It’s not unusual to have some physical symptom of stress, nervousness or anxiety. Even world class athletes have reported throwing up before a big match, and many seasoned performers and public speakers battle “stage fright” with sweaty, shaky hands. Nausea, vomiting, headaches, multiple trips to the bathroom are just a few physical manifestations.

In some people, though, those reactions appear in excess, or at the slightest trigger. Sometimes this overreaction or over-sensitization to stimuli occurs after a prolonged problem or illness when the sufferer is depleted or exhausted. Sometimes it occurs as what Dr. Claire Weekes in her book Hope and Help For Your Nerves calls “second fear” — fear of the symptoms themselves, fear that they might crop up at just the wrong moment (which they then do), anxiety that they crop up with so little provocation.

The first instinct or first advice, if you talk to someone else about it, is to fight against it. But fighting releases adrenalin, which heightens all those symptoms. And you can’t reason it away as an irrational fear of something that will likely not happen, because it has happened before, and at the worst times. As this over-sensitization continues, it sometimes grows and produces other problems.

A summary of Dr. Weekes advice would be to face and accept the fears, anxieties, and their physical symptoms rather than run from them, “float” past them rather than fight them, and be patient, letting enough time pass to change the conditioned responses of your mind and body to new ones. She explains all of these to greater degrees in her book and applies them to various scenarios.

If you’re prone to feel symptoms that you read about, you may want to skip parts of the book that deal with the escalation of symptoms and problems that a person experiences when these reactions go unchecked, lest you add fears of that happening to your other fears.

Though the book is not written from a Christian vantage point, it is not anti-Christian: Dr. Weekes acknowledges that “religion is a good friend” to those trying to recover from nervous illness. She doesn’t say this, but in my opinion Christians have an additional layer to deal with because they feel guilty: we think Christians shouldn’t have panic attacks, anxiety, or fear. In fact, I wrestled for a time with guilt over any kind of physical response to nervousness or fear, thinking I wasn’t exercising faith, until my pastor said something in a message to the effect that, if you are taking a walk and a dog starts chasing you, as you run to find a tree to climb with an angry dog nipping at your heels, you may fully trust that the Lord is with you and will help you deal with whatever happens, but your heart will still be racing. An over-reaction to the normal fears of life is a product of faulty thinking, and Christians are as prone to that as anyone else and in need to changing their thinking to right patterns. And sometimes the practical considerations need to be dealt with alongside or even before dealing with the spiritual issues. When Elijah fled, fearful and discouraged, from Jezebel in I Kings 19, the first thing the Lord did was to let him sleep, then send an angel to give him food and drink before dealing with the issue at hand. In Dr. Jim Berg’s Quieting a Noisy Soul series, he has a quick start section for those dealing with debilitating symptoms and who need immediate help. Of course, he deals with all of the things that disquiet the soul from a Biblical stance and in much more depth, and I hope that some day he will subdivide the series so that people can purchase the book, DVDs, etc. individually and more affordably rather than having to buy the whole kit when there will be parts of it they don’t use. But in the meantime he has a lot of excellent resources and helps on his site. I found Dr. Weekes’ book a helpful companion to Dr. Berg’s series. She does not advocate the Eastern religious types of meditation or other practices that would be cause for concern for the Christian.

I would not agree with every single point. For example, she advises that someone suffering extremely from these responses have companionship and not be left alone. But I have found that sometimes having to keep up with conversations and even someone else’s presence adds to the over-sensitization, and I can relax more fully when alone. I think one’s personality determines whether or not solitude is helpful or harmful. Overall, though, I found the book very helpful and practical.

(This review will be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books).

In some ways it is hard to pin down what This Fine Life by Eva Marie Everson is about, for it had many layers, and each one is rich and deep.

It’s about Mariette Putnam, who has just graduated from boarding school in 1959 and returned to her privileged home in a small Georgia town, where her parents each have different plans for her. Her mother wants her to meet and marry the right man (with the right family, right job, right bank account, right connections, etc.). Her father wants her to take advantage of the new possibilities open for women and go to college. Mariette doesn’t know what she wants…until she runs into Thayne Scott, the mail clerk at her father’s factory. Not only is Thayne not the right man her mother has planned for Mariette, but he has a shady past, which he says he has put behind him now.

Thus begins  an unlikely romance, and I love that the author did not stop at the culmination of the romance with marriage as too many novels do, but rather had the characters marry early on and then deal with genuine adjustment and communication issues and a major unforeseen change.

So on one level, the book is about the developing relationship between Mariette and Thayne. But other levels involve forgiveness, perseverance, and friendship. One of the most poignant levels involves Mariette’s feeling of being “outside looking in” in matters of faith, first at the boarding school she attended which was a different denomination than her family’s, and then as her husband and best friend seem to have something she doesn’t have and doesn’t understand in their faith.

And though I would love to give this book a 100% enthusiastic endorsement, because I loved every other part of it, I do have a quibble with that last area, and it is too important an area to overlook. I’ve mentioned this before with other Christian fictions books, but I don’t necessarily believe every one of them needs to lay out the complete plan of salvation with the Romans Road and a printed Sinner’s Prayer to repeat. How an author handles that is between him or herself and the Lord, because He knows who will be reading the book and what they need to hear and how it all fits best within the context of the story (and it does need to do that — an extended tract with a story thinly wrapped around it will satisfy no one, but most Christian fiction novels do not err in that direction.) So I don’t mind if the way of salvation is subtle or only alluded to rather than explained, but whatever there is of it in a story needs to be clear and not misleading.

In my reading of the book, it seems Mariette’s “outside looking in” feelings in regard to faith indicate that she doesn’t really know the Lord. That can certainly happen with people who have grown up in a Christian environment: I’ve known of such people who just go along because it is the lifestyle they’ve always known until at some point it dawns on them that they have never really repented of their own sins and trusted in Christ as their own Lord and Savior. I’ve heard testimonies by people who did just that. But in this book it seems the message given to Mariette is, “You are a child of God: you just need to realize it,” and she doesn’t seem to “get it” until she experiences a serious personal answer to prayer. Now, if the author meant instead that Mariette did have some kind of commitment or faith but had not fully realized its potential and wasn’t walking and living like a child of God, rather than she wasn’t yet a believer at all, then this would make sense. But it was a little confusing when the message I seemed to be picking up was that Mariette wasn’t a genuine believer, to then see her being told she was a child of God. I wrote extensively once before that not everyone is a child of God, so I’ll just refer you to that post rather then repeating it here.

Other than the confusion on that one issue, I loved this book. I love the author’s characterizations and the way I was drawn in to Mariette’s outlook and feelings. I used the word “genuine” many times already in this review, but it is perhaps the best word I can apply: every character and every situation was real, genuine, true to life, and I look forward to reading more of Eva Marie Everson’s books.

Thanks to Revell Books and the author for the complimentary copy of this book.