I was doing a radio interview the other day and we were talking about the Psalms of David – how he was so free in expressing his emotions to God. For David, all masks were off in his prayer life. God, I feel so empty. God, I hurt. God, why did you allow this to happen to me? God, it seems like everything is against me.
I wanted to get across the point that in order to get to the joy, we need to let ourselves be honest with God and other people about the reality and depth of our pain.
The interviewer said to me, “So you are saying that what we do with our emotions in hiding and stuffing them is like breaking your leg and never allowing the pain to bring you to the point where you go the doctor. So your leg never gets fixed.” I thought that was just an amazing way to look at it – I am always learning more about the emotions.
“That is a great illustration, I love that.” I replied. “That is exactly what it is like when we ignore, stuff, and hold inside the hard things we feel.”
I wish I would have thought of that one myself.
To do something as violent as breaking your leg and then not go in for treatment when your leg hurts and throbs and is killing you hour after hour after hour is hard to imagine. You only see that kind of thing on TV or in war movies - when the guy is shot and then refuses treatment as he goes on to save the day and get the bad guys. Yet, we do this with our emotional pain all the time, don't we?
For most of us, this leaves scars and does some damage to us and those we love. We do not live the life we could, we never get to the better joy that is on the other side. That reflects a testimony from the Chapter Blogs this week. Nicole wrote, “I just know I’m not as happy as I have the potential to be. For the longest time we are taught to stifle any negative emotion – don’t get angry, don’t be sad, etc - but as its pointed out in the book, God gave us these emotions, with the intent for us to use them. Nothing pent up.” Amen, and amen to “I’m not as happy as I have the potential to be.” That is true for me as well.
For others, they do it so often that it ends in disaster. There is a woman we know who was never good at sharing what she was struggling with, never shared her deep feelings with hardly anybody. She could share just along the rim of the bad stuff, things that were going wrong. But the deep emotional struggles, how she felt about the things going wrong, were kept inside. She seemed like she always was so patient, kind, and never got upset. None of us had any idea she was hurting so badly. Karen is now at a really hard place, in the midst of a serious nervous breakdown. The broken leg, never allowing herself to scream out the pain, has crippled her completely. We are just holding onto the hope and praying that it is not to late for Karen to get the leg fixed without permanent damage.
Some of us may need to go out and have a good cry, take a walk in the woods and do some yelling at the trees or even at God, or share something deeply felt with a spouse that you have been hiding a long, long time. Others of us just need to get better at letting ourselves feel and then sharing and expressing our pain and frustration. That is my struggle sometimes.
Maybe you are living in that pain and hurt, talking about it as much as possible, and it is time to move on. I have written about letting yourself feel the pain of life, that is part of finding your way to joy and emotional healing. Do not, however, allow yourself to think that you can stay there. As David did in the Psalms, we need to move through the pain to joy and healing. I am going to think a bit more on that and will be back with a blog on it one of these days.