Blog with Matthew

Emotion and Their Physical Responses

A FEEL reader writes:

Thank you very much for the book, Feel. It is a terrific help to me in my journey to personal freedom in Christ.

One issue I was looking to understand better is how emotions are tagged to physical responses. You wrote how that's why the Church and rationalists suppress emotions. I have observed how certain emotions relate to physical responses both good and bad and the opposite is true too. I think it conditions us to gratify or repress certain emotions or seek to gratify or repress certain physical responses.

Don

Great Questions Don, here are some thoughts.

This is something we all wrestle with, what feelings in our bodies are tied to our emotions, and what feelings are just because we are bodies are reacting to something directly?  On a basic level, emotions are not necessarily linked to a particular feeling in our body. In early psychology, William James and others, wanted to find a permanent link for every emotion to a particular sensation so they could study emotions by looking at how the body felt.  But nobody could do that successfully.  In fact, researchers were so unsuccessful that they had to move on – there is no sure way to measure or quantify an emotion by how your body is feeling. 

If we look at philosophy, we also find very strong arguments for the fact that emotions are only necessarily linked to our thoughts, values and judgments and require no corresponding feeling in our body.  They are independent from bodily sensation.  For more on this, you need to read the early sections of Faithful Feelings.

That is good to know, because it means we need to be careful in figuring out one to one correlations with what we are feeling emotionally and what our body feels physically.  Our body relates to our emotions, but it relates to all manner of other things as well, so the signals it is giving us can be based on a combination of all kinds of things. 

On a  practical level, our emotions very often find expression in our bodies.  How our bodies feel can be used as one indicator of the intensity and nature of an emotion we are experiencing.  We can cry in sorrow or we can cry for joy  or we can cry because we just hit our thumb with a hammer – a person on the outside may interpret our tears as sorrow when in fact they are for happiness.  Only us, who know why we are crying, can correctly interpret the tears.  But even we need to be careful.  Are we crying over “spilled milk” (something minor) because it is really that upsetting, or is it because our bodies are stressed and exhausted?  Each situation requires its own unique analysis.  As we mature, we get better and better at figuring these things out quickly and correctly.

We need to recognize that we are complex, that we are so integrated that each part of us is so deeply interrelated – the rational, the physical, the emotional – that they are all always reacting to each other.  Sometimes, it is easy to tell how our emotions are affecting us physically.  Other times we need to do a little digging, even getting some help to unravel our feelings and emotions and learn how to be more mature emotionally and spiritually.  I believe that as we do that, we can undo some of the unhelpful links our mind has created between our bodies and our emotions – like we get sick to our stomach building toward an ulcer when we increase in anxiety -  while learning healthy emotional expressions in our body.  We need to learn to face hard emotions as emotions, not allowing them to destroy and harm our bodies as they have to leak out somewhere.  We can also learn healthy physical expressions for our love, joy as we let them out to bless our families and friends in laughter, hugs, or other forms of expression and affection.

Fear and Salvation

Brian recently wrote to us at Faithful Feelings about his fear and anxiety.  Here are some of his struggles in his own words, followed by our thoughts:

Dear Faithful Feelings,

I am working through your book primarily because of a struggle that has cropped up in my life in the last three years.  You can definitely lump me in with one of those long-time Christians who seems to have boatloads of head knowledge, but is seemingly incapable of getting much of what I know to sink in much below my neck.  I have the list of excuses, I came from an abusive, broken home where positive emotion was rarely, if ever, displayed, but where manipulation, anger, silence, and stoicism ruled the day.  I went through the typical cycles of alcohol and drug abuse and still struggle with pornography - a problem that started with my introduction to it at the age of 8, though thankfully I finally seem to be getting some victory over it after 30 years.

Oddly, my problem, and question, really doesn't have anything to do with my emptiness and lack of emotion, I understand that much of that comes from a detachment I developed in order to not have to deal with the pain that was a constant part of my experience growing up.

What is truly bothering me, and it really hit me hard while reading Chapter 7, was my feelings of FEAR toward God.  Why does this bother me?  Well, that's easy.  If my emotions are to be trusted and listened to, and if they are "true" then my feelings of unworthiness are true, even though my rational mind tries to reject them.  You have a quote by Jonathan Edwards that talks about maintaining a lack of "religious affection" that leads to "spiritual death" and eventually "eternal death".

Since this is what I fear, and these emotions are true and to be trusted, I don't know what to do.  There are times when I can see a cross and feel a great fear of judgment and hopelessness, when instead I should feel hope and joy at the grace that cross represents.  Instead, I want to cower in a corner and think about something else.

In this, I desperately feel like I want to believe my head, that I'm saved, covered by grace, and worthy, and Disbelieve my emotions, that I'm worthless, that I've blown it too many times, that I've hardened my heart and that I'm abandoned.

In many ways, your book has helped me a lot with what is, in my case, the more "benign" problem of simply feeling emotionally distant and disconnected.  On the other hand, this latter issue seems to lead me to feel even more emotions of condemnation and hopelessness because I need to "believe" what I feel.

Have you ever encountered this, and do you have any insight for me?

Brian

Here is our response:

Dear Brian,

I am so blessed to hear from you and I am so blessed by your honesty.  We all have deep struggles in a broken and sinful world.  For the first parts of your struggle, I believe that God can be faithful in opening your heart to feel again.  Start opening doors to everyday emotions, and ask God earnestly for more, that you need and want more love, more joy, more hope, more of Him.  Please write me again when you have finished the book – perhaps the next chapters will help in this regard.

For the paragraphs about fear, praise God, this is an easy answer.  As John writes to us:    ”I have written this to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know you have eternal life.”  My point in FEEL, which I hope you will see clearly, as your read on, is that emotions tell you the truth about YOU, your beliefs, your values, your thoughts – not that they always tell you the truth.  Many times they can tell you the truth about others or the world and we need to listen, but other times they are only speaking the truth about your beliefs and thinking.  I too battle feelings of anxiety and questioning of God’s promises and sometimes I am afraid.  And we all may be there sometimes until we are with Him. 

As John also tells us, we all remain sinners and whoever says he is without sin is a liar and deceives themselves.  You ARE covered by the grace and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.  He promises that even when we are faithless he remains faithful because he cannot deny himself.  It is tough, and a process, but you must work the head knowledge down into your heart.  Memorize promises that say how God really feels about you, call a friend in a down moment, talk to a pastor after church, find a good counselor, shoot me an email – do whatever it takes to begin to change those deeply held beliefs that inform the fear.  God has called you, God has found you, God has loved you with an everlasting love if you have believed on the Lord Jesus and accepted his sacrifice for your sins.   Come against the lies that our enemy tells, and work the truth into the fabric of your life.  As your faith and trust grows, as God’s truth is not just known but believed then your emotions will change.  This is a hard thing because it is not about what we say we believe but rather about what we actually believe deep down.  It may take some wrestling with God to get there, some brutal honesty about your hurt and anger and fear.  God is big enough to take it all and love you anyway as his precious child.  Nothing you can say to him will surprise Him, He already knows.  Let it all out and feel His loving embrace of comfort and acceptance.  He will come to heal you as you trust in Him- I believe.

Bless you Brian, and God be close to you.  With love and prayers.