Why You Must Trust Your Emotions

“Emotions are the language of the soul.  They are the cry that gives the heart a voice.”  Dan Allender, Tremper Longman

“I’ve never met an irrational emotion. Once you know the whole story, they always make sense.” Sue Johnson

“Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people would mostly have us believe; most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never trod.”  Rilke

How does that make you feel? Its oh so comically true. We as counselors ask that question a lot.  You may roll your eyes now.  Before you totally write us off, consider this: How often are you ever really asked how you’re doing?  I mean in a way that allows you to answer with more than the role of the tongue I’m-good-how-are-you?  When is the last time someone sat down and waited for your heart to show up?

Even though its probably a rare experience for most of us, everyone loves to be listened to and pursued. Why is that? What’s so life giving about being asked how are you doing?

Its because to care about a person is to care what they feel.

Did you know emotions are quite literally the language of your heart?  Truly.  Your heart is trying to talk to you.  Its constantly experiencing the life you live and trying to get in on the conversation with you.  And when it speaks, it speaks in emotions – in passions and feelings and desire.  To care about your heart then is to care what it feels.

Emotions get a pretty bad rap in most circles.  In our culture, an emotional man is a weak one and an emotional woman is at best unstable but maybe just crazy.  Most self help (and Christian) writing exists to tell you how to tame your emotions.

And yet on the other hand, no one wants to relate to Spock types who don’t have emotions.  Being around these people feels awfully boring.  Like they’re kinda dead. We usually run out of things to talk about real quick with these people.  And work to find someone else in the party to talk to.

Sure we don’t really like it either when someone is emotionally out of control.  Yes, people do over react to things (Read about one experience I had here).  A lot of damage is done when people simply live out of their emotions.  If we only follow our every emotional whim, we can’t be mature people.

But on the other hand, the only way to understand the events of our lives is by tuning into our emotions. Stuff happens to us. But its how we feel about it that tells us what those events meant to us.

Last summer I took my son to a rodeo parade.  Its just the sort of thing a boy dreams about.  Big excavating equipment, fire engines and marching bands, and a bazillion horses.  All of this intermixed with people throwing candy right in your lap.  Heaven on earth.  Brandt sat transfixed for all of it.  Until the clowns.  How had I forgotten about the clowns?

Have you ever noticed just how creepy clowns are?  That white face with those big lips, masking some old guy who likes his job a little too much.  Its like something out of a kids worst nightmare.  I mean how did this whole thing start?

My son caught sight of one giggling his way towards us. In the blink of an eye, his limp warm little body nestled in my lap became stiff as a board.  Like spurs on a horse, he dug his little hands into my chest.  And you bet it prodded me into action.  I scooped him up and we shot through the crowd of people in about 0.8 seconds flat.

They passed and he eased his grip. I breathed a sigh of relief.  I’d saved him from the weirdos.

“That was scary, wasn’t it?”  He looked at me, “Sca-wee?”  Oh, right, he had never heard this word before in his less than two year old life.  He said it again, “Sca-wee.” Like he was rolling it around on the tongue, trying it on for size. “Yeah, bud, those clowns were scary, weren’t they?”  “Cwowns… sca-wee.”  It clicked. His experience had a name. I had given my son a word for what was happening inside.  And something in him rose up… empowered.

He told his mom when he got home that the men with painted faces were scary.  He told me later in his crib that we saw horses and marching bands and clowns that were scary.  And even to this day, he still talks about the scary clowns when we remember the parade.

I know some of you might be freaking out thinking my son is now traumatized.  I wondered the same thing until I started paying attention to his tone. When he talks about it, he says it with pride, like he knows something.  And he does, he knows his own experience.  He knows how to tell his own story and talk about his heart.

Isn’t this the thing we all long for? We are dying to make sense of our inner worlds.  To know why we feel what we feel.  There’s nothing more powerful than to know our own experience. It is literally empowering, centering, anchoring.

Here’s the dilemma: We all eventually stop paying attention there to some degree or another.

Just this week I asked a woman the question, “How do you feel about that?”  She looked up, with a blank face and said, “I have no idea.  I literally have no words for what’s happening in my heart right now.  I stopped paying attention there a long time ago.  And I feel so out of practice.” She probably speaks for most of us.

Life leaves little time to sit and feel and make sense of our lives.  Or what we feel there is just too unpleasant or confusing.  So we stop.  Or never start.  In the words of the Puritan writer John Flavel, “Some people have lived 40 or 50 years in the world and have scarcely had even one hour’s discourse with their own hearts all the while.”

Listening to your heart takes practice.  And work. Emotions don’t translate well to English. Or Spanish or German for that matter.  They are a very foreign tongue. I probably don’t need to tell you that.  As such, emotions always need interpretation.  I love Rilke’s words here, that most of what happens to us, happens in a wordless place within.  And its just dang hard to put to words.

Clients often say to me, “I don’t know what I’m feeling.”  And I tell them sometimes you just have to guess.  Its like sometimes when you’re lost you have to just start walking in a direction until you start recognizing something.

I find great comfort in the words of therapist Sue Johnson, “I’ve never met an irrational emotion.  Once you know the rest of the story, they always make sense.” There’s always more story.  Emotions are never random, even though they may be about stuff beyond what’s happening in the moment.

Here’s one of those moments from my life.

On opening day of elk archery season I cracked my eyelids at 4:30 AM.  Within minutes, my friend PJ and I left the warm cocoon of our sleeping bags, dressed in the pitch black and very cold darkness, and began our foray into the mountains to find some elk.

And elk we found. The morning was a complete rush. Or almost complete, except for the moment I shoot an arrow over the back of a cow elk.

At 3 in the afternoon, a rain storm hit pretty hard.  We hunkered down under a grove of pine trees to take a nap if possible and wait out the rain as surely the elk were doing too.  But I could not fall asleep. I could not find any comfort.  My heart felt… something.  And something intensely.

At best I could name that I was lonely, particularly for my wife and son.  But that didn’t seem quite right.  I’d only been gone a day.  And especially because if I was honest, I actually felt scared too.  None of it made any sense to me.  But it sat on my chest like a boulder and wasn’t going away.

So I started talking my way towards it.  “PJ, I’m not doing well.  And I have no idea why.”

PJ cracked his eyes open and turned my direction. I kept talking. “I feel lonely kinda… but scared too.” After fifteen minutes or so of just wandering about in my heart, this sentence popped out, “I feel so fatherless out here in the mountains. I’m afraid God’s not going to show up as a father.”  And boom!  The floodgates of my heart opened up.  And I wept.  There was my heart.

That was work.  But it made all the difference.

So… How do you feel these days?