Lies Girls Believe: Dannah Gresh

Recently, Time magazine published an article about the epidemic our teen girls are facing in the United States and even our preteen girls. You ready for this?

I don't know. I don't think I want to hear it. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

You can find us at familylifetoday.com or on the Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. These are the findings that came from the CDC, which stated that teen girls are now in crisis. One in three girls considered suicide in 2021.

Let that just sink in. One in three girls considered suicide. Are you sure this is accurate? That's so high. This makes me teary, like reading it, thinking of my granddaughters. And it said that's a 60% increase since 2011. And it also said more girls are feeling so sad and hopeless that they can't even engage in normal activities.

I'm not kidding. Like I'm teary right now because our young women. And I've talked to so many moms of teen girls and preteen girls that are at their wits end. They don't know what to do because their daughters are believing a lot of lies and our culture is speaking lies and telling them lies.

And we as women are like, we want to go to war and battle for our daughters, but we're not always sure how to go about that. So today we have hope. We do have hope. We have Dana Gresh with us today. Dana, I'm so glad that you are here. I am so glad to be here. You're already stirring my heart up.

Really? I'm getting on my soapbox. Oh, good. You just get right up on it because I want to talk about it. We're going to talk about this and what an appropriate name for your book called Lies Girls Believe. I think many of our listeners have probably read Lies Women Believe. Nancy Damas-Wagamuth wrote that book, and I went through that.

I bet a lot of women have gone through that. But you do a podcast with her. Yeah, I do.

Revive Our Hearts. I'm her co-host. How long have you done that together? I guess we're going on three, four years now, I guess.

I'm not quite sure. But we've done stuff together since 2008. I wrote Lies Young Women Believe for teen girls because it's like a million and a half women have been set free through the pages of Lies Women Believe. You have that documented. Yeah, it's probably closer to two million by now.

That would be several years ago, it was 1.5 million. Incredible freedom. And many of them said, well, my lies started when I was a teenager or my lies started when I was 10 years old. So we've been working to kind of just bring that truth to girls in an age-appropriate way because the crisis you're talking about chills me to the bone. Do you have granddaughters? I do. I have Addie and Zoey twin girls.

They're four years old. And Stella Bella. Stella. Stella Bella? I call her Stella Bella. That's not her real name.

I have to make up names. And I just think the world they're growing up in is real scary. That number, I hadn't heard that Time magazine number. It doesn't surprise me because in the years that I was writing this book, right about that time, right before that 2021, we were seeing the number of ER visits for poisoning, burning, self-harm for nine to 13 year old girls rising. Nine to 13? Nine to 13. And the average girl in the nine to 17 range scored so high on an anxiety test that in 1957, they would have put that girl in inpatient treatment for mental health care.

Come on. But today it's so common. We're just like, oh, that's pretty normal. That's how that's normal for teen and tween girls.

So just keep going. But normal is not okay when it's that. Yeah, that's not normal.

And so lies girls believe and the truth that sets them free. This is for the age of? Seven to twelve. Seven to twelve. Yeah, eight to twelve.

Yeah, somewhere in that range. I mean, what do you think's going on? Well, so here's what Nancy identified is that lies always have two evidences. One evidence is sin, right? The very first sin ever committed.

We read about it in the book of Genesis. Satan lies to Eve in the form of a snake and she believes the lie. Because she believed the lie, she acts in disobedience against God.

So sin is one evidence of a lie. But the other thing that we don't really notice in there, but there's a lot of insecurity in there. She's like, wow, really? God's withholding something good from me?

Because Satan's saying, hey, listen, God knows that if you eat from this tree, you're going to be just like him. And she has emotions that are kind of not written about on the page. But we can kind of read between the lines and know, okay, she had to feel some insecurity to believe that lie. Well, maybe that's true. I'm doubting God. I'm feeling insecure and inferior myself.

So the good news about that is that before our daughters sin, because they believed a lie, they're going to give us the telltale sign of what I call sticky emotions. I thought this was genius. Now listen up. This is really good. Okay. If you think it's genius, you need to know that it was actually my husband's idea. There we go.

We knew we loved Bob. Hey, you know what? We're going to edit that out. Just own it.

It's yours. But I was like, what do we call this for the eight to 12 year old girls when an emotion is unhealthy? But a sticky emotion is an emotion that just sticks to you and it won't go away. Or you're not sure why it's there because emotions are a good gift from God, right?

When he created the world, he looked at the world and said, it is good. That included our emotions, our joy, our happiness, our hopefulness, even our anger and our sadness can be good when used in the right way. Because emotions are a message.

They're a message from God. And when those emotions are not fun ones, like stress, for example, that sends you the signal that, oh, your daughter's stressed out. If you do less, if she's not in before school activities and after school activities and travel, soccer team on the weekends and she does less, that emotion will depart because the message was read and responded to and it's not needed anymore. But, you know, I think all of us have been on vacation eating bonbons and have a pina colada in our feet up and we still feel stressed out. That's probably because something's really out of order in our life. And it might be because we're believing a lie about our life, about ourselves, about God, about our world. And so if we can teach girls how to identify those sticky emotions and recognize them as an evidence of a lie, and then trace them to see what that lie is and replace them with truth, we can help them experience freedom in Christ.

This is one of my passions for not just young girls, but women. It's amazing how many women are living with lies every day. They've been doing it so long, they don't even recognize it as a lie. It's their normal. I hate to tell you, men do the same thing.

Do they? Well, I mean, it's not about men today, but oh my goodness, are you kidding me? I've done it. We all do. I want to know what your sticky emotions are. I know what my sticky emotions are.

You do? Well, you've seen them. I mean, again, we're not talking about men and emotions. But it's like when you were saying that, Dana, I was like, it's like a flashing light on your dashboard. Exactly. You've got to lift up the hood and say, you know, my anger thing that we've talked about, that was a sticky emotion saying there's a problem here. And I wanted to avoid the problem. That's what you're talking about. And let me just ask you a question. But a lot of times we think, oh, this lie was planted like last week or whatever.

But most of the time it's planted like a long time ago. For your lie, when anger was your sticky emotion, did you have to go back to something you believed when you were a child? Yeah. For me, again, this isn't about me. I want to turn it back to you.

No, but this is illustrating something really important. When I started to study the anger thing, because again, Ann sort of pointed it out, like, you know, when I bring up stuff, you get really angry. And again, I was, to be totally honest, the day she said that, I'm like, what are you talking about? And then she just, with her arms, she went like, exhibit A. Yeah.

And I could see it. So anyway, long story short, when I realized a lot of us displaced anger, which means it's from something else, that's the extension cord that you got to search back. But the other one was chronic anger is deeper. And it's like that guy or that woman that you never know when they're going to sort of blow. And you're like, whoa, you can't say certain things. You don't raise certain topics.

Because that usually, the extension cord goes back decades or a year. It isn't something happened this morning or yesterday. Mine was, I'm not valuable. My dad walks out when I'm seven.

My brother dies that same year. God doesn't see me. So, yeah, there was a lie. Again, I was successful. I was an athlete. I was a musician.

It looked like everything's fine. But underneath, I was living this lie that God doesn't see me. My dad didn't see me. And I'm angry. And I never connected to that. And that's what we're trying to help girls learn the skills so that they don't have to feel that sticky emotion till they're 30 or 40 or 50.

Yeah. Because as children, we're great observers, but poor interpreters. And you saw your dad leave. You saw your brother die.

And you interpreted that as what? How old were you? I was seven.

Seven. How many of us are really mature enough to compartmentalize and process all of that, even in our adult years, without someone helping us, right? And so when you don't have that help, listen, this is what I want to say to moms and dads.

If you can help your daughter learn how to understand her sticky emotions now, you're not just helping her behave better today and not sin tomorrow, but you're helping her 30 years down the road. To be a healthy woman of God. Yes, a healthy mom, a healthy wife. Living in freedom. Living in freedom. And in some ways, you're stopping a legacy.

Yeah, a lot of times. If that girl grows up and is a mom, she's not going to pass it to the next generation. If she doesn't or he doesn't, we pass it.

Right. What are some of the warning signs for moms as they're listening, as they think, my daughter is actually, her stomach's upset before she goes to school. Are there things that moms and dads should be looking for in our kids that maybe our girls are believing lies? Yeah, I think anytime there's a chronic negative emotion that either doesn't go away no matter what you do. For example, a girl who's fearful even when she's completely safe.

Or you don't understand why it's there. Again, she's fearful, doesn't know why. I was just in Colorado Springs a few weeks ago and heard about a true girl. That's the name of my ministry for tween girls who was having trouble with sleeping. She was terrified that someone was going to sneak into her bedroom at night and steal her.

This wasn't rational at all. Now, the funny thing is the mom was a trauma therapist, a Christian trauma therapist. And she was like, I don't know how to help her. Can you imagine how horrible that must feel as a mom? And I think for other moms, like, wait, if she can't help her, who can?

But here's this thing, sometimes the person we're least objective with is our own children. So I was able to go to her. This is a weird thing, but you know, I had COVID like 18 months ago. And since then, I've had chronic anxiety at night. And it's physiological. The doctors say it's a melatonin problem. I'm almost asleep and then I wake up fearful. So I have had to be like, okay, this is a physiological thing. It's not even an emotional thing.

It's completely medical. But I've had to go to the word of God. I memorized Psalm 91. And whenever I wake up, in the beginning, I would wake up and for two hours, I would be terrified in my bed at night because I would be like, something's really wrong.

I don't think I was having panic attacks, but I was having something like that. And now I'm waking up and quoting Psalm 91. Can you quote some of it to us? He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will save the Lord, my rock and my refuge, my God. And if you go on, it says, I will not fear the terror of night. I will not fear the terror of night. And I can do the whole Psalm, but I just start to recite that in my mind.

And I fall asleep in five or 10 minutes. So I go to this girl and I say to her, I hear you're having a hard time sleeping. Because I say to the mom when I meet her, I'm like, where's your daughter? It was a snow day in Colorado Springs. I said, is she home today?

Because it's snow day. She's like, yeah, it's like, we're going to pray for her. Take me to her. This is the warrior in women that comes out like, I'm going to protect my girls.

So my husband's looking at me because I'm not Miss Spontaneous, not like he is. And he's like, we're going where? And I was like, we're going to go pray for that girl. So I just tell her my story. I say, listen, there's not truth to my fear. Is there truth to your fear? Like when you're afraid somebody's going to steal you, has that ever happened?

And you're not saying, there's not truth to your fear. You're asking her. I'm asking her, is there truth to it?

She's like, no. I was like, has anybody ever come into your room and stolen you? No. Do you have you ever known anyone that's come into your room and stolen you? Been stolen? No. Have you read about it in the news? Well, not really. I said, well, I mean, because it could happen.

It has happened, but it's probably not going to happen to you. Does your house have locks on it? Yeah. Does your house have an alarm system? Yeah.

We actually have video cameras. Okay. So maybe like me, your emotion isn't telling you the truth. She's like, oh. And so I invited her to learn Psalm 91 with me. This is like a nine-year-old girl. And I prayed with her.

And several weeks later, the mom said she's memorized Psalm 91 and she's sleeping like a baby every night. I mean, that's just how it works. That's a simple example of it. And sometimes it's a lot harder because there is a real fear or there is a real hurt. I mean, what you described going through with your dad, that's a real trauma. That's a real hurt. But it was interpreted in the wrong way.

But you're right, Dana. I wish I have sexual abuse in my background. And so I can remember one time that it happened, my mind twisted and I thought something must be wrong with me.

This must be my fault. This is something that I do. And so you don't even realize that just becomes this lie of unworthiness and shame. And then you just carry it into adulthood. And now I'm having consequences of these lies that I'm hearing in my head over these years.

So if we can get our girls to identify and talk about the things that they're hearing or the lies that they're dealing with. Yeah. Whew. What a freedom. What a freedom.

And even something like that, such a severe trauma, such a severe pain. The word tells us we can have victory over that. Yes. And I have found freedom and victory. Praise the Lord. But it's taken work too.

Sure. It does take work. But Jesus said, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. He said, if you're truly my disciples, you'll abide in my word and you'll know the truth and the truth will set you free.

Let me ask you this. Was some of your work getting in the word and saturating your heart with the truth of the scriptures? And Dave knows this. I could not exist without the power of God's word.

Yeah. It's become, it's not that I should read it. It's become like, it's my food every day. It sets me free every day.

It reminds me of God's goodness, his grace and his unconditional love and his power that has set me free. And so the answer is yes. So that's truth replacing lies. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah. We've got to take what is true in the word and replace it with whatever emotional sticky feelings we have. Just now, not all the time is a sticky feeling a lie, but a lot of times we are allowing the emotion to become the boss of us rather than using it as a messenger. That's a good way to say it. Okay, God has given me stress or God has given me guilt.

What is he trying to tell me through this? And you go to the word and you learn what it's for. And then the emotion goes away.

Like that's how it's supposed to work. Like we should feel guilt. We should feel anger. We should feel fear. When a bear is chasing me, I want to feel fear, right? Because that's what makes me respond to it. But when we just feel them and we don't do anything about it, that's when sometimes they can settle in and become lies. And if you don't fix them when you're young, have you ever seen the VeggieTales fib?

No. Okay, there's a VeggieTales cartoon where this fib is teeny tiny. It's this little boy tells a lie and it's this teeny tiny fib.

And by the end of the thing, he's like the marshmallow man in Ghostbusters. It's enormous. If you don't deal with that lie when it's small and manageable, it does grow and become far more damaging in our lives. And it spills into every area of our lives. Absolutely. Now is a 7-year-old, 10-year-old girl or boy able to identify the lies on their own or do they need somebody to help them?

They do need help. That's why we wrote the book and that's why we wrote A Mom's Guide to Lies Girls Believe because we want mom to be the one to help her. This book is beautiful. I wish all of you could see it.

I hope you'll all buy it because it's a workbook and it's beautifully written and illustrated and there's great questions. I like that it has a theme of this Zoe. Now I'm realizing that's your granddaughter. Well, I didn't know I was going to have a granddaughter named Zoe when I wrote the book. She was born like a year later and named Zoe.

So it's kind of cool. And why did you decide to use this little girl named Zoe? Well, because so Zoe shows up at the beginning of each chapter and it's kind of just like a story form chapter book type writing. Let me read the introduction to Zoe. Meet Zoe and she's so cute. She has a little picture.

She's a girl whose name means life. She's going to join us as we explore these sticky feelings, the lies they reveal, and God's truth. And we're going to start with the very first woman who believed the very first lie. So what are you waiting for?

Let's get started. Yeah. So Zoe shows up at the beginning of every chapter, this cute little drawing of her, and she has a problem. And the girls have to help solve that problem by telling her what the truth is. And there's pages at the end of the chapter that says Zoe has believed what lie and they identify the lie. What Bible verse do you think Zoe needs to meditate and think about truth? And they write in the Bible verse that they would have found in that chapter.

But what we're doing is we're putting them in the driver's seat of being the counselor and the advisor. Because sometimes it's a little easier to be objective and learn the process when it's not your own lies you're identifying. And then hopefully at the end of the book, we do give her the tools so that she can start establishing that habit and practice for her own life. How many truths do you have and lies do you have that Zoe deals with? The book deals with 20. We surveyed 1,500 church-going tween girls because we wanted to make sure that the lies that we introduced in the book were lies that they really were struggling with. And then we narrowed that down to 20 that were really popping up pretty consistently.

Lies like it's not that great to be a girl or it's not that different or boys and girls aren't that different was not the predominant lie. But we were alarmed when roughly just under 10% of the girls were saying, yeah, I believe that lies at 7 to 10 year old girls five years ago. And that's gotten worse in five years. That's five years old. Yeah.

The survey is five years old. Would you jump into gender dysphoria today? We do jump into it in there. We knew it was coming. I've been studying that. I was part of a think tank on binary 15 years ago before it was hit in the news. Binary, non-binary language.

And so I knew that this was coming fast and furious. So the girls don't we don't talk about the lies in there. We don't talk about transgenderism or pronouns. What we do talk about is that sometimes almost all of us are like, it'd be nice to be a boy because boys seem to be stronger athletes. It'd be nice to be a boy because boys seem to go to the bathroom outside. That is not a thought I ever had. But I'm not going to ask you if it's a thought you've had.

It's the one a granddaughter just told me like, oh, I wish I could do that. So this is so normal, right? To compare ourselves, right? But with the culture telling all these other lies around those really normal feelings that girls have had for centuries, it can lead to really some scary lies. So we went ahead and said, let's talk about why it's so great to be a girl. And there's just some really basic theology in there about God chose two genders and here's why. Let's go back to Genesis 1 26 and 27 where he says, in the image of God, he created them.

Male and female, he created them. Now, listen, there are so many things that are God-like about us, right? Our language proficiency, the ability to fight gravity and fly to the moon, our creativity, that we can compose sonnets and create great works of art. These are all very God-like qualities. Even the way we have emotions. I'm an animal lover, so I believe animals have emotions. I think they're adorable and I love them, but we have them in a much more complex, sophisticated way, right?

And a much more purposeful way. So there's a lot of things about us God could have mentioned when he said, you're in my image. But he says two things, maleness and femaleness are what display my image in this very critical foundational verse. And so it must matter that God chose you to be a girl.

And I like to tell moms, one of the most important theological sentences you can say to your children right now is, it's great to be a girl, or it's great to be a boy, or God chose you to be a girl, God chose you to be a boy. Again, you don't have to study the counterfeits to plant the truth. And that's just one of the lies we deal with in the book. Dana's got some encouragement for moms here in just a second, but you don't have to study the counterfeits to plant the truth.

Gosh, that connects with me so well, because I feel like so many times I have to study everything that's going on in the culture and I'm just overwhelmed by it. But no, what we really need to do is just study the truth. Study the truth, plant that in our daughter's hearts, and that's what's actually going to grow, end up being the solution there, is just being dedicated to the truth.

I'm Shelby Abbott, and you've been listening to Dave and Anne Wilson with Dana Gresh on Family Life Today. Dana has written a book called Lies Girls Believe, and there's a ton of things that our daughters face today that are challenging that the previous generations didn't face. Things like huge anxiety, bullying on social media, and tons of other stuff. I have two daughters, so I think about this quite often, and I just really, what I want to do is equip them with the truth. And that's what this book, Lies Girls Believe, does. It helps them understand the truth in order to be able to set them free. You can find a copy of it at familylifetoday.com, or you can give us a call at 800-358-6329. Now, is there a chance that you, and yeah, I'm talking to you, could lead a small group growing healthier families and deeper knowledge of God in your own personal community? Well, the good news is Family Life's Art of Parenting Small Group Study can help you with that by giving you principles and practical advice to facilitate meaningful conversations about parenting and help you dig into God's Word through a video series that requires zero prep for the study. So you can have more time for actually engaging with your family and your community.

Grab 25% off before Thursday and preview it in today's show notes. Now back to the conversation with Dana Gresh and some encouragement for moms. As we step away, encourage moms right now who have those daughters between that age. Why is this so important to talk about these things?

Yeah, I think one of the really important reasons we're going to talk about it is so that they can have that long-term freedom. One of the girls that I mentored, one of the first girls I mentored believed the lie, everyone leaves. And I was her, she was in high school, I was in my 20s, she was just always fearful that I was going to abandon her. Her youth pastor had left her. And then she gets married, she goes away to college, she comes to see me and she's like 25 now and I'm like, you're still struggling with that, aren't you? She's like, oh, I'm terrified my husband's going to leave me. And we began to pray because by then I had learned you can know the truth and the truth will set you free. And I was like, let's try to figure out when you started feeling that way.

And we spent about two hours that night praying. And you know, her lie was attached to her parents' divorce. She was in like sixth or seventh grade and her mom and dad divorced. And she said from that night on, I had panic attacks that everyone would leave me.

Well, the truth is that people will fail you. So where do we go in God's word? Well, the verse that God brought to her heart as we prayed for her was, I will never leave you or forsake you. And being able to be anchored in that changed her forever. She drove home that night. One of the things, the way it manifested is she could never really sleep alone. She had a twin, so she always had a twin in her room, roommates in college, husband.

That night, she drove 18 hours to go home and got tired on the way, stopped in a hotel room, never even thought to be afraid and slept like a baby. I mean, that's how powerful truth can be. And if we can give our daughters that gift so that they don't have to go through 10 or 15 years of believing a lie like everyone leaves, but they could live in the security of the truth of God's word, that doesn't mean her life's going to be easy and perfect and there aren't going to be heartaches. It means she will thrive through them. She'll thrive through them. And that's what we want women and our daughters and men and boys to thrive in the freedom that God brings through the cross, really. Yeah, it's all through the cross. Family Life today is a donor supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.