Published by Eerdmans on October 9, 2025
Genres: Non-Fiction, Christian Life
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A liberating and life-giving approach to making peace with anxiety
What if anxiety is not an enemy trying to destroy you? What if anxiety is an unexpected ally trying to save you? In Discovering Your Internal Universe, author and pastor Cody Deese invites readers into this counterintuitive shift in how they understand anxiety. Challenging the common assumption that anxiety is an illness that only ever undermines us, Deese demonstrates how anxiety can be a helpful guide pointing us toward things that need our attention.
Revealing his own lifelong struggle with a panic disorder, Deese describes how his anxiety illuminated a path that he needed to explore—a path into his internal universe. The journey brought Deese face to face with unresolved grief, childhood wounds, religious trauma, and personal rejection—and ultimately led to greater self-understanding and acceptance. Through Deese’s story, readers will learn how to access their own internal universe, discover the root causes of their anxiety, and find the courage to embark on their own internal quest. Unconventional, practical, and spiritually insightful, Discovering Your Internal Universe is an invitation to listen to the gentle truth behind anxiety: it is good to be human and it is good to be you.
Anxiety is at an all time high. Nearly one in three US adults have experienced an anxiety disorder at some point in their life. And, looking around at the world, you can sort of understand. It’s not only a mental health concern, but has a root in very real things to feel worried about. Anxiety can be debilitating and unwelcome, but—as Cody Deese shares through his own personal experience—it can also teach us something. Discovering Your Internal Universe refuses the typical narrative of anxiety as enemy and instead invites readers into an exploration of what anxiety can reveal about who we are.
Deese is clear throughout the book that he is not a mental health professional. In fact, he writes that this book came out of an assignment given to him by his therapist. (May we all be so lucky as to turn our therapy session into publishable work.) As such, the book is particularly through Deese’s personal lens, using his experience to hopefully help others. Discovering Your Internal Universe begins with Deese’s lifelong struggle with debilitating anxiety and eventual reframing of it not as pathology to be suppressed but as a messenger pointing toward unresolved grief, spiritual wounds, and unexamined parts of the self.
The narrative then moves from personal memoir into a broader invitation: What if our internal emotional landscape—our “internal universe”—is itself a sacred space worthy of careful attention and compassionate listening? Deese’s approach is striking not just for its vulnerability but for how it bridges spiritual insight with psychological awareness. He challenges the conventional assumption that anxiety is purely a defect or illness. Instead, he suggests it can be an unexpected ally, guiding us toward deeper self-understanding, emotional integration, and ultimately greater wholeness.
I do want to be clear that readers primarily seeking traditional self-help tools or clinical anxiety management may find the book’s emphasis on spiritual interpretation and internal reflection a bit disappointing. This isn’t a book about managing anxiety. This isn’t a book by a medical professional. Rather, this is a book about embracing a managed anxiety and sits at the intersections of memoir, spirituality, and personal growth. It’s a deeply personal look at anxiety and Deese hopes by telling his own story, he can help others. It’s an admirable and vulnerable work.