G4 Emotions

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.