Review: Raising Worry-Free Girls, By: Sissy Goff
THREE QUOTATIONS:
“When your daughter has a little help, a lot of empowerment, and a foundational faith, worries don’t have to carry the same power in her life. With God’s help, I really believe you can raise a worry-free girl.”
“Girls with anxiety overestimate the threat and underestimate themselves and their ability to cope.”
“Anxiety can be sneaky and show up in ways we don’t recognize. Yesterday at a conference I spoke with a woman who told me she had just learned her lifelong stomachaches weren’t a medical problem but caused instead by anxiety. She is in her forties, is a mother of five, has written ten books, and she’s just learning to recognize the Worry Monster for who he is — conniving and relentless. He’s relentless until your daughter learns to face him with the strength and truth of who God made her to be. That’s where we’re going in this chapter. But first, I’m wondering if you’re a little like me, and the Worry Monster is starting to sound like another adversary we all know too well…
1 Peter 5:8-11 — Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, 7 casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. 8 Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. 9 Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. 10 And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. 11 To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.”
TWO TAKEAWAYS:
1. Christ is our daughters ultimate saviour, and we as parents need to be very careful with how we respond to our child’s anxiety so we guide them toward Christ. Sissy Goff writes,
“Anxiety is a lot like a bully. We used to be told that ignoring a bully eventually makes him go away. It doesn’t. He only feels more power in the silence. The only way to get rid of a bully is to confront him. Once your daughter learns to turn and face the bully of anxiety, he’ll come back less and less often, with less and less power every time. But, first, we’ve got to go after him where he lives.”
Goff provides countless tools for both the parents and the child to address anxiety straight on and not let the viscous one-loop roller coaster take over. She emphasizes multiple times how crucial it is for the parents to be very careful with there responses to their child. It is easy to think we are helping our child with their anxiety, but in reality we are enabling it. For example, what Goff calls the content trap — when we naturally reassure a child that something they are worried about won’t happen — a dog biting them perhaps; our response is: “the dog is nice and he would never bite you.” We think we are addressing her anxiety, but really we are playing whack-a-mole with the content of anxiety. Instead, we need to equip our child with the tools necessary to fight the worry directly. Some of the tools Goff outlines are: expect worry, name the thoughts, find the evidence, boss back, worry time, and her voice. You’ll have to read the book to learn more about them.
2. There are many profiles of an anxious girl. These are the facts we must consider:
There are the exploders — angry, attention seeking, or just plain trouble.
And the imploders — “minimize their feelings and then blame themselves for those feelings…their bodies tell the tale with stomachaches or headaches.”
Temperament indicators — from the time she was little, she may have seemed ‘wired to worry.’
Experiential factors — as John 16:33 tells us, “In this world you will have trouble.”
Sissy Goff also outlines the profiles of anxious parents. But you can read the book to learn more about that.
ONE NEXT STEP:
Introduce the concept of the Worry Monster to our children and tie it into the Wild Horses concept from Loving the Little Years: Motherhood in the Trenches — Graced Based Christian Parenting, By Rachel Jankovic
An additional note:
I was an anxious girl. There are parts in this book when upon reading, I turned to Josh and said, “this was me! It sounds like she is writing about me!” When he met me as a 16 year old I was still a very anxious person, but Josh saw through it and pointed me to the truths of God in scripture. At the time I wasn’t always fond of his bluntness and seemingly ‘get over it’ attitude, but I quickly learned he did care and he was listening, and he knew I needed to understand God’s goodness and sovereignty and to retrain my gut reaction. Instead of entering the one-loop roller coaster Sissy Goff describes, I needed to learn to combat the anxious thoughts in the my head and rest in God’s truth. My anxiety still pops up but my ability to take thoughts captive and refocus my mind on truth means I don’t realize how the anxiety or stress is prowling in the background until my stomach begins to ache.
I often find these days that if label myself as an anxious person I tend to get more anxious. There was a lot of useful information in this book and I very much appreciated how it was ultimately brought back to scripture and our hope in Christ, but there were also parts in the book that I needed to quickly move past because it was leading me down the anxious path again. I would still suggest reading this book, just if you tend toward anxiousness, be prepared to fight your own Worry Monster while you read.
The key for me is to remind myself that I must choose between God and earthly matters. I cannot serve two masters.
When I start to get overwhelmed or anxious, I simply say to myself — “eternity mindset.”
This quickly prompts me to refocus on what matters for eternity and then I ask myself, “what is the next right thing?” That is a little saying I have learned from Elizabeth Elliot. This always snaps me out of the anxiety in the moment and helps me be productive. I have recently been encouraged to add repentance for my anxiety into my daily habits and I will share in a post on Monday about how I plan to do that.
Thanks for reading,
Rebecca