Untangling Emotions (eBook)

Introduction

How Do You Feel about How You Feel?

Emotions are strange.

They’re strange in that they can make us behave in ways we don’t want to. Strange in that they can flood through our bodies whether we like it or not. Strange in that they can help us see and do things we would never have done without them. Strange in that most of us don’t know (or even stop to ask) why we are feeling what we are feeling most of the time.

And that’s why we wrote this book. We want to help you understand what your emotions are (and aren’t) and what you can do about it. The reality is that, while we might be slow to admit it, we’re all troubled by our emotions.

Maybe your struggle is with anxiety. Maybe you’re just someone who feels “stressed” a lot. Maybe you’re frequently melancholy, or you live with constant low-grade frustration. Maybe life is mostly just boring. Or maybe you’ve never really thought about your emotions at all. It’s not that hard in this day and age to flit from Netflix to email to Facebook to your job and never land anywhere in between long enough to notice that you’re feeling anything.

Whatever your story, whether you know it or not, sometimes you don’t like how you feel. And in that way, you’re just like every other human being.

Consider a few of the different ways people experience emotions. First, take Jen. Her Tuesday morning is going just fine till a picture at the top of her Facebook feed grabs her attention. Everything about the shot of her three smiling friends, arms around the others’ shoulders, proclaim that they are having a great time. The caption reads, “Girls’ night out! Just what I needed!” There’s just one thing missing from the picture: Jen.

Betrayal, embarrassment, surprise, anger, and a keen sense of being left out wash over her. Tears well up in her eyes, her heart begins to pound, her cheeks flush with heat. Jen can’t shake the feelings and a low-grade nausea the rest of the day. I hate this—of course no one wants to be with me, Jen thinks. I doubt other people feel like this. I doubt other people are like this.

For others, like Angie, emotions are less like a storm and more like quicksand. Angie feels trapped in a world without ups or downs. Most often she just feels bored, empty, even numb. She has no idea why her emotions are so flat, why there’s never any spark, why excitement and joy are experiences for others but not her. She always seems to be on the outside looking in. While others are enjoying a good laugh, celebrating a victory, or having a deep and satisfying conversation, she’s only partially there, more a spectator than a participant. It’s lonely and alienating, and she’s tired of it.

Still others, like Chad, are hardly aware of their emotions at all. Sometimes he’s happy, sometimes he’s sad, sometimes he’s angry. He can go for days without noticing what he’s feeling, and he doesn’t see what the fuss over emotions is all about. But his wife periodically struggles with anxiety and depression. He wishes he could help, but he doesn’t know how. Chad feels more like a witness to the world of emotions than a participant and feels awkward at any significant display of emotion in others.

Finally, there’s Aaron. Aaron has it pretty easy. He knows he has emotions, but they don’t trouble him often. When they do, he rarely stays blue or irritated for long. He’s not hiding from his deeper feelings; he just doesn’t get upset all that often, and he finds that when he does, things turn out all right if he just takes a little time to let everything blow over. The sun always does seem to come out tomorrow.

So how do you feel about how you feel? Can you relate to any of these stories?

As we’ve counseled over the years, we’ve found that sometimes Christians are more disturbed by their emotions than non-Christians are. Christians often see negative emotions, the ones we would describe as feeling “bad,” as signs of spiritual failure. Anxiety is proof that you don’t trust God. Grief is failure to rest in God’s good purposes for your life. Anger is just plain old selfishness. It seems that Christians are never only dealing with negative emotions. Instead, every dark feeling also carries with it a sense of spiritual failure, guilt, and shame about having that dark feeling. As a result, negative emotions are to be squashed and repented of immediately rather than explored, and should be expressed only when carefully monitored and controlled—preferably while wearing a hazmat suit.

Actually, Christians are sometimes uneasy even with positive emotions. Happiness must be scrutinized for fear of “loving the gift more than the giver,” meaning God. A sense of accomplishment or satisfaction over a job well done might just be a cover for pride or taking credit for something for which we were only instruments. If you feel good for too long, it could mean you are selfish and aren’t in tune with the needs of those around you.

It seems like Christians just can’t seem to get it right, no matter how they feel.

The way you respond to your emotions, including how you feel about how you feel, is of vital importance to your relationship with God and others in your life. Our emotions are one of the most common and commonly misunderstood opportunities in our lives to grow in maturity and love. They have the power to deeply enrich our relationships or drive wedges into them.

Who This Book Is For

With that in mind, we hope three different kinds of people will pick up this book. First, we are writing for those whose emotions tend toward the extremes, like Jen or Angie. Both those who feel like the walking dead and those who get swept away by emotional tides have a daily need for God’s comfort, help, courage, and wisdom.

Second, however, this book is for you if, like Chad, emotions baffle you. Maybe it’s your own emotions you can’t figure out. Maybe it’s the emotional storm of a loved one. Or maybe you just can’t understand why certain people in your life do the things they do, and you feel lost.

Finally, we are writing to you if you want to love and care for people whose emotions, for one reason or another, have them over a barrel. As counselors, we know how challenging it can be to care for emotionally volatile people, and we want to help you move into their lives with wisdom and practical ideas.

And what about the Aarons of the world? Do those who are happy with their emotional lives get a pass on reading this? Perhaps. But keep in mind that those with an easygoing temperament, those who are rarely forced to deal with hurt feelings, are also at risk of missing the growth and even the joy that God intends for his children in dealing with their emotions in a way that more tightly and richly connects them to him.

We believe the best way to serve you as a reader, whichever category you fall into, is to speak directly to those in the first category, those of you who struggle with your feelings and don’t need anyone to tell you that emotions are challenging. Those of you in the other two groups, listen in. Don’t be surprised, however, if you find that more applies to you than you had expected, and not just the “emotional people” around you. Our hope is to help all of you understand your own inner world—and that of your spouse, friend, or office-mate—better by hearing us speak to those who feel the problem of their feelings all the time and yearn to change.

Emotions Are a Gift

The Bible has a lot to teach us about emotions. It’s true that Scripture warns us about the dangers of emotions, how they sometimes reflect our disordered inner world and prompt us to hasty, unwise, and destructive actions. But it also teaches us that they are an indispensable part of being human and play a crucial role in our relationships with God and others. A careful study of the Bible can help us discard faulty assumptions so we can engage our emotions rather than be ruled by or flee from them.

Here are a few of the critical truths we will be exploring together:

• Emotions are an essential way we bear God’s image. God expresses emotions, and he designed us to express emotions too. In the Bible we see and hear God’s anger, joy, sadness, and even jealousy. Of course, God does not experience emotions exactly as we do. He is spirit and doesn’t have a body (an important element of our emotional lives) and is sinless, but there’s no denying that he has chosen to reveal himself in the language of emotions and that our emotions are an aspect of his choice to create us to be like him.1
• Jesus leads the way. Jesus gives us a perfect picture of human emotions in action. Jesus, who is fully God, also became fully human. That means that Jesus knows and experiences emotions not only as God does but also as we do, as a flesh-and-blood human being. In the Gospels we witness Jesus’s compassion for suffering and heartache. We see his anger as he speaks to callous religious leaders. We hear his groans as he grieves over unbelief and death. As we live in relationship with him, he actually...