Nobody warned me about this part. That's what I hear more than almost anything else from the women who come to see me — the ones who are postpartum, exhausted, terrified, and convinced something is deeply wrong with them.

If you've grown up in the church and struggled with anxiety, you've probably heard some version of this:

"Just trust God more." "Perfect love casts out fear." "Be anxious for nothing."

These words come from real places in Scripture. They're true. And for many women, they've also added a layer of shame on top of an already exhausting experience — as if anxiety were a spiritual failure, a sign of weak faith, or a problem that prayer alone should have already fixed.

I want to offer a different perspective. Not one that dismisses Scripture, but one that reads it more carefully — and adds what the last several decades of neuroscience have taught us about how anxiety actually works.

Because when you put them together, you get something much more powerful than either can offer alone.