I’ve been doing a lot of work lately. Hard work. And I don’t mean manual labor. I mean the difficult work of sitting with your feelings, examining them, and processing them. In my last therapy session, I had such a breakthrough moment that my therapist gently encouraged me to write about it in the hopes it might help others. So let me try to break down some of the key concepts that have been impactful for me and show you how I connected the dots.
Self-Talk
I read a book–correction, started reading a book–that explored the idea of the conversations we have in our heads all the time. So I began to pay attention to the things I was telling myself, to the conversation in my head. For example, I realized that when I had bouts of anxiety, and I felt breathless, I would say to myself, both in my head and aloud, “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” In fact, these episodes were something I’d discussed with my doctor, who suggested a medication to address this. It didn’t really help. When I had these moments, and I told myself “I can’t breathe,” it just made me feel more panicked. But obviously, I was breathing. I was not really struggling for air at all. It was just a feeling. I started telling myself, “You CAN breathe. You obviously are breathing. You are ok.” Almost immediately I began to notice that I had fewer of those episodes of feeling breathless, and when I did, they were shorter. They did not take control of me. They did not start my mind down a path of more worry and anxiety. I thought, “Wow! Could this really be so simple? Is this all I had to do?”
I know that 2 Corinthians 5:10 admonishes us to “take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ,” but I had always struggled with knowing exactly how to do that. And then I realized that what I was doing in those moments when I was short of breath was telling myself the truth. I was combatting the feelings, which can often be deceptive, with true statements.
Continuing on with the idea of self-talk, it occurred to me recently that I could apply the same strategy to how I speak about my feelings. Instead of saying, “I am sad,” or “I am worried,” I need to change it to “I feel sad,” “I feel worried.” Sad or worried is not who I am. They are words to describe how I’m feeling at the moment. This is again consistent with what God tells us. He says that “the heart is deceitful…who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) Feelings that our heart produces are, in many ways, beyond our control. It’s what we do with those feelings that matters. If those feelings turn into thoughts that are unhelpful and untrue, it leads to further stress, strife, and possibly sin. That’s why Paul says in Ephesians 4:26, “In your anger do not sin.” The feeling of anger is not the problem. It’s what we do with anger that’s important.
Naming Emotions
That leads me to the idea of specifically naming out emotions. I am not good at that, even though I’m a gal who likes words! I often struggle to find words to describe how I feel beyond sad, angry, worried, or good. But actually, as I’ve been learning, science proves that having “emotional granularity” leads to better mental health. Emotional granularity is the ability to narrow down our emotions and name them with specificity. Think about it in terms of colors. If you tell me that something is “red,” I don’t know exactly what you mean. I can get in the ballpark, but I don’t know if you mean burgundy, or cherry red, or candy apple red. The same is true with naming emotions. There are different shades, or nuances, of our feelings. Maybe when you say you feel sad, you mean you feel discouraged or broken. Maybe when you say you feel afraid, you mean you feel inadequate or inferior. See the difference?
Why does this matter? Similar to saying “I feel sad,” as opposed to “I am sad,” naming our feelings specifically helps us to take control over them. Studies show you can regulate your emotions better when you name them, thus you can process them and not allow them to take over your heart. And this is a skill that can be learned! It’s not rocket science. We can all practice being more emotionally granular. There are excellent free resources online, including a color wheel with varying degrees of emotions and their names.
Don’t Rush to Be a Fixer
When someone tells you they are sad, what is your first response? If you’re like me, you immediately rush to point out why they shouldn’t be sad. Let’s say your best friend didn’t get a job she really wanted, and she’s feeling disappointed and discouraged. You want her to feel better. You love her, and you don’t want her to feel bad. So you say things like, “I’m sure this is going to lead to something better for you,” or “Those people were crazy not to hire you,” or “Let’s look at your resume and see what we can tweak.” And those things might all be true and good. But at that moment, you need to validate how your friend feels by naming those feelings and simply feeling them for a while. You could say something like, “I feel so disappointed for you. I feel sad this happened.” Again, scientists who have studied this in relation to our brains and mental health have discovered that we actually cause more stress when we jump right to solutions and try to bypass feeling the feelings.
This especially applies to our own emotions. Instead of trying to avoid our negative emotions, we need to identify and name them and feel them. Most of the time we try to stuff them inside, or we try to distract ourselves with something else that we think will make us feel better. And yet, that only makes things worse in the long run. God gives us our feelings for a reason. He never says our feelings themselves are bad. Feelings help us connect to others and to Him.
We know that God has emotions, and we see that demonstrated in the flesh in Christ. In fact, the shortest verse in the Bible tells us that Jesus wept. He wept over the death of his friend Lazarus even though He knew that He was going to bring him back to life that very day. Isn’t that fascinating? He knew how the story was going to end and yet He still cried. This should be an amazing comfort to us. Though the Bible doesn’t expand upon this, I think based on the character of God we can conclude that Jesus was grieved because Mary and Martha were grieved. He recognized they did not yet know what was about to happen and how painful their loss was. He allowed them to mourn and to feel deeply before He miraculously intervened and raised Lazarus. In fact, the whole reason He delayed in coming to their rescue was so that there would be no doubt that Lazarus was dead; God would get all the glory and people would see this miracle and believe that Jesus was the Son of God. Do you see the part that feelings had to play in this story? God wants to use our emotions like magnets that draw us to Him. If we cover them up and avoid them, we miss out on a deeper relationship with Him. We miss out on things He wants to teach us. Then we miss out on ways we can relate to and empathize with the people in our lives.
Now, if you’re still reading this, you may be thinking, “That was your big breakthrough?” And perhaps this is not new information to you. Some of it was not entirely new to me, but for the first time, I put all those ideas together and they clicked. They made sense. I could see a cohesive strategy for dealing with my mental health that was both rooted in science and in my faith. Maybe something I said will click for you too.
Two books and an article that were helpful with these concepts:
The Untethered Soul; The Journey Beyond Yourself, by Michael A. Singer
Untangle Your Emotions; Naming What You Feel and Knowing What To Do About It, by Jennie Allen
Harnessing the Power of Emotional Granularity; Specifically Labeling Your Difficult Emotions, which you can access here. This article contains a version of the emotional color wheel that is super helpful.