On a radio broadcast, a young woman said she used to have no idea what she was feeling. She said many Millennials and other young people have lost touch with their feelings. One day when this woman’s husband asked her about her best and worst feeling moment of her day, the wife couldn’t answer. This pushed her on a journey to understand her feelings, even if she had to coax them out. She also had to accept her difficult feelings. She said the process was very hard, and she could not do this alone.
I was struck with how familiar her words were to the “younger me.” In my post, “Embracing Grief,” I talked about my own journey of healing and learning to feel my feelings after spending decades denying any sorrow or anger. In my case, I grew up in a home where my father (falsely) said God hates our sorrow and anger, and we must never feel either emotion. So I tried to hide my sorrow and anger until I actually believed I no longer felt these emotions. What I did “feel” was a raging compulsion to over eat sugar. The only reason I didn’t kill myself with the sugar was because I liked to exercise and liked healthy foods. But eating all that sugar (on top of meals), I did gain fifty pounds at my highest weight.
So I can relate to younger women who are not in tune with their feelings. I want to challenge my readers to stop, throughout the day and consider what they are feeling and then write down that emotion. This sounds like a contradiction. If I don’t know what I’m feeling, how can I write it down? I have an idea (which my counselor taught me) that can help you. Sit quietly with a journal or notebook in hand. Truly rest and ask yourself to feel anything. If you are like me, this may be hard for another reason. I had never given myself permission to sit still and think about my own needs or feelings. I was taught introspection was selfish and a sinful waste of time that I should have spent working. Having permission to do this, and even being commanded to do this helped. If this was a “job,” then it could not be selfish or sinful. I had to do my “job,” so I quietly reflected.
An emotion came, and it terrified me, because it was fierce anger. I stopped doing the “feeling journaling,” the rest of that week until my counselor reassured me that my anger was neither selfish nor sinful, nor was it going to overwhelm me (make me become a monster or so I feared). Instead he reminded me I had suppressed my anger for so long, it felt too strong. So I resumed the feeling journaling.
I did not do this alone. I had a counselor to guide me, plus the guidance of a great book, Always Daddy’s Girl, (by H. Norman Wright), because I knew my issues related to my angry father. For gals who are not sure why they suppress their feelings, this could become confusing.
So I want to encourage gals to look at your lives. Do you have any compulsions, where you do things you hate to do? My compulsion was over-eating sugar. Perhaps yours is shopping too much, surfing the internet too much (binge watching), eating too much of some other food. There are many compulsions, but if you find you are doing things you want to stop doing, but you seem compelled to do them anyway, you may also have suppressed emotions behind these compulsions. And the emotions are simply the first symptom. In my case, I had many false beliefs to over come. Also, I never admitted to how bad my father-daughter relationship was. Therefore I had not felt anger about it, nor grieved it. The grief was the hardest emotion for me to process, because it was so deep.
If you still feel you cannot coax any emotion, just by sitting still, then think about your day today and yesterday. Think of any interactions you had with other people. Did you feel anything as you interacted with them? Also challenge your thoughts. Did you think the person or people were fair and kind, or were they unfair and unkind? Sometimes we can figure out what we are thinking, and from there begin to discern a feeling behind it. If the people you interacted with were unfair or unkind (or both), do you feel any anger about this injustice? Do you feel any sadness for the damaged relationship (if this person is close to you and not an acquaintance or stranger)? When we play detective, we begin to challenge our thoughts and emotions to reveal themselves.
But be aware that if we have a negative view of admitting to feelings or even believe certain feelings are wrong, then those feelings will be harder for us to admit to feeling. So also investigate your thoughts and beliefs. These can help us detect feelings attached to our thoughts or beliefs. There can even be wrong beliefs, like mine–that it was sinful for me to feel sorrow or anger. These ideas are silly, since Jesus clearly felt both—“Jesus wept,” John 11:35. Jesus was indignant (Mark 10:14) when the apostles tried to keep children from coming to him. Jesus felt righteous anger when thieves were over charging people at the Temple in Matthew chapter 21.
I am keeping this post short, so you can explore these ideas. I plan to expand the idea about compulsions, and our false ideas (lies we believe) in another post. I pray I have challenged you to look at your emotions, if you have trouble feeling them, or if you know another gal who struggles in this way. We will not solve all our problems in one week, but we can look at areas where we struggle and begin to work on them, even when they are painful. I promise the hard work of dealing with broken relationships, false beliefs and suppressed feelings is worth the work. The healing process for my father-daughter relationship took over a year, but I grew closer to my dad, and God healed me from my sugar compulsion. I never struggled with it again.
God has great plans for your life too. He loves you dearly, and we love you too! Thanks for joining us in this post.