Minding Your Emotions: How Understanding Your Feelings Can Nurture Your Soul (Paperback)

Chapter One

Our emotions testify that our deepest desires are no joke.

Our emotional nature has been given to us, along with all our other benefits, for our good by a loving God. Both positive and negative emotions are more valuable to us than we usually recognize. If we'll let them, they'll teach us the truth about ourselves and the One who made us. But facing that truth can be painful and fearful, so suppressing our emotions becomes the order of the day for many of us. What a loss.

Suppressed emotions can't teach us anything. When we bury our feelings, we're like students stuck with a silent teacher: there's no point in going to class. Besides, suppressed emotions, like nearly all buried things, tend to decay. They mingle with other factors to bear distorted offspring that may not resemble our original feelings at all. The original emotions of hurt, sadness, and frustration are transposed into guilt, shame, oppressive pain, anxiety, secondary anger, self-contempt, drivenness, and identity confusion.

Consider the following story.

Donna's Story

Donna is six years old. See her standing there in front of her school, waiting to be picked up? She points a toe at a crack in the sidewalk. She wipes her nose. She scratches the back of her knee where a mosquito got her. She's fidgety because she's hoping for a whopper-that her dad will show up to get her. She hopes the same thing every day. But today, like every day, it's her grandfather who shows up at her school.

She's hurt, sad, and frustrated. She misses her father-misses him like she'd miss being able to breathe. Dimly, she realizes that he's an alcoholic and consequently undependable, but neither that nor anything else excuses him in her mind. He should be there. She tells her mother, "I want Daddy to pick me up after school, not Granddad."

Her mother gets angry and says, "You should be grateful that you have your grandfather in your life."

Now Donna feels guilty and confused. Somehow, her longing for her father has been turned into something she's done against her grandfather. She wonders, What just happened?

As time passes, Donna receives more rejecting messages from the important people in her life, and her guilt feelings turn into shame. Guilt, we might say, is the feeling that you have done something bad; shame is the feeling that you are something bad. For Donna, shame becomes pervasive and self-defining, lying around her soul like a sooty cloud, suffocating her. She feels miserable.

But for Donna, guilt and shame represent just the beginnings of her negative feelings and actions. In addition, she has plenty of pain, with no apparent hope for comfort. And anxiety blends into anger: Why won't comfort come? Then self-contempt enters her heart: Only an idiot like me would be unable to find comfort. Everybody else seems to be doing fine. Then drivenness takes over: At all costs, I will find comfort. Soon she becomes compulsive: Wherever I find comfort, I'll return there over and over. Identity confusion follows: I'll go against my design if that helps me find comfort.

Beginning in adolescence, Donna finds herself drawn to the apparent safety of homosexual relationships. Since she associates the jagged edges of alcohol-induced fatherlessness with the main man in her life, she figures that all men are alike-unreliable and dangerous. The idea of responding deeply to a man is repulsive to her, even though she has been designed by God to do just that. The deeper she becomes involved in lesbianism, the more her gender confusion grows, but she feels it's worth it to fight off the appalling loneliness inside.

Furthermore, Donna's self-against-self conflict and drive to find comfort lead her to seek out friends for support. She attempts to surround herself with lots of people, many of whom are in some sense outcasts, as she feels herself to be. Donna learns that the fastest way to gain companions is through spending money on them-buying them gifts, taking them to dinner, and so forth. She concludes that a lavish lifestyle will win her the friends (that is, comfort) she desperately needs.

For a while, Donna is able to maintain her twin sources of comfort: homosexual relationships and her crowd of outcast friends. She becomes compulsive about returning to both sources. She thinks, I have to go continually to them; otherwise, I'm comfortless and my pain is overwhelming. But finally, Donna gets caught. Her high-spending lifestyle leads her to use her job at a bank to open several fraudulent credit accounts, and her superiors find out about it. She also financially defrauds her live-in girlfriend, who kicks her out of their apartment. Bam! Just like that, both faucets of comfort are turned off. Her thirsty soul is screaming for water, for comfort. It's time to seek some real help.

In this case, getting help means Donna learns to put her emotions to work for her rather than against her. No longer suppressed under the stifling of compulsive behaviors, her feelings become servants instead of tyrants; they help her instead of rule her. For example, she begins to see her anxiety in social situations as shedding light on her fear that she'll fail ("act like a geek") in relationships, be rejected, and lose a major supply of comfort. Now she explores her emotions (like anxiety) as budding revelations. What used to be a black hole becomes a candle. As writer Anne Lamott put it about one of her own struggles with anxiety, "Sitting with all that vulnerability [instead of running from it], I discovered I could ride it." Likewise, Donna can be carried along by the energy of facing what's real instead of suppressing it and turning it into a destructive force in her life.

Falsehoods About Feelings

Clearly, in Donna's story I'm highlighting not only the wisdom that can come through emotions but also the danger of dismissing them and losing out on the light they might bring. Suppressed emotions doom us to walking in the dark. Dismissing our emotions is like throwing away flashlights during a power outage.

Sad to say, humans are resourceful at discarding their feelings. We have several strategies for throwing our emotions away. Three of the most common ones come out when we say that emotions are for weaklings, that emotions are evidence of instability, and that emotions are less important than reason.

Emotions Are for Weaklings

A prime falsehood people accept in order to discount emotion is that giving in to feelings is a sign of weakness. The high value placed on personal strength becomes an excuse for escaping the risks associated with emotion. As we'll see in a bit, women have their own way of expressing this lie. But men are especially big on this one, having been bred (so it seems) for toughness.

Deep inside, every man feels that, to be a real man, he should be able to take a bullet without making a sound, work around the clock without taking a break, and hear the most devastating news without dropping a tear. He should be able to defend his loved ones with wit and muscle. He should be able to win whenever he competes. He should never show weakness, never give up. If you remember the story of G. Gordon Liddy sticking his finger into a candle flame without flinching, you know what I mean.

Actually, though, God designed men to be courageous, not tough. The differences between courage and toughness may seem slight, but they're really quite striking. One difference is that courage is easily compatible with relationships, while toughness is not. Courage exists for the sake of others; toughness generates pride and isolation. Courage wants to care; toughness wants to be admired from a distance. Courage is compatible with vulnerability; toughness denies all weakness. Courage is Jesus on the cross; toughness is Peter slicing off Malchus's ear with a sword. You get the idea.

God made men to be courageous in the midst of their emotions. Courage is willing to endure the pain of learning from emotions, for it is informed by wisdom, which assures that the pain will resolve itself into new light and growth. Toughness, on the other hand, can't handle the stress of learning from emotion. Toughness is really rather weak.

Imagine a man who, a week after triple-bypass surgery, is back at work for half-days. A week after that, he's at work full time and planning to get back into his hobby, horseback riding. All of this goes against medical advice. Ask him why he's pushing himself, and you'll hear, "Why should I let some doctor with soft hands and, for all I know, a soft head, tell me what to do?"

As our tough guy pushes himself unwisely, he fails to detect the niggle of fear in his heart about his own mortality. So he requires his wife to deny her fear as well, and she becomes outwardly pleasant in a plastic way but doesn't show her real self. Both people are reduced to automatons, compulsively fighting off a fear that would, if faced, make them more human. It's hard for them to be wise because neither allows the openness that begets wisdom.

Western culture has lost a whole treasury of wisdom because of its tendency toward reductive thinking. For example, when people are viewed as mere machines, as with the couple above, it becomes easier to reduce the meaning of life to personal pleasure. How can such a worldview accommodate wisdom-or, for that matter, the courage it takes to persevere in life long enough to develop that wisdom?

A worldview that reduces the meaning of life to pleasure favors the young, for they are the most adept at seizing it. The old, then, get short shrift. Yet it is the old who are most likely to have been schooled by life. The wisdom bank of a culture imbued by such a worldview becomes more and more depleted.

Without wisdom, there is a dearth of big-picture thinking-the very thinking necessary to delay gratification and build relationships that are more than brief exercises in narcissism. Without relational depth, life degenerates into desperate self-aggrandizement (desperate because there are many pigs and few troughs). Made into a competition, life becomes painful and lonely. Toughness is highly valued because it supplies a sense of invulnerability in a harsh world. But as we've seen, the male ideal of toughness does not deliver what it promises.

The premium on toughness amounts to a confession by men that they've given up on cultivating relationships. So the responsibility for maintaining relationships falls on women. Meanwhile, though, women have their own problems with relationships.

Women tend to gravitate toward stoicism rather than toughness. An outward pleasantry and politeness turns out to be a veneer over a steel core. That core is organized around a commitment to avoid seeming needy. This commitment often coexists with a Pollyannaish denial of the harsher realities of life. Stoicism, then, has a dishonest streak: it can't admit how hard life really is in a fallen world.

It turns out that stoicism and toughness, not emotions, are for weaklings.

Emotions Are Evidence of Instability

Many people think that showing any sign of emotion marks one as unstable, not to be trusted. Therefore, they reason, it's better for them to keep their emotions strictly in check.

Actually, emotions are evidence of instability only for those who are ruled by their emotions. When an emotion instantly takes hold of someone's behavior, we could call that person reactive-that is, his emotions provoke immediate actions instead of calm reflection. In the following exchange between a dating couple, it becomes clear who is reactive.

Jennifer: Tyler, I feel that sometimes, when we're trying to have a discussion, you just attack me from out of the blue. I don't even know I've said anything wrong, and you're all over me.

Tyler: Oh, so you think I'm attacking you, climbing all over you. Well, I know how we can solve that! I'll just stop talking with you. If you can't let me talk without accusing me of attacking, maybe we should just not see each other anymore!

Jennifer: I'm not saying you always attack. There are just times when I'm surprised by how intense things get, and I didn't even see it coming.

Tyler: I can't believe you. Why haven't you told me this before? I'm not willing to be characterized as the jerk in this relationship. If I have to worry about your feelings being attacked every time I talk with you, what's the point?

Clearly, Tyler is feeling something so overwhelming that he can't slow down long enough to reflect on why his inner anxiety has skyrocketed. Rather than doing the internal work to understand the anxiety, he is placing the burden on Jennifer, making her work hard to explain herself in just the right way to defuse the anxiety.

In fact, anyone who is ruled by emotions makes everyone around him work harder. His relationships suffer because everyone around him is so tired of the extra labor it takes to make him feel OK. Prescription: if you're in a relationship with a "reactor," resist the temptation to work so hard to keep him OK. Encourage him to do the internal work himself instead of shifting the burden to you.

Emotions themselves, then, are not evidence of instability. It would be better to say that those who react immediately to their emotions tend to be unstable. These folks have never learned how to place a buffer between themselves and their emotions. The buffer is the skill of reflection that involves taking advantage of the human ability to think about what we're feeling. Because feelings are interpretable, we might say that our feelings are a part of us that are out there looking for words to express themselves. They are undirected sensations looking for a compass. We can properly express them when we identify the factors underneath them and put them into words.

Reactive people are not finding the right words for their emotions. Sometimes they don't reach for words at all; they turn their emotions directly into actions. This is called acting out. For example, a person who, upon feeling a hint of emotional pain, automatically opens the refrigerator to get something to eat (subconsciously hoping to bury the negative feeling with a physical pleasure) is acting out. The gift of words is completely gone. This person is overlooking whole substrata of factors that intervene between emotion and behavior. Emotions become behavior-wham!-just like that. Road rage is a good example of this abrupt maneuver. Is it any wonder that we live in an increasingly uncivil world?

Silence, too, can be a form of reactivity.

Continues...