We Will Tell You How To Feel (or how I discovered my emotions after an abusive church experience)

For so long, I heard preached that we must control our emotions, feelings because they deceive us as Christians. So, I have been for years controlled, cold, because I thought that was what a good Christian did. Gradually as my wounds have healed, my feelings, my ability to express emotions has begun to thaw, melting underneath grace. I love reading your encouraging posts, Blessings!

This was a great post, Elizabeth. There was so much I wanted to say, but I kind of got stuck at the point where you revealed that you’d never heard of the Beatles.

I think for the first time, I really get how closed off fromthe rest of the world you were. And how were you supposed to spread the love of Christ to those on the outside? And what you must have thought of thoe of us who went to those liberal, apostate churches? Wow!

And to think, this all popped into my head because you said you’d never heard ofthe Beatles.

As usual, your post is well-written, poignant, and thought-provoking. Still, I keep thinking, “What grown adult has never heard of the Beatles?”

I should clarify that I’d heard OF the Beatles perhaps like one hears OF the President or some other famous person. And I’d heard snatches of their songs–like while at a store or something–but if I heard a part of “Love Me Do” i wouldn’t have known that was a Beatles’ song. I didn’t know what they looked like or what year they were popular. I didn’t know their albums or the names of the singers. I was not allowed to listen to secular music and didn’t have TV or have any access to pop culture. So, yeah. For all intents and purposes, discovering who the Beatles were was astounding. And being able to listen to one of their songs from start to finish was pretty incredible.

A few years ago I was pregnant with my 3rd son. I was, for the first time in my adult life, just begining to really study the Bible and was learning all sorts of fascinating things. I felt like I was actually growing spiritually (something I’d heard of, but didn’t really understand). When I became pregnant I was terrified that my spiritual growth would come to a halt because all the hormones would make me too emotional and emotions are baaaaad and not to be trusted, right? It was such an “aha moment” for me when I realized the TRUTH. God created emotions. He CREATED them! And that meant they were to be used for good. And He created hormones and He would use them all for good and continued growth in me. I still struggle with not feeling like a total spiritual failure when I get too emotional about something. But I try to remember that not only is He not limited by how I feel, but that He wants to use how I feel to accomplish good.

I remember, after leaving an abusive church, this was many years ago, having nightmares that the Lord had come back and I was screaming, No, No, Lord, I haven’t gone back to “the church of….” yet!! A little post-traumatic stress.

I hate the “How does that make you feel?” question for different reasons.
As a very intuitive and “feeling” person, when someone asks me that, I want to say, “How does that make me feel?? HOW DOES THAT MAKE ME FEEL? It makes me IRATE..that’s how it makes me feel!!” OR “Isn’t it obvious? I’m bawling and my voice is breaking. I’m feeling sad, genius.”
On a broader scope, I think feeling is an integral part of being human. Each is an individual, each feels, and those feelings are valid.

oh.. my. you have made me cry. bless you and your beautiful journey – you are so brave.

This post touched very close to home (and heart) for me. I didn’t grow up in an abusive church, and I was a strong feeler, until I ended up in a marriage-turned-abusive. At some point, I realized I was frozen and terrified of feeling, and the thing that broke through that ice was a mentor friend who started crying for me. I couldn’t feel hardly anything for myself, but I still had the ability to feel some empathy. And when I started empathizing with what she was feeling, I began to thaw and realize that what I was going through really needed to be cried about.

I’m so glad to be crying again (it always confuses me when people apologize for making me cry. I’m like, “no, no, it’s wonderful that when you make me feel like crying, I can cry now!!!!” I’m so glad for you, EE, that you are feeling, even though it’s terrifying and sometimes debilitating. There’s so much real stuff to cry about, and my husband’s favorite verse now is “Jesus wept”, followed by the one in Hebrews where it talks about Jesus’ tears and weeping, in his prayers, being heard by the Father, even though, clearly, His tears didn’t stop the pain he was getting ready to suffer.

If we lost our ability to feel physical pain, we’d be in a very, very bad way. Pain is an important part of surviving and thriving in this world. It’s from God. Emotions are the same way. They aren’t untrustworthy products of the fall, any more than any other part of our bodies. They are gifts, guard rails, barometers, etc., that help us survive and thrive in a world that is both full of wonderful things and many terrors, too. To keep you scared of the terrors (as some abusive churches do) and yet strip you of the natural, God-given response to feel the reality of terror (or any other feelings) is really a dirty trick.

I love Jeremiah, Elijah, Nehemiah and maybe especially Habakkuk for how they feel so much, so honestly and how God doesn’t go do the “churchy” thing of telling them what not to feel, but meets them each, in different ways…

A point of clarity–my husband, whose favorite verse is Jesus wept, is not the same as the abusive husband.

Bernard: I have often felt numb myself. It is a terrible place to be. If it persists, might I recommend contacting a doctor? That’s what I did. I also went to therapy. And it helped tremendously. Thank you for sharing this with us. This is a safe place and I will always keep it that way so my readers feel free to share their hearts. Thanks for chiming in.

Oh so many parallels to living in a physically and emotionally abusive home.

I found my way over here from Sarah Markley’s blog and I just had to leave a note. Thanks for this post because all along I thought I was alone and a freak for thinking that I have broken emotions.

I’ve repressed emotions too, to the point where I can’t always identify them anymore. I’m all too familiar with the game of leaping back and forth between feeling and the safety of numbness because the only way I can make sure I don’t drown in all the confusion is to cut it off altogether. It wasn’t until recently that a friend who’s been helping me through some stuff began asking me repeatedly, “How do you feel about that?” I’d give a shrug and hope she’d let me off easy. I really had no idea and it was so frustrating.

I’ve been looking hard for my lost emotions since then, but I’m still a little scared that I might get lost in it all if I let myself go.

We started feeling again after leaving our abusive church. Then it got messy: hubby yelling at coworkers, me yelling at the kids and crying at job interviews. We are still learning to feel appropriately. Once the feelings start they just seem to gush!

This is really lovely and (ironically?) does convey rejoicing. But rejoicing by choice is much healthier than rejoicing out of fear and obligation!

And I love some TV shows, but just having the thing on for background noise makes me crazy!

PS – I tried to close that open “bold” tag, we’ll see if it works!

(But that time it did!)

Elizabeth, I shared this article on FB with my friends as well as e-mailing it around to the friends not on FB…many wrote back to say that this article was so them! Coming out of an abusive spiritual experience is so painful and wonderful at the same time…I downloaded “Love Me” and listened to it all day at work and SMILED!