Brave

by Sissy Goff

  Research says that problem-solving has been proven to reduce the likelihood of developing an anxiety disorder.8 I would also say that for the girls I know, the problem is not a lack of problem-solving skills, but their lack of confidence in their problem-solving capability.

  I have a feeling you might lack confidence in your own problem-solving capability. Or maybe you don’t. At least, you don’t when you’re by yourself. But when you’re around your friends, or boyfriend, or parents, even, it gets a little harder.

  We girls are intuitive creatures. It’s one of our best gifts—and just like those old 45 records, it’s also one of our worst curses. We know when someone doesn’t like something we’ve said. We know when someone might not like us. We usually know what others want us to say and how others want us to act. In those times and in those situations, it’s especially easy for us to doubt ourselves and let others think and problem-solve for us.

  I want you to find your voice.

  If I had to say my goals for this book right now, they would be that you would find your voice and that you would find your confidence in your own problem-solving capability. But even more, I want you to trust that God’s Spirit lives inside of you, guiding and giving you direction. His voice is there. You can often find His voice by the feeling you get in your gut—this little stirring deep down inside you that quietly hints at a direction to go. A choice to make. What to say in a certain moment. Who you want to be in a particular situation.

  I want you to find your voice. I want you to trust God’s Spirit leading you. I know way too many girls who don’t. They don’t believe their voice matters, and they don’t trust and follow what they think might possibly be God’s leading. So they live in the maybes. Here’s a formula that I believe will help you find your voice when you encounter problems. I want you to ask yourself these questions:

  What do I believe God would want?

  What does it look like to love other people?

  What does it look like to value my own beliefs and myself?

  Who do I want to be in this?

  I truly believe that if you answer those four questions, you’ll find your voice. You’ll find that gut sense of who God has made you to be and how He’s leading you. My gut is honestly the thing I use the most as a counselor. When I’m sitting with someone in my office and feel like I have no idea what to say or do, I can often feel this little stirring inside of me. The older I get, the more I trust in that stirring. The more I believe it’s God directing and guiding me. He wants me to find my voice, and He wants you to find yours.

  The Worry Whisperer wants to stop you. He wants to silence you and stop you from doing the brave thing. From practicing. From listening to your emotions. From acting on those emotions. From using your voice. From finding and being you. That’s really all this chapter is about. Listening to our hearts and acting on what they say. Doing the brave thing and believing God is leading the way, He has our good in mind, and He has already overcome the world and the Worry Whisperer. More on that soon.

  In the meantime, I’m so proud of you. You’ve basically taught yourself some of the most important tools in cognitive-behavioral therapy. You’re already retraining both your cortex and your amygdala, and you’ve done the brave thing by reading, thinking, and practicing. And using your voice, even in the pages of this book. I can’t wait to see where you go next, especially as we talk about the hope undergirding every bit of understanding and help on this brave journey.

  What are five things you’ve learned in this chapter that you want to remember?

  What are five things you would tell a friend?

  A Few Brave Things

  to Remember

  The Worry Whisperer’s tricks for your heart include certainty, comfort, control, and avoidance.

  The Worry Whisperer tells you that you’re not safe unless you’re certain of what’s expected, what’s coming next, and all manner of things that none of us can really be certain of.

  The Worry Whisperer will try to convince you that you need comfort at all costs. “Don’t do the thing that makes you uncomfortable. Staying safe is the only way to get rid of your anxiety.” But the opposite is true: Taking risks and doing the scary thing is the only way to truly work through the worry.

  The Worry Whisperer tells us we’re not okay unless we’re in control. But it’s not possible to be in control, so we live in a perpetual state of anxiety. The good news is that Someone much wiser than we are is in control.

  Avoiding the scary thing feels like the answer to worry and anxiety. But the scary thing morphs into another scary thing and another. And suddenly, we find we’ve given worry way too much power to limit and define us. Avoidance strengthens anxiety.

  Your brave tools for your heart include an emotional vocabulary, brave ladders, rewards, practice, and problem solving. You’re always going to feel better about yourself when you do the brave thing.

  If we don’t let our feelings out in healthy, appropriate ways, our feelings will find their own way out, often in the form of worry and anxiety.

  The only way to create lasting change in the amygdala is through experience—through doing the scary thing. Brave ladders are a way to do the scary thing in small, manageable steps, with lots of rewards along the way. The number one reason people don’t work through anxiety is that they don’t practice.

  7. Trouble

  I want you to think back on being in fourth grade. Picture your little self sitting in church on a Sunday morning or in the gym for your homecoming pep rally. What were you wearing? Who were you sitting with? Now visualize the high school girls that you thought were the coolest in your school or church—picture them walking right by you. Can you see them? They were dressed so cute and looked so confident, like they didn’t have a care in the world. They sure didn’t look like they were experiencing trouble. And since they didn’t look like they were experiencing it, you didn’t expect it when you became a teenager yourself.

  It’s kind of like any time we think about the next stage of life:

  When I get to middle school, things will be so much better.

  At least when I get to high school, the girl drama will be over.

  When I can move on and have a fresh start in college, I’ll finally have real friends.

  When I get married, I’ll feel loved like I’ve always longed for . . . all the time.

  When I have kids, I’ll feel like my life has a sense of purpose.

  And on and on and on. We don’t expect trouble. Then we get there . . . wherever “there” is. And there that trouble is again—or a new type of trouble.

  Until recently, I would have said you were a generation that didn’t expect much trouble. I said to your parents at parenting seminars all over the country that it was mostly our fault, as grown-ups. We were wearing T-shirts and using hashtags that said “Livin’ Our Best Life” and “Best. Day. Ever.” I told the grown-ups in your life that I felt like we were doing you a disservice, because you didn’t know to expect trouble. I told them your expectations were set so high that when something went wrong, you felt like something was wrong with you or with your life, rather than realizing that we all live every day in the midst of some kind of trouble.

  These days, however, trouble is more visible for a lot of us. I’m sitting on my porch in the midst of a pandemic. People are walking by in masks, worried about the trouble that might come. In Nashville, we had terrible storms this spring. We’ve also seen horrific racial violence here and across the country. We’re living in the midst of trouble like none of us have ever experienced. None of us were expecting this kind of trouble.

  I want you to write five to ten things you were expecting to be true about your life when you became a teenager.

  My guess is that those things are likely not what you are experiencing. Let’s break it down a little more; now I want you to write what’s true. Take each of those expectations you wrote and write down what life is really like for you now, regarding that specific expect
ation.

  I don’t know what you wrote, but I could guess based on thousands of conversations I’ve had with girls your age over the years. Again, you’re not alone, either in how you’re feeling or that you weren’t really expecting things to be quite this way.

  You were expecting to have grown out of the awkwardness you feel inside, but you still feel that awkwardness rear its head way too often.

  You thought you’d know who you are, but you are still falteringly figuring it out.

  You were expecting to be confident, but you’re still unsure. A LOT.

  You were expecting to be surrounded, but you’re still alone too much of the time.

  John 16:33 is the verse we have talked about often in this book: “In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

  Let’s look at what was going on in this verse. Jesus had just told the disciples He was about to leave them. He was their best, most trusted friend. They believed He had come to save the world, and now He was leaving. Not only was He leaving them, but He was leaving them to do the work that He had started. They weren’t expecting this kind of trouble. It was all just too much. Too much of being left and too much pressure. I would guess that they felt unsure, awkward, and alone and maybe more than a little worried.

  “In this world, you will have trouble,” He still said. “But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

  I want you to expect trouble and worry. Wherever you are now, in whatever the next stage of life is. He says those very words to you now, in your room, as you’re reading this book. “In this world, YOU will have trouble.” In fact, He already knows the trouble you’re experiencing with friends, with family, and within yourself. You will have trouble. Expect it.

  In fact, I’m going to make my own list of things that I want you to expect.

  You’re going to have trouble with friends. Some girls can be, as you know, quite fickle. You’ll have some friends off and on throughout your lifetime who won’t be true friends. Fickle girls turn into fickle women. But expect to find a handful of trusted, safe friends along the way. They may come at unexpected times and in unexpected places. Those friendships will take work. Look for them and put in the work to keep them.

  You will have to go it alone sometimes. Even with a great group of friends, a great husband, and your family. You are still going to feel alone at times. There is not one person—friend or husband or child—who will ever completely fulfill you. Only Jesus can do that. You can have a wonderful marriage—which also will require work. You can have some amazing children—who will make you want to lose your mind at times. You can expect trouble in your family life too—even the most connected, perfect-looking families have trouble.

  I want you to expect trouble. But there are other things you can expect too—things that I told your parents about in their book. But I want you to know them even more.

  You will have good friends along the way, although they may not be the most popular friends.

  Kindness is more important than cool in a friend every time.

  Even the best of friends will hurt your feelings and leave you out sometimes.

  Learning how to handle conflict is more important than having a friendship where there isn’t any.

  Every important relationship in your life will be hard sometimes.

  You won’t be invited to every birthday party.

  Just because you’re not someone’s best friend doesn’t mean you’re not still a friend. Everyone has a closest few.

  People can still really love you and hurt your feelings, even at the same time.

  There is no perfect friend.

  There is no perfect guy.

  There is certainly no perfect teenage boy.

  Every college student feels lonely, thinks they chose the wrong college, and wishes they could transfer sometimes.

  There is no perfect marriage.

  Every job has hard days when you wish you had chosen something else.

  Parenting is hard. You will love your kids like crazy, and you will be glad when summer break is over.

  Through every stage of your life, you will worry at times. You’ll worry about the things and people that are most important to you, and sometimes you’ll worry about things that don’t even matter.

  You will feel sad and angry and hurt often. Daily. But those feelings do not define you. You get to pick what defines you.

  You’ll never feel 100 percent confident.

  You can feel courageous and fearful at the same time.

  You will fail. And fail in big and little ways a million times over the course of your life.

  Your failure does not define you either.

  You’ll often feel like something is wrong with you. You’ll feel like you’re the only one who ________ or who doesn’t ________. You’re not. And it’s not.

  You are exactly whom God meant for you to be, even though you won’t feel like it most of the time.

  In this world, you will have trouble and have it a lot.

  But you can always have hope because of Jesus.

  Jesus is the one friend who will never disappoint you or let you down.1

  In this world, you will have trouble. But . . .

  The verse doesn’t stop with trouble. There is a but. Thank heavens, there’s a but.

  Romans 5:3–5 says it this way: “Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”

  “But” and “Not only so” are awfully similar in these two verses. Trouble is not where things end. In this world, we will have trouble and suffering both, but suffering produces good things. In fact, let’s do a little experiment. I want you to walk out this verse with a real-life example. Start with suffering. Actually, I can start with my example. Then you can add yours.

  A time I suffered: When my parents divorced.

  It taught me perseverance: I had never been through anything that hard. I learned that I could get through it and still be okay. That I could persevere.

  It grew character in me: I realized I was stronger than I knew. It helped me develop more grit.

  It brought hope: Now I help kids every day whose parents are getting divorced or who are going through some type of pain. I’m better able to help because I know what it feels like to hurt in that way.

  Your turn.

  A time I suffered:

  It taught me perseverance:

  It grew character in me:

  It brought hope:

  Again, science backs up Scripture. There are good things happening when we struggle, even if we don’t know it at the time. Research says that up to 70 percent of people who go through trauma experience profound positive transformation.2 Experiencing difficulty grows more “grit and perseverance” in you, according to two psychologists I respect.3 I would imagine you have certainly grown more grit and perseverance as a result of the trauma or trouble you’ve experienced. You’ve likely developed more character and hope too.

  In this world, you will have trouble. But the but is coming. It’s coming and for one reason only: grace. My favorite author, Frederick Buechner, defines grace in this way: “Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.”4

  In this world, we will have trouble and worries. But He has overcome the world, and in that we can certainly take heart.

  A Few Brave Things

  to Remember

  In this world, we will have trouble.

  Expect trouble and expect worry.

  Sometimes our anxiety is related to our unrealistic expectations—for others, for ourselves, and for the wor
ld. When we experience trouble, we think something is wrong with us or wrong with our lives.

  Suffering produces perseverance. Perseverance produces character, and character, hope. In other words, suffering eventually creates good things in all of us.

  Science backs up this truth with research that says trauma actually grows more grit and perseverance.

  8. Take Heart

  So far it sounds kind of tough to be a teenage girl. Have you picked up on that?

  Here’s what we’ve established:

  You live with pressure to get things right, to succeed, to look beautiful, and to have all of your friends and followers on social media respond.

  When something goes wrong in a boy’s world, he blames someone else. When something goes wrong in a girl’s world, she blames herself.

  Girls tend to blame themselves for things that are either out of their control or that aren’t blameworthy to begin with.

  You have changes going on in your body that create a lot of emotional upheaval.

  You have changes going on in your brain that cause your memory to falter and your confidence to dip.

  Girls often don’t let themselves feel angry, disappointed, or any emotion that others might interpret as them not being kind or good or likable.

  Girls often lose their voice as they approach puberty, letting others think and problem-solve for them.

  Girls are twice as likely to struggle with worry and anxiety as boys.

  Trouble. And here I am telling you to take heart. Well, really, here Jesus is.

  Taking Heart or Taking Shame?

  I want to add something else to the mix. You might have picked up on the fact that I often speak at parenting seminars. Most of the time, I go with this guy named David, who has worked with me for twenty-five years and is like a brother to me. We have fun going back and forth when we speak. He talks about boys. I talk about girls. Because he works mostly with boys, and I work mostly with girls. (Which means my job is way more fun. Can you imagine trying to counsel a teenage boy and get him to talk?)