Untangle Your Emotions: Naming What You Feel and Knowing What to Do About It

We think God is waiting for us to pull ourselves together, but actually He is waiting for us to come to Him and fall apart.

When we deny our pain, losses, and feelings year after year, we become less and less human. We transform slowly into empty shells with smiley faces painted on them.”[3]

Feelings aren’t meant to be fixed. Feelings are meant to be felt.

I’ve learned the secret in life: Never do anything alone. The scarier something is

Life is complex. It is messy. It is marked by confusion and curiosity and pain. On way too many occasions

You have heard it before that the boost you get from exercise in your serotonin is similar to that of medicine. Whenever you feel like you are getting tangled up emotionally

The ones who love Jesus are zealots. The ones who love Jesus really love Jesus. They throw off their sin and struggles faster than anyone I have seen so they can follow Jesus with reckless abandon. They want God. And it isn’t even complicated for them. They just want more of Him.

And before I fully understood what was happening

I asked everyone in attendance to set down the burden they’d been carrying

once we notice what we feel

After you go through the paces of noticing

In a Psychology Today interview

What is the biggest challenge you are facing right now

Emotional granularity is the ability to describe your emotional state using nuanced words and phrases instead of generic ones. Here’s what’s fascinating about emotional granularity: Feelings experts have shown that there is a direct proportional connection between a person’s emotional granularity and their mental health

I think of how long I misunderstood all the “Fear not” language throughout the Bible. I’ve heard a hundred sermons telling us how much God does not want us to fear

But imagine if we let our anger draw us to God instead of to sin

Emotional maturity is the ability to feel what we feel without judgment and without being controlled by our emotions. Emotional wholeness begins by noticing and naming what we feel and then deciding what to do with it

Psychology confirms that emotions are intricately connected to our motivational system

Step one of connection through feelings? It’s to notice how we feel. I asked myself a simple question: How am I feeling?

Emotions are best healed in community. They are best healed there because they were given to us to connect us to others. Crying alone is cathartic; crying together heals us.

Emotions always enter in a three-phase approach: Inciting event: You encounter an event as trivial as picking up your dry cleaning or as devastating as receiving a cancer diagnosis. Prediction: Your mind (usually subconsciously) makes a prediction as to whether this is a positive or negative event. Effect: Your body and mind react

I know you think ignoring these emotions is not costing you anything. But it is. According to a study by the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Rochester