Don't Let It Drive

What a panic-filled decade continues to teach me about anxiety, identity, and the tools our faith communities forgot to pack

The office had a tired warmth that good counselors’ offices tend to have. Worn furniture that had held many heavy hearts, and if the armchairs could talk, they’d know a lot of sadness and some dark humor. Dr. Allen Minor, a kind, curious man in a wrinkled dress shirt, sensible khakis, and practical footwear, looked across at me and said something I’ve never forgotten:

“Rob, you may never get rid of anxiety. It may always be in your emotional car. Just don’t let it drive.”

I was in my early thirties. I had spent the better part of two years white-knuckling my way through rolling panic attacks that arrived every ten to fifteen minutes during my waking hours. I’d sought medical help. I’d cycled through two counselors before Minor, both offering something useful, neither quite reaching the thing underneath. Dr. Minor handed me a cassette tape (Google it, young ones) featuring a guided meditation. What began with that TDK tape turned out to be the start of a road I’m still walking. The finish line, if there is one, sits somewhere past the horizon.

I’ve traveled a lot of that road quietly. The social, religious, and occupational circles I move in don’t always welcome words like somatic, mindfulness, or nervous system regulation. I’ve practiced something close to a clandestine spiritual life, integrating tools that have genuinely helped me while keeping them largely out of sight. That’s its own kind of exhausting. Starting a mindfulness habit is hard enough. Adding a burden of secrecy is cruelly challenging.

The story we tell

We live in a world shaped by the stories we tell. And when it comes to healing, our storytelling instincts can become their own kind of obstacle.

There are two ways we most often name anxiety: I’m having anxiety, or I am an anxious person. In the first, anxiety is a momentary flutter, significant only when we give it meaning. In the second, we let the feelings of a moment, even many repeated moments, become our whole story.

For most of my twenties and early thirties, I was living the second sentence. My anxiety had become so habitual that my first waking moments each day were spent manufacturing scenarios to worry about, because worry felt normal. It was miserable.

What meditation slowly gave me was a different relationship with the experience. Thoughts that had been automatic became conscious. I started to notice the anxiety train chugging toward me before I was on it, barreling into a panic attack. That pause, small as it was, was enough to be present to the feeling, to notice it as something separate from my identity. In that noticing, it lost its full grip.

I don’t want you to think noticing alone took the anxiety away. It didn’t. It merely kept me from being owned by it. The anxiety wasn’t me. It was an experience I was having.

This is what a meditation practice actually does: less fighting thoughts, less trying to eradicate anxiety, more simply disentangling its grip from your identity. Healthy healing communities have a slogan for it: Feel your feelings, drop the story.

The tools we weren’t given

Here’s a distinction worth making carefully: it’s one thing for a community to lack familiarity with certain tools. Indigenous cultures, ancient communities, and embodied traditions across the world have long known what Western research is only now congratulating itself on discovering. That the body holds memory, that rhythm, movement, and communal gathering regulate the nervous system, that breath is not incidental to healing but central to it. Dance, music, ritual, nature. These weren’t primitive approximations of real therapy. They were the thing itself. Many faith traditions simply lost the thread. That’s a historical reality, not a moral failing.

But it’s another thing entirely to greet these tools, once recovered and once available, with hostile skepticism. One is a reality of being human. The other is a choice being made now, with information now, by people responsible for the care of suffering people.

I know this from the inside. Well-intentioned people, without a trauma-informed understanding, led me to believe my faith was lacking if I even had anxiety. I don’t blame them, or myself (anymore). When you’re young, you trust people with wallets and car keys. All of them genuinely wanted to spare me from an eventual hell. They just had few tools for my present one.

When that gap between intention and actual care keeps someone in unnecessary pain, or treats their need for regulation as a spiritual deficiency to be prayed away, it stops being a limitation. It becomes something closer to malpractice.

This is a pattern. Challenging mental and emotional conditions get framed as moral or faith failures, which adds shame to suffering. When a struggling person speaks up, they risk rejection or, at minimum, a quiet reduction in their credibility. Many stop speaking up. Some practice clandestinely. Some just leave.

Some faith communities have turned anxiety into a sophisticated, even institutionalized, exercise in self-accusation. The implied message: you wouldn’t feel this way if your faith were stronger. It’s as though these communities believe shame just hasn’t found the right scripture verse yet. But science has shown that habitual anxiety bypasses reasoning entirely. Dr. Judson Brewer, neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and someone who has studied this far more rigorously than most preachers, argues that anxiety can become as habitual as addiction, skirting even our deepest-held beliefs, no matter how sincerely we hold them.

The same science tells us we have agency to form new neural pathways. We aren’t doomed to our factory presets. But “pray harder” continues to find a ready audience, partly because it sounds like a defense of a loving and powerful God. That gives the speaker an internal sense of righteousness while handing the sufferer a fresh pile of guilt. That approach tells us more about the habits of a shame-based culture than it does about the complexity of suffering minds shaped by real trauma.

The toolkit exists

Jonathan Haidt’s research on the anxious generation, the work behind his book of the same name, documents what many of us already sense: we are living through an epidemic of anxiety, particularly among the young, shaped by forces that prayer and worship alone were never designed to address. That’s not a slight against prayer. It’s a category observation. A hammer is not deficient because it can’t turn a screw.

The good news is the toolkit exists. Contemplative practice, somatic work, trauma-informed community, the wisdom of traditions that never forgot the body. None of it requires abandoning faith. Most of it, looked at honestly, was there in the tradition all along, waiting to be recovered rather than invented.

You don’t have to choose between your faith and your nervous system. You don’t have to practice in secret or earn permission to heal. The full toolkit is available. You’re allowed to use it.

Be well, friends.