I receive it. So the outcome of fear is faith. Yeah. And and then we become wise about using it, like, hey, I'm scared. Who do I go to? That's a form of wisdom. It's kinda like knowing that life is scary and difficult, then I need to learn how to live it in a way that allows me to do it well. That's what happens when we actually live in our fear. We try to get away from our fear. It turns into our biology. Well, that and when fear is not accepted as a part of the emotional spiritual response to life, anxiety takes its place. But also anxiety has a very relevant place in our lives because we are created to anticipate the unpredictable. And anxiety is that which is the energy of anticipation. Mhmm. You know, to be prepared to fly, to be prepared to flee, to be prepared to freeze because biologically, we have these incredible, let's just call them capacities or mechanisms to be able to react to something moving towards us, running at us,

to to save ourselves. And a lot of the human experience, the human brain is is developed to predict what's gonna happen next, what's gonna happen next, what bad things gonna happen next, what bad things gonna happen next. And anxiety, I believe, becomes progressively worse the less capacity, especially in our early years, we've less ability we've developed to use fear well. I think when fear is prohibited as a tool to let us live relationally in danger, then we end up becoming ashamed of fear and we end up not having a place to go with fear. And then we start our focus is not who do I go to, but how do I get away from this or how do I get out of this? Put a story to that. What's an example or metaphor of how early in life that happens? Well, I remember, like, for example, seventh grade. Seventh grade was extraordinary. It is a lot of lot of kids. Oh, middle school. Middle school. Middle school. I went from a little bitty, classic I guess you'd call it home it's not the fifties, but what we think of as a stereotypic fifties, sixth grade school to seventh grade, and it was everything that would be a nightmare. I remember the first day I was in school, I saw, one kid of one race pick up another kid of another race and throw him over the railing into down into the second, the first story stairwell. And I thought, wow. It's just very I'm not I'm not in elementary school anymore. I'm not in elementary school anymore. And, and I'm not talking about race. I'm saying, this this it's just people. And I I remember going being very, very, very frightened. And then but there was no at the time, no one to talk to about that. Everyone seemed to be adjusting. No one seemed to be talking. We all kinda ran like baby birds away from the tigers, you know, into our little cubbies and stuff. And and at home, I didn't mention it and didn't talk about it. At home, I was already conditioned. Hey, this is how it is. You need to be strong, brave, whatever, and no one can do anything about it anyway. So that was already in me. Mhmm. And so school became to be something dreadful. I remember being relieved to get out of there. Fridays was heaven. Friday by Saturday at noon is the the the anticipation of something horrible happened. Sunday night was awful. Sunday night was awful. And I'm telling you, Steve, the the gym class locker rooms, the things that happened when the teachers weren't around, people hitting and knocking and threats and verbal taunts and just like, god. And I remember praying at night, oh, god, oh, god, oh, god, oh, god, We're not gonna do this tomorrow. Will you prevent this from happening? And, and it was just literally heart rate, anxiety, anticipation, dread. So that if anything good did happen in my seventh grade year, I forgot You can see it. Yeah. I forgot it. All I did all I knew is that I survived it and got out of it. And that experience can end up without healing, make us start watching for the next experience that's familiar. So anxiety is this cascading kind of building thing. Extending away from not having to feel fear.

And then it can become a way of By trying to predict what bad things gonna happen. Whatever I have to do to avoid vulnerability. So it's like it hijacks our creativity and our imagination. It does. That's well said. It hijacks who we're made to be. It hijacks our capacity to trust, And it leads us to a place that allows us to ask this question. What do I need to do to escape living this life? Yeah. Okay? And therefore, we don't learn one of the great, I think, great mysteries of living, Stephen. And it's that life is tragic and that's the that's reality. And God is faithful and that's the truth. And those two statements and the Hebrews knew this, but those two statements were in great conflict. Mhmm. They they that is the conflict. And the Hebrews contended with it. The story of Jacob is to go from deceiver, anxiety ridden, need for control, at what cost I already know the future, so I'm gonna make sure I create my safety for myself, incapacity to love, hyper visions, intimacy disorder, boundary distortion, enmeshment with sick people, and all that kind of stuff. Jacob had a name change from deceiver by wrestling with himself Mhmm. And wrestling with God. He ended up getting a name change, a blessing from God. He was crippled, always human. And then secondly, he received the name Israel, which means to struggle with God and live. And that's a story of the great conflict being reconciled, that life is tragic. That the struggle is the reconciliation. The struggle is the reconciliation. Israel is the to struggle with God, we find life. To struggle with God and live is the reconciliation

of reality and the truth. And anxiety is is the biological refusal to struggle. I'm just trying to not. I'm trying to predict the future so I don't have to struggle. Well, yeah, anxiety is the normal gift of biological anticipation. Yeah. Anxiety that becomes sickness is the do whatever I gotta do to get away from being human. I'm glad you said it's normal because we're we're real close to talking about anxiety as a moral failure or as a sin or something bad. And it's not. Anxiety is not bad. No. Anxiety is part of living in a place where the unpredictable does occur. I mean, it it's going to happen. Do you we wake up any every day and anything can happen. If that doesn't shoot some acid into your stomach, then, you know, you're not human and you're not here and you don't live in the same place. It's embarrassing to say. Sometimes I'll play a trick with myself in thinking, well, if I can name the bad thing that's gonna happen, then I know it won't happen. And that's the beauty of anxiety. You you just define what anxiety take. It's dread without an object yet. So we have to find an object to calm ourselves. And create magical thinking to try to yeah. And we we live in the negative. And so if that's anxiety your hopes up, and that way you won't be disappointed. Right. Okay. So Anxiety management. So that's anxiety. What's depression? It's the other side of the arm stretched out. Right? So the yeah. Let's go back to the center again. Yeah. Anger is a desire for change. Anger is is the voice of a human being who has the capacity to speak and speaks. And when your voice becomes valueless or considered worthless or you know somewhere because of your past experiences that if you speak, it won't matter, you literally learn how to survive. You you find your heart useless and even worthless. And so your anger that is a an outcoming of life, I desire this, I want this, or your anger that is a reach for life, you start to use your willpower and your mental thought processes to say, be quiet, heart, and we start depressing that which wishes to rise. It's Archimedean principle that that a ball of air, has a a pushed underwater has a equal and increased pressure to rise. Depression is where you push down the natural order of life that we're made to speak. Imagine a beach ball in a pool. Yes. It's pressing down of that beach ball. Yes. So for what purpose? Why would someone wanna press down that? Well, you press it down because, like, the the see, anger is the most vulnerable feeling of all because it shows what matters to us and what we care about. I'm not talking about rage. Rage is about People get so let's Yeah. We need to read The Voice of the Heart. Rage and anger are miles apart. East Coast West. If we were to have anger be a statement and not just a word of anger. A hunger for life. So we push down our hunger for life. I hope. We hold down our hunger for life. I hope we walk that first.

Why do people do that? Why do we do that? Pain. That that rejection. We're so relational that we we use our voices so our voices will be heard. We did a podcast on friendship not too long ago. And we we speak our feelings for our feelings to be connected with other people so that, you know, pity the man who falls and no one has is there to to to pick him up. That that angers are there for joining and living and creating. And when someone doesn't value you and tells you no to how you're made and you finally start to shut down, and isolation is the only safety. So you depress your heart. It's emotional isolation. Absolutely. And depression continue. The heart So so like anxiety

not being bad, depression's not bad. They're both normal natural reactions to a really difficult world. You know, you you hope for marriage to work. You hope that your children will receive certain things. You hope that the school's gonna turn out to be the you hope that they your children won't end up in a breakup where they their hearts are crying and they say, you know, why, Eddie? Why why does that happen to me? And all you've got to give them is, I don't know. I don't know. But I'm with you in it. You're playing Emmanuel. And most people aren't aren't don't like the god Emmanuel, god with us. They want another the alien god of rescue You want the genie in the bottle god? Genie in the bottle. Saves them. And so life is a, an experience of having to deal with that which we hope for not happening. So anger is dispensed with and then sadness settles in, but we don't speak that either because you have to have anger to speak to Press that down too. So you press that down too. And depression is And the hurt to press the hurt down. Depressing

that which makes me hungry to live. So it's hard. Depression I mean, anxiety Does it does it make sense that a person would be depressed because life happens like this? Life is that painful. It is. I have hope and it's not come through. Life is tragic. Yeah. It's got the picture of, like, someone holding down their anger with one hand. They're holding down their sadness with another hand. They're sitting on their hurt like a bunch of beach balls. Yeah. No wonder depression is so exhausting. That's the problem. It's this extension of us stretching ourselves away from ourselves. What's the solution? Well, I tell you, admitting that life has pain in it, admitting that life has we have great desire in it, admitting that we wish no matter what we can't stop hoping, admitting that we're human, admitting that life is an emotional and spiritual experience where the things we wish for don't happen like we wish they would. How does admitting begin to change that? Admission is the the recognition emotional recognition that we're having a human experience in a very tough place

where God lives too. So I guess that I would become afraid and angry in the middle of that life. Absolutely. You're admitting powerlessness. It's kinda counterintuitive, but you're admitting powerlessness over life, which is gonna take you to your feet. It's a paradox. It is a paradox. And then amazingly, because it makes room for God and others actually because you're giving up control. Then you surrender, which means you give back over that which you've been hiding. In other words, you return your hearts to the living. Okay? And you return your heart to the living because we're made to be connected to God and others. So you give back what you've hidden. You have to. You have to. And then what happens is this experience of relationship actually creates the return to sanity, wholeness in the midst of a place, okay, that we know is tragic, God is faithful. And then all of a sudden, the experience of anxiousness and depression is part of living a life that's full and rich and wonderful. I mean, you're gonna be anxious. You're gonna be depressed because you're gonna lose and unpredictable is going to happen, and what I do with it is the relationship in it. I mean, I talk about my exact Sonia, you know, I've I've been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and I'm gonna have to have some significant surgery upcoming. And last night, I said, you know, Sonia, the the anxiety in me, it's like like it's midnight, and I wanna take the recycling out. I'm like, I want to get control of something. So I went and paid a bunch of bills and then I came back to the bedroom and she said, do you feel better? And I said, honestly, I do. Yeah. Every vacation, I've gotta, like, do my mail, do my bills, like, it's Right. It's forecast in college, I would make sure every apartment was is a apartment. And that anxiety lead leads me and you to be responsible with recognizing that life is out of control. Yeah. But we we also know at the same time, me paying those bills ain't gonna take my prostate cancer away. And we know that. We know that. And that's what admission of being human, surrendering to the process. I must be really scared because I'm taking the I'm taking trash out at midnight and doing this. Exactly. And then once we surrender to this wholeness and the god of wholeness, we take our lack of wholeness, our brokenness to this God for healing and strength and courage in the midst of a tragic place. In other words, we give our life and will over to the true care of a God we struggle with who can handle our struggle. That's so important you said struggle with because it almost sounded formulaic that if Yeah. If I would just bring my heart to God and tell the truth to God, then my anxiety will go away. It's not that what you're saying. No. We're gonna be gonna be anxious. You're gonna be anxious the rest of your life. And if you read books that are gonna cure you from being human, they're lies from they're lies from the the marketplace of profit and and you they're they're banking on your addiction to find a place where you don't have to be human. They're banking on it. I mean, you think about most of the the, teachings, even sermons, they're always putting your life off till tomorrow. If you do these things today, tomorrow is gonna be in a place that doesn't exist. It's a joke. The beautiful news about being anxious and depressed, depressing, and the beautiful news about being human is that because we're made for relationship, the better we are at living human, the more friendships, relationships we're going to have, the richer and deeper our love is going to be, the more we're gonna trust the God who is with us instead of the God who rescues us from being human. We're gonna wind up being gift givers who can accept people where they are without trying to change them because their anxiety makes us anxious. We can be with people in wider, deeper ways. And, Stephen, that's very familiar because there is no place, Paul says, that a human being can go that is distant or away from the love of God. No breadth, no depth, no so we're becoming people who can love with the love that we've been given. And that's an incredible gift. And it comes from one part of it from accepting. Yeah. We're gonna be anxious. We're gonna be depressed. If something happens to Sonia or or one of my sons whom I I love, depression's gonna be real normal because it's a part of the grief and not wanting to care again because the care is like I can't live through caring. I need to not. I need it to stop. This is normal. And frankly, for me, I'm telling you, homesickness is because we're sick for home. And no matter how much we live here, this isn't home. I'm gonna make a house here. I'm gonna love here, but it's a journey to go home.

This is Stephen James, the executive director of Sage Hill Counseling. Thanks for listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. If you're interested in learning more about the power of our core eight emotions, I encourage you to check out Chip's book, The Voice of the Heart, A Call to Full Living. If you're a therapist, a pastor, or professional that works with people, and you'd like to be better equipped to help people live fully, we invite you to learn more about Sage Hill Training. This is an in-depth experiential training to help you bring your heart to the work you are called to do. You can visit sagehilltraining.com to find out more.