Caris Snider

Caris Snider knows what it’s like to suffer from anxiety and depression.

“I would always share that anxiety felt like elephants sitting and pushing and stomping on my chest,” she said. And thus was born the name of her new book, “Anxiety Elephants,” a 31-day devotional to help others who relate to that feeling.

She uses her own experience with mental illness to help others suffering from anxiety and depression. “I hope that they see that they are not alone,” she said. “That their struggle is real, but that there is real hope for them. It’s not just for the person down the street, or their coworker or the person they sit by in church. There is hope. It is a process and I hope that people see that. It takes time. I still have bad days and bad moments, but I know what some of my triggers are for anxiety. I know how to take small action steps [included in her book]. I’ve taken back the power of my thoughts. The anxiety elephants, they don’t get to control me anymore.”

“Anxiety Elephants” started out as a 10-day devotional, but the response was a universal approval and readers asked for more. She added another 21 days and revamped it to its current version, which was released on Dec. 17 last year.

It’s available on Amazon and in book stores. She’s also been speaking to various groups and has fans around the world, including some in Germany and Scotland, who have connected with her writings. Several book signings are also on her schedule.

Although she later came to understand that she’d suffered anxiety her whole life, it wasn’t until 2011 that it became real to her. She was maintaining an appearance of perfection – mother of a two-year-old daughter, happily married, running an in-home business, active in her church – but she was pushing her body to get back to her pre-pregnancy figure. She ignored the occasional flutters of anxiety she felt.

“I was not taking care of my body. I was overworking it; I was not feeding it,” said Snider. “I was maybe eating less than 1,000 calories a day, and I was drinking four gallons of water a day. Just trying to be perfect and have it all together, and I was just depleting my body of every nutrient.” The imbalance triggered even more anxiety.

“We all try to hard to have it all together,” Snider said. “I was the master of the mask. Everything looked perfect; everything looked great. But it wasn’t. And the truth of the matter is, none of it is great. We all have struggles in some way, and that is okay. It’s okay to not be okay, and I hadn’t given myself that permission.”

One day, she had an anxiety attack that left her unable to move. Terrified she was having a heart attack, she managed to call her mother, who told her to go to the doctor, and advised that she was likely having an anxiety attack.

She went to the doctor, who agreed with her mother’s diagnosis and recommended medication to help. Snider refused.

The doctor also told her that with all the exercising she’d been doing, she’d strained her chest cavity wall and for six months was prohibited for lifting anything, including her daughter.

With the diagnosis, Snider began to slide into a depression.“So here goes my purpose,” she said. “Everything my purpose was involved with was taking care of people, lifting bags, my business – so now here sneaks in depression because depression tells you ‘you’re worthless, you’re useless, you’re purposeless, you’re hopeless.’ So now I’m dealing with that.”

Her “rockstar” husband, friends and family helped over the next several months with the physical aspects of her diagnosis, but mentally, she continued to decline and kept her dark thoughts to herself.

“Getting out of the bed was huge, just exhausting. And it wore me out. I was withering away, I wasn’t eating. You know, I think sometimes we use different things to numb our pain and I think I was trying to starve my pain.”

The anxiety attacks continued, and even though she knew what they were, she still didn’t want to admit there was something wrong. At her husband’s urging, she attended a women’s retreat, where she met a fellow attendee who was a restoration counselor. “It was a total God thing,” said Snider. “Our paths were meant to cross.” The other woman gave Snider her contact information and said, “call me.”

Snider didn’t; not right away, anyhow.

A few weeks later, she discovered she was pregnant. “My body was crumbling and here this little life is inside,” she recalled.

She went to her doctor who confirmed her pregnancy, but also told her she had to eat, she had to gain weight. “I couldn’t eat for myself,” said Snider, “but it was like a mama-bear instinct triggered inside of me. I could eat for this baby.”

She gained six pounds over eight weeks, an accomplishment for someone who’d been starving herself, but lost the baby.

“At that moment, it was rock-bottom for me,” Snider recalled. “I was just broken, completely shattered. I just remember I had two options: Look up or give up. And I thank God that He helped me look up.”

She called the woman she met at the retreat, she took the medicine the doctor prescribed to help her with the anxiety, she prayed and she began to take small action steps to pull herself up.

“About a month in, the fog began to clear and I began to think clearly and I wasn’t in that pit anymore,” she said. With the support of her counselor, church, family and friends, “I began to see that I do matter. I have something to offer this world just like so many people who struggle, they matter.”

“Anxiety Elephants” came out of sharing her experience with church groups and others, and realizing that so many people suffer as she did. “You feel like you’re the only one. But 264 million people world-wide battle anxiety alone, that’s not even the numbers for depression,” said Snider. “As I began speaking at churches and women’s groups, and even some youth groups, people began to say ‘when are you going to write? When are you going to write all this?’”

The response has been overwhelmingly positive. “It’s been humbling,” she said. And, along her journey, she’s given up pushing herself to be perfect and is open about her progress and struggles. “The fear in my head was that people were going to judge me,” she said. “But they didn’t.”