Are My Emotions Good or Bad?

I am really excited because today for the very first time, I get to talk about my new book that is coming out in February. And it has been the last year of my life. Every project that I work on usually takes at least a year, sometimes longer, of research, writing, and developing this project. There's no escaping it. It always takes long for me. I go away, I go under a rock, and I create for months and months and months, and then I come out and I'm so ready to talk about it. And they've held me off for a little while. So today is really exciting to me to be able to share.

The name of the book is Untangle Your Emotions: Naming What You Feel and Knowing What to Do About It. Zach told me, "This is the bravest thing you've ever written." And I believe the reason it's the bravest thing I've ever written is to tackle as big of a topic as our emotional life, it was just overwhelming. Because all of us are coming at this from a different perspective. Some of you are very emotional. Some of you aren't emotional at all. So to take everyone's views of emotions, to go through the research and to look at the science of our emotions, to also study in depth what the Bible has to say about our emotions, it was just a really daunting task.

I'm so excited and proud of this book. I really believe it is helpful and it will give you handles because so much of our emotional lives has been shamed.

From the time we were young, there are messages that I've sent to my kids that many of you, your parents sent to you, which is just, "You're okay, don't worry about it. You're fine. You're going to be great." Or you've had parents that try to fix your emotions, that try to tell you why you shouldn't be sad and why you shouldn't feel angry about things that happen.

And yet our emotions are actually gifts and tools that God has given us to navigate a very mixed up world. When you think about your wild emotions that maybe you show readily or maybe you hold inside, those are actually gifts from God. That concept I believe has not been taught very well in the church.

We have two extremes. We have the people that say, "Follow your heart", which is what the world largely says, "Follow your heart, follow your emotions, your emotions are the only thing that matter." And then you have the church that says, "Do not listen to your emotions. Your emotions aren't trustworthy, your emotions are misleading you." And I would say both of those things aren't true.

There's actually another reality, and it's the way that God built your emotional life to inform you and to connect you with each other, and to connect you to God.

Our emotions have a purpose. So when we try to conceal our emotions or we try to control our emotions or we just try to cope with it all, we're actually missing the better way. There are certain times that controlling or coping or concealing serves its purpose, right? There are times we just cannot fall apart, that we cannot feel the emotions that we need to feel because we're needing to get through a season of life that's just really difficult. But ultimately, the healthiest way to deal with our emotions is the way that God designed us to deal with our emotions.

My story is that for a long time I have been a fixer, that I have tried to fix other people and I've tried to fix myself rather than feel my emotions. But here's the secret-

Emotions aren't meant to be fixed. Emotions are meant to be felt.

So many of you have read Get Out of Your Head, and I'm so grateful for how far and wide that book has gone and I'm so proud of that work. I still stand by every single word that I said in that book. However, our emotions are a little bit different than our thoughts. I can tell you to stop thinking something and you can actually stop thinking it. You can distract yourself, you can change the channel in your mind. You can do that. But with our emotions, if I tell you to stop feeling sad, that's pretty impossible.

If you look at the life of Jesus and how He encountered people, He met them in their emotion. He felt their emotion with them. He lived a verse like, "Mourn with those who mourn." He shows up on the scene and Lazarus, who He's about to raise from the dead, and He knows that, He knows that, and yet when He sees His friend Mary weeping, He weeps with her. He cries with her. He didn't fix the problem. He could have said, "Hey, watch this." And raised Lazarus from the dead. No, He modeled and showed us that emotions are not bad, that they're gifts for moments, that there is unthinkable, unspeakable grief, we feel sad and we don't have to fix it.

If we could have this redeemed, beautiful view of our sadness and our fear and our anger and our joy, I believe those emotions could be handled in a different way, in a healthier way for us.

I know they can. I've learned this. I've learned to be comfortable in my emotions. It's not easy. I promise you it is not easy, but I absolutely promise it is worth it because we want to be emotionally healthy. We want to be emotionally healthy for our kids. We want to be emotionally healthy for our friends. We want to be in this world in a way that we are experiencing all that God has for us. That's how God is.

He means for these gifts of sadness and fear and anger and joy to lead us into deeper relationships, into deeper relationship with Him.

Today, I want to read to you a little part of the middle of the book that I think will give you a little taste of what this is about-

"I canoe. I mean I actually own a canoe. Actually, two. We have some land in the middle of hot Texas and there's not much to do out there except canoe. And I'm the worst canoe you've ever met. Well, I think I'm good. I paddle with great confidence. I boss the other people paddling along with me in my canoe. But bottom line, the boat never goes where I want it to go. And we hit the shore and we zigzag across the river and everyone with us can't figure out why. I can't figure out why. And I've been doing this a while. I know the goal is to stay in the middle of the river, so we're burning a lot of energy crisscrossing and weaving across it.

Psych 101 would tell you that emotional regulation is the goal. I want you to picture that river and my canoe.

On one side of the river is explosion, anger, weeping, gnashing of teeth, deep-seated feelings, throwing dishes, beating someone up. I know we've talked a lot about the gift of emotions, but we all know what happens when we let them run the show. On the other side of the river is shutting down, not feeling anything, dismissing all you feel and imagining that you don't feel. These are the two banks we want to avoid hitting in our emotional canoe.

Now what's interesting is that trauma causes your river to start rushing even faster and it brings the banks in even closer. Of course you're going to hit them. You've been through the death of a loved one or abuse or even a move or a job loss, something that has caused your river to narrow way, way down. And your capacity to deal with the emotions you will inevitably encounter on a day-to-day basis, it just shrunk. That's okay.

If you're reading this and you've been through something difficult and feel easily irritated and maybe you swing into deep, unhealthy emotion or even checking out, I'm going to say what I always say, of course you are. Of course you're fragile. You're not yourself. All our rivers at different points in our life shrink and get narrow. Each time is an opportunity to come back to Jesus over and over again. If you're in the season right now, ask the people around you for grace and don't be afraid to get help. But if you're in the wide part of the river, you feel emotionally stable and healthy, I urge you don't get complacent or look down on those that are struggling. Difficult circumstances may be just around the bend for you. So enjoy the season. Feel the feelings. Share your guts out about the small or medium-sized things going on in your life, but don't judge the people who haven't quite reached the wider calmer section of the river.

One of my kids has been going through so much trauma they could write their own book. And what other people might mistakenly view as a behavior problem is so clearly just a place where they need some extra grace to process very big emotions which get intensified by life's past hits. They need a little more time to figure out how to navigate the rocks of life and avoid slamming into the riverbank. And as we have given that kid grace, they have begun to process in a healthier way and their river widens.

Our rivers can widen. With safe places to process, and sometimes professional help, our capacity to regulate our emotions, it grows.

As we've seen our feelings show up in our minds and bodies and reactions. That's where we experience them, but where do they come from? They were built into us by a God who feels. We were designed by God to feel. I follow Jesus, and whether you follow Him too or have no faith at all or still deciding what you believe, I'm really glad you're here. If you don't know Him, I'm guessing that as you keep reading, you'll really like Him. Because as you're going to see, He's compassionate towards you, toward me. This matters because to be human is to long for compassion.

We're all starving for compassion and Jesus wants to provide it.

When Jesus walked the earth, story after story of His ministry confirmed how He cared about each person He came across. He cared about their mind. He cared about their body. He cared about their soul. He even cared about their emotions, which is something we don't hear too much about. I've heard smart Bible people teach and preach on how important it is for us to believe certain things with our minds and behave certain ways with our bodies and commit to certain things. But I can't think of a single time when I heard someone teach on how Jesus feels about the emotions we feel, which is odd to me because all throughout scripture we see evidence of God the Father, God the Son, and God the spirit feeling lots and lots of feelings.

How do you think God feels about your feelings? Is He judging them? When does a feeling and emotion turn sinful? Have all the emotions always existed? Will they exist forever in heaven? What does God do with His emotions? Wait, does God have all these emotions? Does the Bible say we can control our emotions? If we can, does that mean we should? While I cannot answer these questions exhaustively, these pages are my attempt to explore what God's word says."

Those are some of the words that I wrote. But it represents a massive project that is a huge issue in our day.

Our emotions are usually either stuffed or ruling everything. And I really believe there's another way, a whole other way that God designed our emotions to serve us, to cause good in our lives, even the difficult emotions, they're gifts from God to navigate a really wild world.

One of the girls that I mentor just read the book. And she and I were talking before I started filming and recording. And she just said to me, "Jennie, here's the deal. The other day after I finished this book, I felt this wave of anxiety and I was about to get on stage and I thought, 'Gosh, it must be about being anxious about speaking or leading.' But that didn't make sense to me because I'd done this many times and I wasn't nervous in the past."

And she said, "So instead of just brushing past it, I stopped and I paused and I used the simple process that you built in the book. So I got on my knees and I sat with God and I asked God, 'Why do I feel this way? Where is this coming from?' Sure enough, it was coming from something that happened days earlier that was really difficult, and that anxiety was still with me. So bumping up against this little part of something that has a little bit of pressure associated with it that I bumped up against many times and been fine that kind of sent me over the edge. So I just simply walked through the process in your book, and it was so helpful because then I was able to say to my friend, 'I think I'm just worried about this situation in my life.'" And it was something to do with someone she loved and their health, and it made so much sense that of course she was anxious about that.

So I believe that our emotional lives will actually get sorted out, untangled as we go through this process, as we work together to process our emotions in the way that God meant for us to process them. Yeah, it is a little bit of work. I'll be honest, it is a little bit of work. But I will say, so is feeling anxious all the time and not knowing why. So is feeling sad all the time and not feeling connected and feeling isolated and lonely in that feeling. So is being angry and not knowing where it's coming from. All of that is a lot of work too.

So wouldn't it be better to rest and to sit in these feelings and to begin to untangle them and invite God into these emotions and into these feelings and see what He has for them?

Because if they're gifts from God, then they have purposes that are also from God. I think we've been missing it because we're so afraid of our emotions because the world has told us that they're everything, or we squelch our emotions and conceal them because the church has told us they're dangerous. There's another way. God has a different way, and I'm telling you, it's going to set you free. I'm so excited for you to get this.

I really believe it is going to give you a whole new framework.

So right now, I want you to go pre-order the book now finally on the market, you can see the cover. Also, I want you to go join my email list because for anyone that's on the email list, you get the first chapter free. So go right now, join the email list and also pre-order the book for you and your friends. You're going to want to walk through this with other people. My dream for this book is that what feels chaotic, all knotted up, wild in your life right now, that we would together sit down with God and just take one thread and look at it and process it and talk about what it looks like to feel that feeling, to name it, to feel it, and to share it with other people. Because as we do, as we encounter and deal with our emotions in the way that God intended, we begin to heal.

If you go to untangleyouremotions.com, you can find the links to every retailer to pre-order the book. So get ready, the conversations happening here are going to be life-changing and helpful and important.