Emotional Healing & "Feeling Your Feelings"
When I was hospitalized for my bipolar disorder in 2007, one of the therapists said to me, “Feel your feelings.” For years, I had no idea what he meant by that. It seemed like just a New Age proverb. Still, it stuck with me. It wasn’t until the past few years that I realized just how much my childhood experiences had cut me off from my deepest emotions.
In his book The Deeply Formed Life, Pastor Rich Villodas talks about how “scripts” – childhood experiences that often unconsciously shape who we become as adults. He describes how the conflict between his mother and father led him to internalize the message, “I have to hold everything together.” “This script has marked my life,” he writes:
It has informed my decisions at home, my leadership at church, and my self-understanding. I have often lived with a sense of being overly responsible, afraid of failure, and excessively anxious in conflict, with the persistent feeling that I had to be a stable, unanxious person. No wonder I became a pastor. I have often given the impression that everything was going fine and have struggled to maintain limits.
When I read this, I felt could have been talking about me. The only difference is that, due to my mental health condition, I am not as able to hold it together as he may have been. I can hold things together for a time, but, if I have unacknowledged emotions lurking deep below the surface, eventually they can lead to mental breakdown. I have learned that if I don’t feel my feelings, I may end up distanced from reality itself.
As a child, I became convinced that emotions were dangerous things and it was better not to have them. If I expressed vulnerability, that made me a target for bullies at school. If I expressed anger, that meant I was like my mom, whose fights with my dad scared me when her own bipolar went out of control. I wanted to be like my dad when I grew up – focused on helping other people, seemingly always put together. It wasn’t until I read his journals after his death that I understood the emotional pain he had been hiding from the world.
Because I didn’t see healthy ways of expressing anger or resolving conflict when I was growing up, I thought the best way to handle conflict was to avoid it, like my dad largely did. But this strategy didn’t work for me as well as for him. I have learned that my anger will eventually come out, either through mental breakdown or unhealthy conflict.
One of the first steps toward emotional healing, after my hospitalization in 2007, was meeting Bil Mooney-McCoy, one of the program directors at TechMission at the time. In my regular talks with him, he talked about your emotions as being like a stack of trays in a cafeteria. When I would check in with him, he would always ask me, “What’s on your top plate?” But then he would ask me to look deeper.
Oftentimes, below a surface level of vague discomfort, I might have a lingering resentment, but, below that, an even deeper sadness or shame. This shame may relate to a deep lie that I believe about myself, such as, “I need to win other people’s approval to be worthy of love.” On the surface, I could agree with a statement like, “I am fully accepted in Christ and His love is all I need.” But my life experiences make it hard for me to believe that on a heart level.
Pete and Geri Scazzero, in their Emotionally Healthy Relationships course, offer a tool that can help explore your feelings beyond what’s on your “top plate.” They call it Explore the Iceberg. It simply involves asking four questions:
1) What are you mad about?
2) What are you sad about?
3) What are you anxious about?
4) What are you glad about?
Reflecting on questions like these can help bring to light emotions we didn’t know we had.
But even as I’ve become more aware of my emotions, that hasn’t necessarily meant my behavior has changed as much as I would like. Rich Villodas, who, like me, is driven to get others’ approval, talks about some additional questions that can help change the scripts we live by:
I…was being triggered easily by criticisms and I carried and nagging sense of uneasiness about difficult conversations [I needed to have]. [So] I resolved that if I found myself negatively or disproportionately reacting to someone or something, I would take a few minutes…to process that moment through five questions:
1) What happened?
2) What am I feeling?
3) What is the story I am telling myself?
4) What does the gospel say?
5) What counter-instinctual action is needed?
He then goes on to tell the story of how a Christian leader asked him to make some changes to a prayer resource he had shared. She hadn’t criticized it, but, because she had asked for changes, his desire to be seen as perfect was offended. But, instead of firing back a frustrated email, he stopped and asked the questions:
1) What happened? A well-known leader offered constructive feedback.
2) What am I feeling? Shame.
3) What is the story I am telling myself? If I don’t do things right the first time, I’m defective.
4) What does the gospel say? My failures and mistakes don’t define me; God does.
5) What counter-instinctual action is needed? Share this story with [my wife] (which was counter- instinctual because I tend to keep moments like this to myself).
[After a month or so], I noticed my triggers starting to diminish. I found myself less bothered by criticism and feedback. I was able to see many of the reactions for what they were: moments for healing brought forth by the gospel. Do I still get triggered? Absolutely. Do I still need healing from destructive scripts? Indeed. But something had shifted in my soul.
I can’t say I’ve gotten as far as Pastor Villodas in my own emotional healing, but I find his example both encouraging and helpful practically. It’s one thing to feel your feelings, it’s another to process them in a healthy way. At first, as I started to feel my feelings more, I felt at times like they were overwhelming me – as if this was a step backward. Now I feel I have some tools not simply to feel them, but to understand them.