Are Your Feelings Awkward?

We all have feelings. Women do. Men do. Kids do.

And in fact, we were all kids with feelings once. Inside our little souls burst a full spectrum of colorful feelings - from the curiosity stirred up by our imaginations, to the nervous tension when our parents would fight, to the exuberant anticipation of a Christmas morning.

But this rainbow of emotions may have frightened our parents, as perhaps they had learned to be frightened of their own emotional rainbow. And if they could not tolerate and celebrate their own feelings, they knew little of how to deal with ours.

Sometimes parents have rigid, inflexible ways of dealing with emotion. Sometimes the range of “negative emotions” – sadness, fear, embarrassment – got suppressed. Perhaps in your family only a smile was seen as the appropriate emotional expression. Or perhaps only anger was seen as manly and tough.

What happens when you don’t talk about your feelings?

Well, you don’t stop having them.

1. WHEN YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS, THEY START TO CONTROL YOU WITHOUT YOU REALIZING IT.

For example, some of you grew up in Christian homes. I did. Sometimes in our Christian subcultures, we’re taught that negative feelings indicate our faith is lacking. For instance, if we were sad, maybe our parents told us we need to put our hope in God and stop being sad. Maybe they even quoted a Bible verse to drive their point home.

I believe that our parents and pastors did this with the best of intentions.

However, suppressing feelings in an attempt to obey God doesn’t make them disappear. Instead, the feelings simply go underground, continuing to live inside of us undetected. And because they are still there, they are influencing our decisions outside of our conscious awareness. When we don’t create space to explore our feelings, those very feelings may actually bypass our rational minds and take control of our actions!

I don’t believe this type of emotional suppression pleases God.

A beautiful spectrum of affect is displayed in the Psalms. The poets express a gamut of feelings from anger, depression, and shame, to jubilation, satisfaction, and a sense of safety.

Do God’s promises transform our emotional states when we truly believe them? Absolutely! God’s promises heal our soul. But I don’t believe this happens in a simplistic, robotic fashion.

The Almighty created us as complex image bearers with a full range of emotions. We are not materialistic machines in which “X” input guarantees “Y” output, or in which “X” Bible verse guarantees “Y” emotion, in the same way every time. Thinking of ourselves as machines ignores the nature of our souls. We are always ebbing and flowing with a mix of conscious and unconscious feelings and beliefs. Since we are soul and not machine, I believe we must learn to recognize the full array of emotions inside of us, and handle these emotions with respect and discernment.

2. WHEN YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS, FEELINGS START TO SEEM BAD.

Often, people get the impression early in life that having negative feelings is a bad thing and shows that you are a weak or immoral person. Imagine the outcome – now, not only do you feel sad, but then you feel embarrassed about feeling sad, as if you were doing something wrong by being sad.

God gave us a broad range of emotional indicators – joy, peace, surprise, excitement, sadness, fear, embarrassment. Feelings were designed by God with a purpose – to indicate the state of our souls, and to gear us up for appropriate action.

All feelings are useful when we know how to respond appropriately to them.

3. WHEN YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS, YOU MAY FIND YOU ARE AN ANGRY OR DEPRESSED PERSON.

When we don’t talk about our feelings, they may all get converted into one big feeling, such as anger, or the inner deadness of depression.

And when all feelings get turned into anger, for example, we have lost our ability to attend to the range of emotional indicators that God gave us.

Sometimes anger is a helpful emotion, such as when we witness a vulnerable person being exploited. In this case, anger gives us extra energy to do something to restore justice.

However, it is highly problematic when we allow all of our feelings to turn into anger. Anger is a secondary emotion, while other emotions like shame, fear, disgust, etc. are primary. When we feel anger, it clues us into the fact that underneath the anger we are feeling something else.

Anger itself is no place to stay and hang out. If we fail to identify the original emotion behind anger, and just brood in our anger, we can cause grave harm to ourselves and others. Most of us have witnessed firsthand the havoc and destruction that anger, bitterness, and unforgiveness can wreak.

I think that’s why the Bible says,

“Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.” (Eph. 4:26-27.)

A few verses before, Paul reminds us of our new identity in Christ. He goes on to give us some powerful applications as to how to live out of this identity. One of these applications is to learn how to use the emotion of anger properly – as a guidepost rather than a campsite. If we build our anger into a campsite, the devil has ample opportunity to wreak havoc and destruction in our lives.

Therapy is a place where we can begin to reconnect with the wide range of feelings – emotional indicators – that God created. It’s also a safe place to explore what lies underneath our anger.

If you would like go on this journey, I am available to walk by your side. For more information or to schedule an appointment, please do not hesitate to call me at (208) 464-8806 or email me at jennifer.mft@hush.com.