Recently, I was at my parents’ house, and they decided to put on old home videos of my sisters and I when we were small children. Most of their videos seem to be of us opening our presents each Christmas. These videos all seem to be pretty much the same, with the exception of us growing taller and older each year. One thing seemed consistent throughout all the videos, whether we were five years old or ten – my sisters and I would shriek—ear-piercingly shriek—when we opened our gifts.
As we watched these videos, I found myself with a newfound respect for my parents and their eardrums.
I’ve been thinking about these videos the past couple of days, and as I’ve reflected on our screams of excitement, as well as my initial confusion as to why my parents felt the need to record the same responses year after year, I realized something: those shrieks of joy, of pure excitement, were times when my sisters and I experienced and expressed unbridled emotion. There was an innocence to our excitement and joy – no one was telling us to “calm down” or that we were too loud, and (while we feared that a sister may try to take our new toy without asking first) there was no fear that our new toys would be taken from us, replacing our joy with grief.
Thinking back to five-year-old Julie jumping up and down, screaming with delight over her new PJ Sparkles doll makes me smile and nostalgic at the same time. When I receive a gift, good news, a compliment, or something that makes me feel happy now, I find my happiness now is not as simple and pure as it was when I was a child. Instead, it’s often interspersed with other emotions: fear that whatever good I have may be lost or shame that I may be fooling whoever just paid me a compliment. This makes sense – I have three more decades of life under my belt than five-year-old Julie. I’ve experienced more pain and loss than my five-year-old self ever did. Not to mention, my brain has developed into a fully functioning human brain that has incorporated all of these experiences and the messages I learned about these various emotional experiences into file folders in my head that I draw from in order to respond.
In previous blog posts (here and here), I’ve written about how all human beings have emotions. Our emotions are part of how we reflect the image of God our Creator. They also provide us with information regarding how to respond to circumstances in order to survive and thrive. Sometimes these responses are in line with our most important values, but sometimes, they are designed to bring us short-term relief, which may help us adapt and survive initially, but can lead us to sacrificing an abundant life in the long-run.
One way we may respond to emotions is to demonize them. Instead of recognizing them as part of our unique human design and make-up, we view them as a weakness, something we must overcome. Maybe as kids we were told to “stop crying” or to not be so “sensitive.” As a result, we internalized that crying and feeling were “bad” and things that needed to be reined in and controlled. I’ve worked with clients who grew up in households where a parent or caregiver suffered from a mental illness whose emotions often took center stage, or who had parents or caregivers who relied on them as children to meet their emotional needs. As a result, from a young age, these clients internalized a sense of responsibility for “fixing” their parents, leading to a belief that any negative emotion could be and must be eradicated. In Christian circles, it’s common to quote Scripture (“Do not be anxious about anything,” for example) or Christian platitudes (“Just trust God!” or reassuring someone who’s suffered grief that their loved one is “with Jesus now”) to eradicate negative emotions.
Another way we may respond to emotions is to ignore or avoid emotions altogether. If we brush aside that compliment someone paid us, then we don’t have to deal with the shame or fear of being found to be a fraud. If we distract ourselves from our pain with Netflix, we may be passing time and numbing ourselves from what we are feeling, but ultimately, our feelings are still there. Instead, we’re wasting time doing things that temporarily take our minds off the pain, but are not filling us up. Our difficult feelings remain, festering and growing until they can no longer be ignored. Maybe this results in relational conflict or difficulty concentrating or checking out from those around us.
Do these strategies actually work? They may offer some temporary relief in the short-term, but I’ve never seen them completely get rid of negative emotions in the long-term. Short-term relief is temporary – especially if we’re suffering from difficult emotions (grief, fear, shame), these feelings usually have a way of rearing their ugly heads in unexpected moments. In the beginning, demonizing and ignoring our emotions may take minimal energy. But as we continue to live our lives, we will have a variety of experiences that will cause these feelings to come up. As a result, the amount of energy it takes to demonize or avoid will increase. When we view emotions as “bad,” this means we cannot allow for appreciating positive emotions. Instead of eradicating emotions, I’ve seen demonizing and ignoring emotions usher in a load of self-judgment, especially when the negative emotions just won’t go away despite our best efforts. We judge ourselves for being weak for having difficult emotions, for being inadequate for not being able to make ourselves or others “feel better.”
Ultimately, we are fooling ourselves, believing lies like these: that life does not involve pain; that we are the only ones who experience pain; that pain can be completely eradicated and that it’s up to us to eradicate it and that there is something wrong with us if we can’t eradicate it.
So, how can we respond to our emotions in adaptive, life-giving ways? First, we can mindfully notice what we are feeling in the present moment. We can notice any thoughts or judgments that may come along with these feelings, and notice those as what they are: thoughts and judgments. We can recognize our emotions as part of what makes us human, reminding ourselves that they are part of our human experience and that, as a result, don’t merit judgment. After all, Jesus tells us flat out in John 16:33 that we’ll have trouble in this world. Pain is an unfortunate fact of life that we all experience. In the same verse, Jesus tells us to take heart because He has overcome the world. Both pain and comfort can co-exist. We don’t have to demonize or ignore our pain to find comfort. In fact, how can we truly find comfort without acknowledging our pain? Instead, we can show ourselves kindness. This can be as simple as speaking kindly to ourselves, saying something like, “This is really hard right now,” or placing a hand on the place in our bodies where we feel our painful emotion the most, showing that part of ourselves a gesture of comfort. It can look like reconnecting with our breath, engaging in an activity that brings us joy, or sharing our feelings with a trusted friend.
As you’ve heard me say before, our brains are problem-solving machines and one of the “problems” our brains try to solve is that of our difficult emotions. Demonizing and avoiding are two such strategies. While they may seem to alleviate our pain in the short run, they often end up costing us more than they really help. By acknowledging our pain, reminding ourselves that all humans experience pain throughout their lives, and showing ourselves kindness, we can conserve our energy by staying in the present moment and pursuing the things that matter most to us. We can live more abundant lives.
