‘The Garden Within’ Book And How This Trauma Therapist Wants To Banish This Myth About Signs Of Weakness
Trauma therapist Anita Phillips, LCSW-C, wants to banish the myth that honoring one’s emotional well-being is a sign of weakness.
A preacher’s kid who became a preacher herself at 19, Phillips knew she had a gift to share, so she returned to school in her 30s to learn more about mental health. She earned degrees from the University of Maryland, the Regent University School of Psychology & Counseling and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Since then, Phillips has been featured on Oprah Daily, Tamron Hall, Red Table Talk and Hello Sunshine.
Last year, on Sept. 19, the minister released her much-anticipated book, The Garden Within, which focuses on how feelings that grow in the heart are the foundation of someone’s thoughts, which determines their choices. She recently spoke with Blavity to take a deep dive into her perspective.
In her opinion, historically, her industry has not had ties to religion. So, the idea of her book stemmed from the obvious gap she noticed between spirituality and psychological practices.
“The mental health field early on did not develop as a safe place for Black people, so it’d only been wise to avoid that,” she told Blavity. “We do see that changing, but it started in a very legitimate play. The issue of religion and psychology is also salient. Psychologists are among the least religious professionals in the United States, and historically religion was also pathologized by the lens of human behavior, professional studies of human behavior.”
She added, “”Both having our culture and our worldview pathologized and having a safe space in general pathologized, so it was not a safe place. We need to free ourselves from criticizing ourselves for not involving ourselves in a faith that wasn’t safe for us.”
Since she is a Christian, she wanted to educate herself about how we were created according to the Bible. She found that the physical structure of the brain is similar to a plant in the way it functions.
“As a Black woman of faith who has been shaped by Christianity, I wanted to go back to the beginning to get an answer. I did believe that the answer to everything we need is in scripture for me. And so I began exploring creation. How did things start? What did wellness look like when God created humanity? And at the same time, I was taking my first neuroscience class and I saw that a neuron so clearly looked like a plant,” she said. “For me, that could not have been a coincidence. I believe that our creator is intentional. I began to explore the similarity between neurons and plants; we have billions of neurons planted all over the inside of our body.”
To break down the significance of why it’s important to nurture your emotions, Phillips used the analogy of how we cope when we’re hungry. Similar to how the feeling of hunger signals it’s time to feed ourselves, we need to address our sentiments. Despite humans being wired to avoid negative feelings like pain, anger, or fear and show too much emotion, doing that is a weakness rather than a strength.
“Western culture specifically has the idea that thought is higher than emotion, that thinking is better than feelings. That feeling suggests weakness, that we are less evolved, that we are left intelligent, and that we are less likely to win,” the minister said. “And so combine that with the human need to avoid pain and we have a problem. But it turns out that it’s not the right way to go.”
She continued, “Emotions do function like the soil in the garden. We have seed soil plants through. The seeds are the words that we hear and they can become the things that we believe depending on whether they connect with the soil. The soil is the heart. That’s where our emotional lives are. Our mind is the plant that grows from that seed that has been planted in that soil and then the fruit is what we do.”
Although it may be hard to shake traumas that have happened and past decisions, Phillips says it’s not impossible to doctor yourself up to have a purer heart.
“The Bible says that Jesus felt everything we feel, and so if he had every emotion we have, then no emotion can be a sin because Jesus never sinned, Hebrew 4:15,” she shared. “And so when we talk about pure heart, it can’t be that the emotion is right or wrong, but what is growing there? The entire garden is growing from that soil, and so the question would be, what have you believed that is impure because you were afraid? Or because you were sad or because you were angry? What seed did you allow to germinate and grow in that place of pain? And if you are allowing those things to grow and you know that’s not good stuff, then you need to work on the purity of this garden.”
The two main takeaways she wants anyone who reads her new book to grasp is to first shift their perspective to understand “that you are a person, not a problem to be solved” since everyone is “beautifully created and constructed.” The second is that we have depth and many layers to ourselves so we’re “more than one thing because we use the parables, the power as an example in the Bible to help us understand the different emotions.”
She said, “There are some areas that are in full bloom and other areas that are empty right now and that’s okay, you are a vast garden with many areas and different things are happening in different spaces and that’s okay.”
