Some of the most common emotions that come up in my work with Christian women are anxiety, anger, grief, and guilt. Obviously, these are not fun emotions for anyone to experience, which is what lands them in my office. They want new ways to cope with difficult feelings so that they can live vibrant and fulfilling lives.
When I ask them to describe what they’re experiencing, I often hear a common fear: if they allow themselves to experience their difficult emotions (as opposed to avoiding, ignoring, distracting themselves from them), they will not be able to feel anything other than their pain.
The thing is, when we start talking about why they feel the way that they feel, the reasons make sense! The emotion they’re experiencing usually matches the experience or situation they’re describing (as for the few times it doesn’t seem to match, there’s usually something else going on under the surface that once unearthed, makes sense!). They feel anxious about increased responsibility and workload at work, or about finding a partner, or about becoming a mom. They feel angry at husbands who don’t seem to “get it” or carry their share of the mental load. They grieve lost loved ones, or feel guilty about past mistakes. But along with these difficult emotions is an accompanying fear – if I let myself feel an emotion that makes sense given what I’ve experienced, will I drown in that difficult emotion? Will I ever feel different? Will these difficult feelings take over my life?
In my work and in my own life, I’ve come to see that we have a hard time allowing ourselves to feel what we feel. Why is that? I think there are several reasons, especially if we’ve grown up in the church. We’re taught “not to be anxious about anything” and that anger is “bad” (despite the fact that there are clear verses in the Bible that differentiate between feeling angry and sinning in anger). We’re taught to “rejoice in suffering” and that we’re made new when we come to know Jesus.
These are all true sentiments and make sense in the context that they’re written about in the Bible. However, we’ve often been handed one of these sentiments as a response to the pain that we’re feeling, which then adds another element to the difficult emotion we’re already experiencing:
Shame.
Shame makes it more difficult to feel our pain. It attaches a judgment to our pain. You *shouldn’t* feel anxious about finding a spouse because God has a plan. You trust God, don’t you? You *shouldn’t* feel angry about your husband not pitching in around the house because he has his own set of responsibilities that he’s tending to (or perhaps something infuriatingly patriarchal along the lines of “that’s not his role”). You can be sad that you lost your loved one, but you have assurance that they’re in heaven, so you *shouldn’t* be too sad or sad for too long.
When shame is attached to a difficult emotion, it makes us want to avoid that difficult emotion all the more. To prove shame wrong. That there’s nothing wrong with us, that we do trust God, that we can buck up and deal with our husband’s cluelessness or indifference and our loss.
When we believe shame and the judgment attached to our difficult emotions, it tells our brain that our initial emotion – anxiety, anger, grief, guilt – is dangerous and wrong to feel. In my work with clients and in my own personal counseling, I’ve come to see the value in pausing the “I shouldn’t feel this way” track and just sitting with the “this is how I feel” track. This helps tell our brains that this feeling is not dangerous to feel, that we can tolerate it. It also speaks back to the shame by showing ourselves compassion – we acknowledge our humanity, that this experience did indeed cause us to feel a certain way and that that is part of being a human being created in the image of God. The feeling itself is not something that needs to be fixed or eradicated – our response to the feeling is our responsibility and something we can choose.
For example, I think of a pivotal experience I had as a middle schooler. A friend had a sleepover and invited two of our mutual friends, but did not invite me. I have no evidence that this friend did not invite me because she was mad at me or wanted to be mean to me – she never treated me differently or said anything that led me to believe something was wrong in our friendship. Adult me can look back and hypothesize perfectly rational reasons for why I wasn’t invited. Nevertheless, it hurt my feelings, and I was sad to be left out of their sleepover.
I could tell myself, “Julie, she didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, so you need to just get over it!” And while looking back, I truly don’t believe she meant to hurt me, I was still hurt. I can allow my feelings of hurt, while acknowledging that I have no evidence that she meant to hurt me. I can do this by responding compassionately to myself without assigning judgment or blame to her or to me: “Ouch, this did not feel good. I’m sad to be left out of the sleepover. We usually have sleepovers as a big group, so it makes sense that I feel sad to be left out of this one.”
I often speak with clients about noticing emotions as waves, they are stronger at some points, less tumultuous at other points. We can learn to ride these waves of emotion by noticing any judgment or meaning we’ve attached to particular emotions. For example, if I tell myself that I’m feeling anxious because I don’t have “enough” faith or I’m not praying “enough,” instead of noticing and allowing my fear, I’m actually heaping shame upon myself, lying to myself about who God is, and still feeling anxious.
It can feel really scary to allow ourselves to feel difficult things. That may seem like a simplistic or obvious statement. But when we’ve denied our feelings for so long by heaping judgment and shame and a whole bunch of “shoulds” on top, feeling our original feeling may seem super scary if we’re used to employing defenses against feeling difficult feelings. We may find that when we sift through the shame, we are able to tolerate the original distressing feeling. There are a variety of ways to practice this tolerance or allowance. I generally start with grounding in the present moment by noticing my five senses or feeling my feet making contact with the ground.
Letting ourselves feel our difficult emotions doesn’t make them go away. It doesn’t necessarily make them “easier” to feel. It does tell our brains that it’s not dangerous or shameful to feel. It’s like exercising a muscle we haven’t worked out in a while – it might be painful or feel awkward in the beginning, but overtime, the muscle strengthens and can lift heavier weight.
One of the many reasons I love therapy is that you do not have to walk through these difficult experiences or emotions alone! Having another bear witness to your pain, sit with you through it, remind you that they’re right here, can be a profoundly healing experience. I’ve experienced it for myself in my own personal counseling. And when we think of our loving, caring, kind Heavenly Father, isn’t that what He does for us?
