Session 1.3 - The Emotional Self

Objectives:

  1. To make the participants realize that emotions are indicators to their well-being
  2. To help the participants learn how to handle their emotions
  3. To help the participants become more aware of the appropriate response to the emotional needs of others

Introduction:

Like it or not God has made us to be emotional beings. He wants us to have emotions – His emotions. He wants us to weep over the lost, be moved with compassion for the oppressed, be outraged by injustice, provoked by idolatry and angry at the hard of heart. He wants us to love the sheep in our charge, be caught up in the agony of intercession and have hearts full of hope. The Christian life, properly lived, is awash in emotion. However it is not merely sentimental, trite or unstable. Truly Christian emotions have a majesty about them. They ring of the Kingdom and participate in and agree with the Truth.

Emotions

People and their emotions are like bells. Some people are like alarm bells going off anxiously and loudly. Some are chipped and cracked and when they “ring” the sound seems painful or like the bells on old-fashioned trams noisy, clanging, rattling. Yet others are like shop bells being rung by everyone that enters their life. Some are like a carillon, gentle, and beautiful and silvery; finally there are those that are deep and resonant and summon the countryside to worship.  The aim is to produce people who ring true and ring deeply with the emotions of God. People whose very emotional presence is a declaration of the Kingdom of God. To do this we must get a handle on our emotions, we must be able to name them and we must start to choose which emotions we will express and which emotions we should deny.

Identifying Our Emotions


Many people cannot clearly identify their emotions. They simply use general words and phrases such as “good”, “bad”, “up” and “OK”, instead of more specific and useful words like “disconsolate”, “elated” and “perplexed”. For others feelings are just a confused blur. Yet others are so hurt that pain overwhelms all other finer feelings and for those people the emotional choice is constant pain or oblivion. Many chose oblivion via drugs, alcohol, or promiscuity and increasingly they escape into the total oblivion of death through suicide. Such people need help. They need to untangle their emotions and work through to peace. So being able to “feel their feelings” and being able to identify and name their emotions is a crucial first step.  Another reason why good emotional identification is important is that mistaken emotional identification can lead to spiritual disaster. For example take the common confusion between love and lust. A young person who confuses these two can end up in a disastrous relationship. The portrayal of emotions by great authors helps us to get in touch with our feelings and to discriminate between them. When a poem particularly resonates with us then it is probably evoking an unexplored feeling that needs to surface. Making spiritual judgments about the emotions we experience is often counter-productive and causes us to express some emotions and repress others to conform to a spiritual standard or model that we have been taught in church. This can confuse us emotionally and spiritually.

Most Christians have a strong belief about what the perfect Christian is like. Some may think the perfect Christian is an extroverted evangelist. Others may think the perfect Christian is a quiet and ascetic mystic, while yet others may think that the perfect Christian is a blessed and happy believer living a happy and contented life. This model of the perfect humanity shapes our emotionality. For instance people who think the “blessed believer” is the ideal Christian tend to emphasize the importance of joy as an emotion. They also tend to deny painful emotions such as grief or disappointment, which do not fit with their model of the happy contented Christian. This process of valuing some emotions and denying others based on our idea of the “model Christian” is very common. The central questions of changing mental models are “Can I be more like Jesus than I am now?” and “What is my actual working notion of the Christian life? Is it what Jesus meant by the Christian life?” To doubt our mental model of the faith is not the same as doubting God. You may need to make a calculated decision to move beyond your culture and upbringing, accepting that which is good and rejecting that which is evil and moving to maturity in Christ.

This leads us to a problem – what about the emotions I have today, right now, before I have changed a bit. How do I handle them? How should I evaluate them? How should I react to them?

Acting On and Reacting To our Strong Emotions

Handling strong emotion is not easy – and life in the Spirit is frequently full of strong emotions. Love, righteous anger, compassion, ecstasy and joy in worship can be transcendent and powerful emotions that sweep the believer along.  In the face of such powerful emotions what should we do? How should we act on our emotions? How should we react to them as they well up inside us?

What we perceive and believe gives force to our convictions and emotions. If you behold little of reality and believe almost nothing, then you will feel small and dull passions at best. However if you are filled with the Spirit, and see Heaven opened, and know the truth, and believe the Scriptures, and are truly on a mission from the Lord then your emotions will be strong and clear and grow in strength and grandeur. To add the obvious, the reverse is not true, strong emotions do not mean you are spiritual. People can be gripped by all sorts of strong and yet fleshly emotions. So strong emotions can be both godly and fleshly.

The Christian life is about holy emotion not a dead and passionless existence. However before we can control our emotions and manage them appropriately we must become aware of their existence.  Self-control means managing our emotions so that fleshly and carnal emotions such as wrath and bitterness are kept out of the Christian life and holy emotions such as compassion are given full expression in the best manner possible.

Repression is the opposite of self-control because it denies the existence of the emotion and does not enable us to control it in any way at all. That is why people who use repression of emotion as a main device in their Christian life are often subject to outbursts of rage. They in fact have no real control of their emotions and no insight into their emotional state.

The concept of “permission to feel emotion” is denied to many people. They are told from a young age to keep emotions, particularly negative emotions, completely under wraps. Once this is successfully internalised such people may have to give themselves “permission to feel” those emotions that they have denied themselves over the years. Such emotions may include sensual emotions, pleasure, anger, disappointment and grief. Gradually coming to feel long lost emotions can take some time. There is frequently a deep fear that control will be lost. It needs to be remembered by such people that they have successfully controlled that emotion for perhaps thirty or more years. They know how to put the lid on the box when they have to. It is most unlikely they will truly lose control but the experience will feel new and a bit scary at first. Eventually the recovered emotions will lead to the deeper resonances of life and a fuller and more meaningful existence.

Realizing your emotions are inappropriate is not quite enough. You must make a definite inner decision. You must make the firm and definite decision that even when emotions are powerful you are going to be in charge of them. This is not repression, it is self-control. Your mind can decide how you will or will not react as long as you make the decision to put it clearly and absolutely in charge of your life. We need to discern our strong emotions. Thus we do not need to run away from strong emotion whether it be positive emotion, negative emotion or even deep spiritual emotion. The presence of strong emotion should not panic us into a fight or flight response or shut us down into repression. Rather we should evaluate the emotion rather than react to the emotion, we should master the emotion and not just flee from it or try to beat it to death. The mastery stance requires discernment and discernment requires understanding of emotions, their sources, their place in our life and their relative values.

Rather than repressing our emotions and unmet needs we need to be aware of our heart and discipline it according to the truth. During a mid-life crisis the best advice is “acknowledge your feelings but follow the truth.” It is perfectly Ok to acknowledge to yourself that, “I am strongly tempted to have an affair” as long as you stare that fact in the face and decide to refuse the temptation because you love God. It can also help to look at the consequences and say, “I will not do so because that is wrong and destructive and would make shipwreck of my life.” By acknowledging the temptation and refusing it you can grow in emotional and spiritual maturity.

There is however an aspect of emotion that can guide us and is meant to guide us. Emotions can act as a “preliminary analysis” of a complex situation prompting us to give it more thought. There is a place for hunches, gut feelings, emotional signals and awareness of emotional atmosphere. Emotions are able to reduce a very complex situation down to a certain feeling or impulse and they do this very quickly and efficiently. Emotions are thus meant to be initial assessments of complex situations – but only initial assessments. This is useful in that our emotions select the situations that our reason will go to work on and analyse. Emotions can make us attracted, suspicious, repelled, guarded, curious or astonished at a given situation. Sometimes this initial impression is validated by further thought at other times it is proved totally wrong.

Here are some hints that may help you to find a “place to stand” so you can take charge of your own emotional life.

Recognizing and Understanding Emotions in Others

Sensitive and caring ministry to others depends on being able to accurately recognise and understand the source of emotion in others. Without this skill pastoral care will be clumsy at best and damaging at worst. Tasks such as counselling and prayer ministry require a fine feeling for personal emotions. If God has called us to ministry He has called us to minister grace to a hurting and damaged world and called us to be able to understand people – including being able to read their emotions.

This is becoming increasingly difficult as in our multi-cultural societies ministry means reading emotions of people from different backgrounds, genders, and ethnicities than our own. False reading of other people’s emotions leads to mistaken action and reactions on our behalf. People react to “shadows” instead of realities and defend themselves from perceived emotional threats that simply do not exist. When people constantly misread others intentions towards them and this spreads to an entire group then entire churches, denominations, cities and even nations can become embroiled in it. This group aspect of emotional misunderstanding is often indicated by phrases such as “they hate me” or “they are up to something” where “they” is rather loosely defined. Good emotional recognition means picking up the emotions that truly are present in the situation such as love and acceptance and not projecting into it emotions that may not be truly present in the situation such as criticism and rejection. One of the big barriers to correctly reading the emotions of another person is that we cannot understand how on earth they could possibly react that way. We make light of reality of the other person’s emotions. People may react in immature ways but we still need to try and understand the source of their immaturity. Writing someone off as “just unspiritual” without understanding why they are unspiritual does not contribute to the solution. Much can be gained by distilling the thought behind a person’s emotion into a single sentence. This sentence provides the key thought that they are acting on or reacting to. It can also help to ask about the facts, feelings and identity issues involved.

Once we are in touch with our own emotions and the emotions of others we need to put those feelings into words so that they touch minds and hearts and minister the grace of Jesus Christ to the world. We are not free to just “let fly” with our emotions. According to Scripture there is an appropriate time for each and every form of emotional expression. This is not chronological time such as “at 3 pm you may weep” but event time linked to life events and happenings “at a funeral it is a good time to express sympathy”. Generally our emotions should be matched to those around us. Emotions should be congruent in both type and intensity. Culture, circumstances and social dynamics normally tell us what emotional expression is appropriate in any given situation but this can be modified by the Holy Spirit from time to time. We need to match our emotional expression with the strength of the person and the depth of the spiritual needs of those around us. When Jesus spoke to people who were strong, hard and stubborn he was strong and harsh and direct (Matthew 23:1-10).

Once we have the timing of our emotional expression right and decided on how private or public it is to be we then need to make sure that we deliver a clear, unambiguous and balanced message. Emotions are often mixed and in order to express them clearly we need to give a picture of all the emotions involved in a particular situation and their relative strengths. The “light and shadow” technique involves expressing all aspects of an issue, its boundaries, the light and the dark and the various contrasts so it cannot fail to be understood. We may have the timing right, the choice of audience (private or public) correct, a balanced and tactful statement but how much do we tell people about the emotional truth of the situation?

Our emotions should be true and not false but they should also be appropriate and edifying. We are to express true emotions that are modulated by the circumstances, timing and needs of the situation. We think before we emote. We aim to edify, to be appropriate, to inject those feelings into the situation that encourage, uplift or console. We balance truth with grace, bringing both to bear on the situation. Jesus did not retreat from expressing emotion, His emotions were real and authentic and spiritual. There was a solid and appropriate truth about them. Yet they conveyed grace and fitted the moment perfectly.

Christian emotion is to be real, but it is also to be self-controlled. We need to reveal the truth about ourselves, so we cannot pretend emotionally, but we need to fit that truth to what others can bear.

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