Statesman63
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 | | Subject: The Cure for Panic Attacks Sat Aug 24, 2013 3:12 pm | |
| The Cure for Panic Attacks
This is a complete revision of my first attempt of penning this. My original title was “How to Cure Stasibasiphobia,” which denoted my plight. But as I continued to garner Truth for the cure, I realized that what I had compiled can be applied to almost all phobia categories. So confident am I that this is it that I venture to say that no future revisions or addendums will be necessary. If you happened to have stumbled upon this writing it was by Providence, not caprice. Without further ado:
I am humbled to have discovered that Jesus was correct when He said that healing is found in Truth. Truth is revealed through discipleship, but without getting too much into that at the moment, allow me to just skip to the truth of the matter. The cure to all panic attacks, fear, and anxiety IS peace. The way to peace starts with peace. You cannot start in fear and then analyze and work your way back to peace. Since peace is the end that you seek, start there instead of imagining how to get there through some mystical labyrinth of a higher wisdom, which only creates a loop back to fear. I already hear your vehement objections: “I’m not feeling too peaceful. I woke up this morning with heavy dread.” Jesus said in Luke 21:14, “Make up your mind not to worry beforehand...” He says to start in peace. The truth is you have peace. Jesus said, “Peace I give you. My peace I leave you.” Elsewhere He says, “Stop doubting and believe.” Isaiah says not only to start with peace, but to keep your mind on the Peace-giver. To quote directly, “You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee because he trusts in thee.” If you are “kept” in perfect peace then peace was the starting point. Assume peace. Assume confidence. Assume success. Assume acceptance. Start with peace. Never assume fear.
Peace is not something that you figure out. Peace is unascertainable; inscrutable. Philippians 4:7 says that the peace of God transcends all understanding. The light bulb to the discovery of peace will never come on in the state of fear. Once you have the peace of God, it is such a state that cannot be described. Peace substitutes can be described in how-to books and psychiatric theories. And there are volumes of literature on how to obtain counterfeit peace and drugs that would be precisely termed “coping mechanisms.” Just as peace is inscrutable, fear is irrational and one should never attempt to figure it out or rationalize it in an attempt to understand it. No matter how well you think you understand it, it will remain paradoxical. The answer to peace does not reside in fear. Think from the realm of peace. When you find your mind dwelling on fear, shift your mind back to peace. Never let your mind stay on the fear. The need for this shifting will soon become less often and eventually fade away into the oblivion of habitual peace.
Peace is a flow of time and a positional point and moment in space. You must keep in step with peace. If you hesitate and ponder about it, peace can pass you by and you will be stuck in fear. Peace is like preparing oneself to enter the twirling of a Double-Dutch jump rope. If you take your place at the right moment, you will be at peace and can keep in step with it. If you step in at the wrong moment or spot, or refuse to step in at all from paralysis of fear, you’ll miss the peace. You must step in at your moment. Fear is freezing. Peace is being unfrozen. You must establish peace by taking your place in the peace that God specifically gave you. You do this by claiming your victory. So just jump right in and let every opportunity be one for peace and freedom. Since fear paralyzes, keep your mind in the “go” mode.
Peace is something that you claim: it is to be claimed. It is not to be searched out or discovered. Technically, you can stop praying for it. It is realized at the moment you claim it. You are able to claim it because God promised it to you in Christ Jesus. The opposite of claiming peace is rejecting it. There are no in-between options. You either claim peace or you reject peace. I know it sounds harsh to be told that you are rejecting peace when peace has been what you have been searching for for years. By the authority of God’s Word, I am able to say that the reason you do not have peace is because you are rejecting it. Remember this writer knows exactly what you are going through because I have shared the same experience.
Again, start in victory. Claim your victory in Christ beforehand. How do you claim victory? You already have the victory. It is because of what Jesus did that you are victorious. In case you didn’t get the memo, at the cross, Jesus died and took your sins with Him, and then on the third day He resurrected, credited you with His righteousness so that you raised from the grave with Him; and, He put all things under His feet, including your enemies, fears, and anxiety; and, placed you with Him at the right-hand side of the Father in Heaven. In case you didn’t get the memo, your citizenship is right now in Heaven. You have the legal right to complete victory in Christ Jesus. All demonic forces and enemies, including the spirit of fear are submitted to Jesus and conquered. But in order to experience your new-found victory, you must be with Jesus because only then will the enemy be under you—because the enemy is under Him not you. Jesus, not you or I conquered the enemy.
Since victory is promised, learn to go not based on what you see or have experienced in the past. Learn to not believe what your eyes see, or your body feels. If what you see or what you feel contradicts what God says, your sight and feelings are wrong because what comes out of the mouth of God is always Truth. One thing God cannot do is lie (Hebrews 6:18). You may feel anxious, and the fact that you feel that way is the truth. The lie is not that you feel the way you feel. The lie is that you feel that way based on false information. If you really believed what God said in His Word you would not feel that way. You were promised the victory in Christ. You have it even if you aren’t feeling victorious, or even if what you see seems to convey otherwise. The true reality is different in the spiritual realm, which we can’t see. The spiritual realm is just as real as the physical that you can see, and its truth supersedes the physical. Don’t let your eyes bewitch you to a lie.
One more thing that you must know about victory is that it does not seek approval or confirmation from others. Victory and peace are self-affirmed only. Peace is affirmed from within through a confidence in Jesus. Never look to another for approval or confirmation of a personal quality that you feel embarrassed about or feel weak about. Do not expect or seek from another to answer you on how well you are doing with respect to your overcoming anxiety. To question peace is to deny it. I know that we victims of anxiety naturally want sympathy from those without anxiety who have no idea what it is like to suffer with it. We must instead assimilate and understand their realm of life without anxiety instead of attempting to get them to understand and sympathize with our realm of fear, dread, and darkness because it is their realm that we endeavor to achieve for ourselves. There is no benefit to get someone in the realm of peace to understand a person in the realm of fear except for pity. Since the realm of peace is the true realm from God, and the realm of fear is a lie from Satan, we must start with the Truth and stay there. Don’t live in the lie and ask or expect someone to understand the spiritual lie you live in. Again, to question peace or victory is to reject it for yourself. God knows, understands, and sympathizes, and that is the only sympathy that is beneficial. You don’t have anything to prove to anyone anyway. Others have nothing to do with your confidence or peace.
There are things that you do, that you may or may not be aware of that perpetuate the fear in your body and mind. The cardinal sin, and the first rule is to never, and I mean never bash yourself for an apparent mistake, hiccup, or mishap. Self-bashing perpetuates fear. It feeds fear, making it stronger, and increases its longevity. You can wake up in fear the next day because of the self-bashing that you did the day before. Self-bashing ingrains negativity into the mind. This must be avoided at all costs if you want to experience the peace that God has already given you in Christ Jesus. Even if you embarrass yourself to the 100th degree because of a panic attack, you must make light of it, and not bash yourself at all. This is doable. Realize that by withholding the self-bashing, you are subverting the negativity that feeds the fear and anxiety. The negativity that plays like a scratched record from yesterday’s disappointments can be avoided when you finally learn how to stop self-bashing. You will find that the fear will get lighter on its own when you habituate self-esteeming in place of self-bashing.
The way to counter the habit of self-bashing is by utilizing its opposite, self-esteeming. You can do this simply by realizing who you are in Christ Jesus. You are more than conquerors through Him who loved you. You can do all things through Christ who gives you strength. You are right now seated with Him who is seated at the right-hand side of the Father in the heavenly realms. Get the point? Thoroughly peruse Scripture and claim and declare yourself to be the empowering verses God claims and declares you to be. See yourself as God sees you, not as you see you. God sees you through the crimson stained lens of Jesus Christ. God sees you through Truth. Claim yourself to be that which God says you are.
Learn to separate today from yesterday. Today should be a clean slate. Yesterday’s failures are today’s opportunities. Never carry over past disappointments to today. God wants us to imitate Him, and He is in the ever-present. His name is not “I Was” or “I Will Be,” or “I am Striving to Become,” rather, His name is “I Am.” God is always in the present and we should be also. There is nothing we can do about past mistakes except let them go. Why worry about future mistakes because they may never happen. Let today be a clean slate, ready to be masterfully painted with new opportunities. Don’t pass by any opportunities for peace. Come off the sidelines and play the field of life.
Do God’s will. What I gave you is the answer to your healing, but the best way to guarantee God’s peace is to do His will for you. Answer His calling for you. Even if the calling seems to be more than you can handle, do the steps above, and place yourself in step with wherever He leads you. In fact, if it is not more than you can handle, perhaps it is really not your calling, because God’s calling is usually more than we can bear. God promises not to tempt you with more than what you can handle regarding temptation to sin, but the Bible never says that he will not lay on you more than you can bear. Moses, when God commanded him to go to Pharaoh, said, “Who, me? I’m not eloquent. I am not capable of doing it, nor can I handle it. Send Aaron to do it instead of me.” Our calling will be more than we can handle because God wants us to rely completely on Him instead of on our own power, resources, and abilities. God told Gideon, “You have too many troops to fight the thousands of Midianites.” God told Gideon that He didn’t need Gideon’s power to pull off this thing which was bigger than Gideon. God wanted Gideon’s insufficiency and He used that to accomplish His will. God wanted Gideon’s problem to be much bigger than Gideon so that there would be no question as to whose power pulled off the coming feat. My point is that when you accept and do God’s full calling for you, peace is automatically credited to you. A great peace will befall on you when you do this. God gives you His strength and peace because you are operating for Him. And when you understand that in God’s will, life is not about you, but about His collective community of children, then that helps get your mind off of yourself.
Peace is a relationship with God. Non-Christians cannot experience true peace because they have no relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Jesus is your peace [Eph. 2:14, 2 Thes. 3:16]. He also is the one who makes peace between you and the Father. There is no peace within oneself if one is not at peace with God. There exist a pseudo peace that non-Christians can purport they have, but what they are describing is a materialistic, or egotistic false peace because it is not attached to the Peace-giver Himself, who is Jesus Christ. If Jesus did not give it then it is not true peace. True peace exponentially trumps pseudo peace. Moreover, pseudo peace blocks us from receiving true peace because we are relying on the wrong source. Do not seek after the wrong peace.
What I am about to say may sound “scary,” and you might want to tune it out and ignore it. But you should pay close attention to what I am about to say because missing this point could cause you to miss your peace. What I am about to say is truth, and truth should never be viewed as “scary” and never “ignored” because it is the truth that sets you free no matter how much the truth hurts at the beginning. Sin blocks us from the peace of God. Isaiah 48:22 reads, “There is no peace,” says the LORD, “for the wicked.” He restates it again in case you missed it the first time in Isaiah 57:21, “There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked.” He says it another way in 59:8, where he says, “no one who walks in [crooked roads] will know peace.” The opposite is true for those who walk with God. Psalm 85:8 says, “I will listen to what the LORD will say; He promises peace to His people His saints...” But he ends that verse with a warning, “but let them not return to their folly.” That verse clearly assumes that the saints are walking saintly.
Non-Christians cannot have peace because they are not connected to the source of peace. Christians are conditionally promised peace if they walk uprightly: that is, if they are not rebelling against God. To walk uprightly is not to check off all of God’s commands to the tee—that’s legalism. To walk uprightly simply means that you are not rebelling with an egregious sin that you know is grieving the Holy Spirit. Until you recompense that sin by putting it away and repenting in Christ, you will not see peace because God blocks His peace to all who live wickedly, including His own children. The good news is that when you do decide to put away that sin you’ve been holding on to, and follow everything that has been described within this post, God on His Word, promises perfect peace for you; a peace beyond what the world could possibly discover.
Lastly, peace is not only a relationship with God: peace is also a relationship among God’s children. Stop viewing people as objects—they are fellow children of God. As long as people are objects in your mind, you will remain in fear. Anxiety turns people into objects. Sin also turns people into objects. If you are stuck in a sexual sin, you turned a person or particular gender into an object of lust. Anxiety turns people into an object of fear. Through the eyes of fear, they are not simply God’s children. In truth, they are the same dust of the ground that you are, so they are not to be put on a higher pedestal than you or feared. And, Satan wants you to make people objects and not see them as they really are so that you will continue to either fear them or lust after them. So stop viewing them as objects, but rather, view them as fellow saints, or regarding non-Christians, as fellow creatures created in God’s own image. When you are able to make the correct connection with them in your mind, then you will become free to make relationships that you were unable to make in the past and you will see peace that you never discovered before.
In case you haven’t looked it up by now, stasibasiphobia, my conquered fear, is a fear of walking in public because of a fear of possibly becoming ataxic before the eyes of others. I would often walk uncoordinated when eyes from peers would take notice of me ambulate. I now start in victory. I was starting in fear and finding myself uncoordinated and from that, grew more fearful and embarrassed, which often led to panic attacks. I was analyzing my fear to try to get to peace. But when I started in victory, I claimed peace and the effort of a dignified and confident walk became natural. I don’t give negativity a chance to object when I start in peace and victory. Fear and negativity are no longer ingrained in my mind. And I don’t self-bash, but rather pronounce aloud, declare, and claim what God says about me to be true. I have taken my place in the peace that God has given me.
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