Statesman63
Admin
Posts : 287
Points : 631
Join date : 2010-09-30
Location : Cleveland, OH
 | | Subject: A Desperate Cure for Panic Attacks (Part 2) Fri Jul 21, 2017 11:02 pm | |
| A Desperate Cure for Panic Attacks (Part 2)
More extremely helpful ideas have come to me since Part 1 of the same title that I would like to share. I have found this technique to absolutely help. It recently came to me. It will give you the power to completely conquer your anxiety. This is coming from someone who has lived with the worst type of anxiety for decades. It may at first sound counterintuitive. For years, I was under the impression that one suffering from anxiety should never think about anxiety thoughts: the things that cause fear and panic attacks (which, by the way, are never logical thoughts, all things considered). But this technique that absolutely works goes against what I once thought one should by all means avoid. Anxiety thoughts are not logical; they never are. From a Christian perspective, not only are anxiety thoughts not logical, but they also defy the Truth of the Word of God.
Let me share with you how anxiety works. For your healing, it is important to understand how anxiety works. If your panic attacks are triggered by being around people, for example, at the start of the day, you may be hopeful that this day will be better than the last. You leave the house with some confidence and some hope and some faith that God will give you some strength to get through this day. You pass by a few people and try to keep your mind off of your fear. You might feel successful, and thus it would give you more hope that this day will be better. But at some point in the day, you are not paying attention, or the fear thoughts builds up surreptitiously, without your awareness that it was building up. And then when you go out into a setting that triggers it, thoughts start coming to your mind, and I quote Anxiety itself, “I’m not worthy enough to stand with confidence in this crowd of people…I don’t feel strong enough to keep this up…I hope I can avoid being noticed, especially by good looking people, or by young people who are prone to make fun of me when I stumble…I can’t keep this up…People are looking at me and they are probably thinking negatively of me…There is no way I can impress them…” Etcetera and etcetera. So again, I was under the impression all of these years that what we must do is to seek to avoid these types of thoughts at all costs. And trying to avoid these thoughts seems impossible because these thoughts are etched into the mind like a recurring scratched record. They repeat itself over and over again whenever you are in those trigger places. Anxiety does not let you avoid thinking of its thoughts. To try to not think about it, one ends up thinking about it anyway. And it often catches one off guard at some point throughout the day because we have become habituated into thinking about it even when we are unaware that we are thinking those thoughts. They creep into our minds unawares.
By all means, what you must fill your mind with is God’s Word. God’s Word is the key to your absolute healing. Along with this technique that I am about to share with you, God’s Word with this technique will give you absolute healing. I put together the Catharsis page in this Forum. You need to memorize and meditate on those verses, especially the ones that pertain specifically to you. Read it every night just before you go to bed. Don’t just read it. Imagine those verses being true. Underline and highlight the words that stand out to you. Imagining them to be true is your meditation. See yourself actually becoming the person that God says you are in His Word. And prayer adds power to those words. Your prayer pertaining to this is to simply ask God to make those Words that He promised come to fruition in your life. Ask God to give you strength to believe what He says to be the Truth. Ask Him to impress His words onto your mind so that God’s Word, not anxiety, will be the new scratch record that recurs over and over in your mind.
But as I mentioned before, we are not going to avoid thinking about anxiety. Anxiety won’t let you stop thinking about it, and when we try, it creeps in and slithers its way into our minds without us being aware until it accumulates and breaks out into a panic attack. We are actually going to think about it, but in a different way. Listen carefully: preempt the thoughts of anxiety and exaggerate them as much as you possibly can. That is the technique. Beat anxiety to the punch. Now I will try to explain so that you can understand, use it, and live a free life. Let’s take our previous scenario of thoughts of Anxiety, but this time we are going to preempt those thoughts with great exaggeration and (this is key:) God’s Word. When you leave the house this time, your thoughts are as follows: “When I turn this corner, there will be tons of people…they will all be focused on me and all will hope I stumble and fall…they will all point their cameras at me and record me falling…famous people will be in the crowd and will join in the insults…they will throw things at me because and hope I make a complete fool of myself…the President of the United States will be there and laugh at me too.” That weakens anxiety because anxiety can’t do worse than what you just came up with and now you have turned the corner and none of those things occur. If anything around that corner resembles the those thoughts, it is at a very low level than what you just thought. Now attack anxiety with these thoughts: “God gives me strength to conquer the worst anxiety can throw at me…God empowers me to stand confidently even if there are tons of people paying attention to me…God empowers me to walk confidently even if there are famous people in the crowd…To which of these people am I not worthy of standing before?...My worth is the same as famous people…To which thought of anxiety, fear, or negativity must I bow down to? (The previous statement was a rhetorical question, of course.) God gives me peace in every situation…[insert catharsis verses here…]”
Let me tell you why this works. This works because Anxiety wants you to try to avoid it. Anxiety finds strength in you seeking to avoid it. It wants you to feel inferior to it and feel that you cannot climb this mountain and overcome it. Anxiety wants you to try to not think of it and to try to avoid the situations that triggers the anxiety in the first place. Yes, I said the last sentence correctly. Anxiety wants you to try to not think of it and it wants you to seek to avoid the situations that triggers the anxiety. Anxiety actually does not want to put you in the situations that triggers it; it wants to make you seek to avoid being in those places. This technique puts you in the so-called “worst-case scenario” (according to anxiety, not Truth) places and not only does it put you in a place where anxiety cannot trump what you just came up with, but you are now in a place where you are not running from the triggers. The triggers are less than what you came up with. You are now ridiculing the triggers with the Truth and power of God. You are now controlling anxiety, and it is not controlling you. And whatever anxiety throws at you, as I said, anxiety cannot beat what you came up with, so whatever scenario you find yourself in, it is less fearful than what you already came up with, so your experience is calm peace because you released anxiety’s power over you. Anxiety works by building up to a panic attack. You are disarming anxiety itself by starting at the top of whatever it is able to create.
In addition to this technique, there is something else that you should do. Cast out the fear by speaking to it forcefully and loudly in the authority of the name of Jesus Christ and the power of His blood. There is power in the blood of Jesus because His blood created a New Covenant that the demons must abide by. His blood has given the believer a legal right to peace and all of the promises of God throughout the Bible. His blood has given the believer a new ownership—God is now Father and the believer no longer belongs to the powers of the dark forces of this world. His blood has given the believer a new identity. And there is power in the name of Jesus by virtue of who He is. Not only is He God, but He is God-Man. He is our mediator that links mankind to God. He is able to be a complete mediator because He is fully God and fully man. I’m the shy type. For me, a good place to do this loudly is when I’m on the road in the car and I am not overheard shouting at demons. Say forcefully, “In the Name of Jesus, evil spirits, spirit of Anxiety (call them by name), spirit of Fear and Confusion, spirit of negativity, I command you in the Name of Jesus to leave this body and mind and never return again! I command you to loose this child of God in the Name of Jesus! You have no right to occupy this blood bought vessel of Jesus! Loose me!” The more you do this, the weaker the spirits become and eventually they lose their grip on you and leave. Do this every day if necessary. The optimum and ideal situation is to have some other Christians pray these things over you while laying hands on you, but doing this yourself also works. So weaken (and perhaps even cast out) the spirits of fear by telling them where to go in the authority of Christ, along with doing the aforementioned technique.
And it is simply not true that a believer cannot be possessed by a spirit of fear. Fear is a spirit. I know there are teachings that a Christian cannot be possessed by a spirit of fear because, as the teaching goes, a Christian has the Holy Spirit in him or her and greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world; and God and evil spirits cannot dwell together. God is good; evil is evil; therefore, God and evil cannot abide together in the same body. This is simply not biblical or true. If it were true, then an unbeliever who has lived with panic attacks for decades, the moment he or she decides to accept Jesus for their sin debt and become a Christian, according to this teaching, the person should immediately be cured of his or her anxiety that they been living with for decades. In comes Jesus, out goes the evil spirits according to that teaching, and that is not accurate. Furthermore, Paul wrote to Timothy several times regarding his fear. Timothy had a timid disposition and apparently suffered from anxiety. From Paul’s writings to Timothy, we get such verses as: “God did not give us the spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of a sound mind.” And Paul tells Timothy to take a little wine to help settle his stomach. Wine does nothing for the stomach. But it does help the nerves when one gets that unsettled, churning nervous feeling in the stomach that is brought about by fear. No one would argue that Timothy didn’t have the Holy Spirit. Yet he suffered with the spirit of fear as a Christian.
Repent, repent, repent. Make sure that you have addressed your sin. Psalm 85:8 says, “I will listen to what God the LORD will say: He promises peace to His people, His saints—but let them not return to their folly.” This is both a promise and a warning. It is a promise with a proviso or stipulation. Isaiah 48:22 says, “‘There is no peace,’ says the LORD, ‘for the wicked.’” And in case you weren’t paying attention the first time, Isaiah says again in Isaiah 57:21, “‘There is no peace,’ says my God, ‘for the wicked.’” In case you might be thinking that this is just Old Testament stuff, Jesus says in John 5:14 after he healed a man of his 38 year infirmity, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” God does promise peace to His people, but at the same time, He promises the opposite to His rebellious children. He will not help us find peace, and will leave us in our fogged up minds if we live in rebellion against Him. One will not lose his or her salvation based on their decision to not obey the LORD, but one will lose life (true living) and be confined to death (depression and darkness) if one does not disengage from his or her egregious rebellion. Again, this does not apply to a passing sin that one may happen to do and if realize, repent of. John said that there is a sin that does not lead to death. John tells us that all wrong-doing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death (1 John 5:17). God’s promise of peace applies only to Christians who are not living in death due to open rebellion to Him. So my technique, although I nearly guarantee that it will work, will not work for the one in rebellion because God will block the peace no matter what he or she does. Fix the root of the problem (sinful rebellion) first, then fix the problem (anxiety).
And by the way, we don’t conquer our sin by our own efforts. We cannot conquer sin or rebellion or a habit of sin by a new year’s resolution. We conquer sin by grace. The flesh cannot conquer the flesh. We conquer sin by the power of Jesus, which we submit to in order to conquer it in His strength and not our own. The flesh wants to keep sinning. The Spirit keeps us from sinning. Please refer to the “How to Stop Sinning” thread (I think that’s the name of it) located in this forum to learn how to conquer your rebellion, especially if you feel trapped and you feel that it is too difficult to stop committing your sin. Remember, we have a new identity in Christ. We are no longer sinners, therefore, we no longer have to live as sinners. When we understand our new identity in Christ and the power of His grace through His Spirit, then sin can be conquered. And I am aware there is false teaching going around that says that we are sinners and just have to submit to the fact that we sin all the time and can do nothing about it. That is false teaching—not biblical. We were sinners. We are now Saints, now that we have accepted Jesus. We are saints who occasionally sin, but have been given the power to stop sinning. Sin is no longer our master. We are now slaves to righteousness, not sin. Please also refer to the “Our New Identity in Christ” series in this forum (again, I think that’s the name of it…I am not glancing at it at this moment.)
| |
|
