One question I’ve never liked is, “How does that make you feel?” Truth is, often I just don’t know. Or I don’t want to know.
My feelings are tangled. They feel unknowable, out of control, and sometimes, alarmingly absent. Maybe yours do, too. Feelings! What are we supposed to do with them? And what even are they anyway?
A lot of us might answer, “Nothing I want to deal with, thank you very much.”
Why? I can tell you that personally, somewhere along the way, maybe from church, or just from growing up, I learned I wasn’t supposed to feel feelings. Or be sad or angry or scared. I was supposed to be okay. Or maybe I avoided feelings because I despise the feeling of being out of control; I believed these feelings were too scary, and sitting in the hard felt ... too hard.
Even now, as an adult, every time I experience sadness, fear, anger — emotions I’ve been conditioned to not want to feel — something deep within me automatically starts trying to fight off the feeling like it’s a virus. I go on attack, judging that feeling, condemning it, and telling myself why I shouldn’t feel it at all. My brain tells me how it is all going to be okay. It barks out all these orders about what I need to do so I can finally stop feeling the feeling.
Before we heal, though, we’re going to have to dump some unhelpful notions that are baked into a lot of our hearts and minds. Most of us from our earliest days were taught to not feel what we feel.
Regardless of the year you were born, the city you grew up in, and who raised you, I am confident you were conditioned right from the start regarding what to do when you felt a feeling.
Most often, it’s control yourself.
They might be embarrassed by our displays of emotion. They might feel judged by them. They might be emotionally unhealthy themselves.
For whatever reason, often accidentally, they shame us for feeling things. They dismiss the feelings we felt. They neglect or ignore altogether the emotions we are juggling. They shut down as we try to engage.
It’s not just our parents. The church often doesn’t know what to do with feelings either. And that can be deeply hurtful.
Listen: I so wish I could talk to you in person. What is your story here? Were you ever told by a parent or family member or some kind of spiritual authority not to feel something that you really and truly felt? Were you ever told to “calm down” because your natural reaction was too big?
We’re going to take steps toward uncovering and healing those wounds in our time together.
And a huge part of that is recasting some of the unhelpful things we’ve learned in church.
Your feelings, my feelings, are not evil things that need to be beat back.
In fact, feelings can’t be beat back. No matter how far down we stuff them, they pop out at funny times. And they get all over people — especially people we love.
Rage, fear of rejection, jealousy, bitterness, despair—if you’re like me, you might think you packed all those things safely away in a box, so you won’t have to see them again. But those things sneak back up on us when we least expect them.
And they’re not figments of our imaginations. Those feelings are tangled up with something very real in your past or present, something that absolutely IS a big deal to you, whether or not you’re ready to admit it.
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Feelings can’t be beat back. They can’t be ignored or dismissed. They are trying to tell us something.
Look. I’m a fixer at heart. For so long, I’ve considered my fix-it nature a gift—a spiritual gift, in fact. But over the past few years, as I’ve been on a journey toward untangling my emotions, I’ve come to see things in a very different light.
The truth is that I’ve been so busy fixing stuff that I’ve neglected the “feeling” part of me.
I haven’t given myself permission to feel what I actually feel. I haven’t given the people in my life permission to feel what they actually feel. It turns out you can’t feel feelings while you’re preoccupied with fixing them.
Crazy, right?
I bet you can relate. In fact, I know it. I bet you tend to resist examining your feelings, too.
As we go through these six weeks together, learning to listen to what our emotions are trying to tell us, I hope you’ll discover this truth: Feelings were never meant to be fixed; feelings are meant to be felt.
