How to Engage Your Emotions as a Christian Woman?

I am reading a book right now called, "Untangling Your Emotions"

I found this book intriguing because a lot of times in the church, emotions are either over-emphasized or under-emphasized. And I have found myself wondering, in an emotionally driven world, where is the middle ground for Christian’s? How should we engage with our emotions?

The writers of this offer wisdom throughout their book. In this post, I will be sharing a few of my favorite pieces of wisdom:

To begin, the writers state, “God doesn’t call us to avoid or squash our emotions (as Christians often suppose). Neither does he call us to embrace them unconditionally (as our culture often urges). Instead, He calls us to engage them by bringing our emotions to Him and to His people.

Our emotions invite us to see the world as God sees it—both broken and beautiful—rejoicing where he is redeeming it and yearning for the full redemption that is yet to come. Only in the safety of His strength and patience can we face our visceral reactions, name them honestly, and talk about them with God and others (Alasdair, 2019).

Engaging our emotions involves walking a deliberate, middle road between the twin pitfalls of the hyper-emotionalism that fawns over our feelings and sets them up as dictators and the stoicism that squashes negative emotions from the outset. The Bible’s model of engaging emotions means something very simple: when an emotion comes on your radar, you look at it, see what you find, and then (not before!) decide how to respond. The beauty of engaging is that it doesn’t judge your emotions ahead of time as either good or bad. When you engage something, you move closer and explore it, preparing yourself to deal with whatever you uncover.”

The writer lists four steps to help with engaging that I pray you may find helpful:

1. Identify

To engage something, you need to become aware of its existence. Although it sounds simple, this is the hardest step for some,

For some of us, being asked, “Why are you so upset?” or “How do you feel about that?” is like being blind and having someone ask you what color the sky is today. If this is you, turn to someone you trust and ask, “What emotions do you see in me most often?”

We see the Psalmist do this in Psalm 42:11, He says, “Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you in turmoil within me?”

Putting a name to an emotion does not mean always having a label. Sometimes identifying can look like this:

“I’m feeling off” or “something’s up” or “I am feeling something I can’t explain and I don’t know why.”

The point is to identify something is occurring in side of you, instead of numbing it out or running from it. You can only engage once you discover it is there.

2. Examine

Once you have identified, the next step is to examine it and see what you can learn. Your emotions are always telling you something about what you currently care about, love, or value. They are always pressing you toward some kind of action. The process of examining emotions involves asking questions like:

· “Why am I feeling this?”

· “What am I reacting to?”

· “Why is this hitting me so hard?”

· “Why isn’t this affecting me the way it usually does?”

· “and How is this emotion making me want to behave?”

The list of possible reasons for feeling angry or afraid or joyful in a situation is endless. In this step, as you examine yourself, you aren’t interested yet in whether what you’re seeing is good or bad; you’re just trying to understand what is going on. Whether what you see is a problem or not, you want to become as aware as possible of what you are caring about, how you are relating, and what you are doing in response.

3. Evaluate: Once you identify that something is happening, and examined what is going on, the next step is to figure out which aspects of what you are feeling are good and godly and which ones are destructive or selfish. This is super difficult. Rarely, you will find only good emotions or only bad. Usually the good and bad are mixed together. The bottom line then in evaluating emotions is this: it’s okay to be upset about what upsets God, and glad about what makes him happy. But when you find yourself ignoring what pleases him and acting in ways that anger him, you need to evaluate your emotions as revealing something wrong in your heart.

4. Act: When you know what you are feeling, have put a name to it in the best way you can, have decided which aspects of the feelings are good and bad, you are finally ready to act.

Options for actions are endless and valid responses to emotions fall in two categories:

- On one hand, we want to embrace and nurture the loves of our heart and the behaviors that are good. On the other hand, we want to resist and even starve loves and actions that are bad. (They write more about this in their book!)

This does not mean focusing solely on changing the emotions themselves. Changing our feelings is not our biggest goal. Instead, the goal is to let the evaluation of our emotions drive us to act in ways that will have an impact on the deep loves and treasures of our hearts

The last step, isnt really a last step, but an all-encompassing step. As you travel through each of these steps, it is incredibly important to remember to engage God. Engaging emotions without engaging the One who created them can lead to disaster.

Psalm 62:8 is a beautiful picture of engaging God:

“ Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.”

If you trust God, David says, “Pour out your heart to him.”

If you are like me, you may be wondering:

“But what does it actually look like to pour out our emotions to God?”

The writer paints the picture beautifully:

“Let me give you an example from a passage that has been especially powerful for me.

Look at Psalm 22:1. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? Here is a man in deep distress. He is in trouble and groaning. Worse, he is also alone and abandoned. Stop for a moment and consider the nature and intensity of emotions he’d have to be experiencing to write something like that. Panicky fear. Deeply confusing disappointment. A shocking sense of betrayal. Tangible grief.

Now look at what this man does with these painful emotional experiences: he takes them to God. He is apparently free to engage God—with loud cries no less—even about being abandoned by God. He calls this God, from whom he feels so distant, “My God,” and speaks directly to him, not about him in the abstract. “Why have you forsaken… Why are you so far?”

Of course we know from other passages that God will never leave or forsake his people— the psalmist’s feelings in this moment are not the whole story. The psalmist knows that, too, because the psalm ends with an affirmation of God’s faithfulness. Yet this psalm and many like it come to us without a swarm of footnotes about how God hasn’t really abandoned us. And, importantly, this psalm doesn’t direct this person (or us) to ignore his feelings because they don’t reflect the truth about God. Instead, we are shown a path that forges endlessly toward God, even through the center of emotional storms.

God hears and cares

Like the psalmist, you can come to God with a raw heart and lay your burdens before him (Matt 11:28–30). He will receive you in your pain and walk with you. When your emotions feel overwhelming, turn toward God and put those feelings into words. You will be heard by the God who hears. And when you don’t have words, read Psalm 22 and pray to God for help. Know that when you do, you will find your Father in heaven feels great joy for the opportunity to embrace a child He loves.”