This is post 4 of the “Living Fully Alive” Blog Series. Reading the posts in the order they were posted is recommended for the best reading experience.
This session focused on the various origins of emotions, what I can learn from them and touched a little bit on how to tell the difference between emotions and intuition.
In my experience, it is the rare family, that teaches children how to manage their emotions in a healthy way. I certainly am part of the group that grew up learning how not to do it, except I didn’t know it until I got older. I don’t mean to bash my parents, after all, they were not taught how either.
Emotions are tricky things. I can see how it appears to make sense to leave emotions out of at least the unpleasant areas of life. However, if we take the emotions out of the equation, we are denying one part of who God created us to be. I am reminded of this scripture:
1 Corinthians 12:21 (TPT) It would be wrong for the eye to say to the hand, “I don’t need you,” and equally wrong if the head said to the foot, “I don’t need you.”
Deciding that I don’t need emotions, or that feelings are not a necessary part of me would be about the same thing. When have things ever turned out better in the absence of following God’s design? I need to remind myself of this, especially when I want to run far away from painful emotions. He gave me the ability to feel for a reason. It will serve me much better to seek him to find out what to do with them, than to run from them or avoid them in so many ways.
Personally, it helps to know that God has emotions too. They can’t be bad, if he has them! Jesus is portrayed having several different emotions. He was sad, he laughed, he was compassionate, angry, and I imagine the time he rebuked his disciples after calming the storm, there is at least an element of disappointment, if not frustration present. And then there is his time in the garden before he gets arrested. I can see God’s emotions in the Old Testament too. There are many glimpses in the prophets where he shares how he feels about the Israelites, and the choices they are making. Being merciful, kind and redemptive to them, seems like it cost him something too.
What role did emotions play in my history? Emotions were not absent in my growing up home. They were managed by manipulation, sarcasm, rage, abuse, outbursts, eating, working too much, and probably a few more, if I sat here long enough to remember them all. As I stated above, the majority of people alive on this earth probably grew up among people who did not know how to manage their emotions well, because they had not been taught, which is now perpetuated to the next generation – unless something is done about it. And we are learning just how to do something abut it. Abi and Justin designed this class to help us do this and in turn help others learn how to do it. But I have to warn you. We are stirring up stuff and not learning a whole lot about what to do with it yet. This might cause some temporary turmoil. If you want to avoid that, wait until I get to the class that helps us learn how to manage our emotions before you start stirring yours up.
Physical senses of pain, cold, and hunger are examples that help me understand how important it is to pay attention to our emotional feelings. If I am hungry, and I don’t do anything about that hunger, I will eventually starve. If I feel cold and I don’t find any means to warm up, I may eventually turn into a snowman. If I sit too close to the fire and feel the burn and don’t move, I am going to cause great damage to my body. It would seem clear from these examples that one of the functions of feelings is to alert us to an action step being required in order to thrive. I can see how emotions play a similar role, at least emotions we would normally consider negative. Realizing that my emotions are an “alert” sign, enables me to stay in an analytical frame of mind in order to determine what action is required, rather than panic or react in the heat of the moment. This is a really nice example of letting both emotions and logic have their proper place in my decision-making process. So, emotions, you are welcome in myself. I promise to pay attention and to receive the service that you provide me.
As I learn to connect with myself and the emotions I experience, it allows me to also connect to others. In other words, if I am not able to show myself compassion, love, care, or sympathy, I am going to find it hard to give it to others. This is a very timely topic for me to become aware of. Certain individuals in my life are pushing all sorts of emotional buttons and I am struggling to show mercy and kindness. Turning this struggle into a self-awareness exercise, I have to ask myself, am I merciful and kind to myself? If not, why do I feel I don’t deserve to give myself mercy and kindness? I see that little red warning light right there. One I need to investigate. Do you maybe need to do some investigating too?
Remember the truth in tension concept explained in session 1? About holding truth in tension? Here comes an application. I need to pay attention to my emotions, but I must not allow them to dictate my entire operating system, neither should I shut them down so completely that I don’t know where the fire is that I need to go tend to.
Emotions happen both on the subconscious and conscious level. The conscious level is a no brainer. You are aware of what you are consciously feeling. The subconscious is where it gets tricky. Here’s a cool quote Abi presented in class.
“Until you make the subconscious conscious the subconscious will direct your life, and you will call it “fate”.“ C.G.Jung
Here is an example in relation to what my logic tells me versus what my map of beliefs tells me. Take a person who has had a bad dating history. The prover shows there is a bad history in dating, there must be an unhealthy belief regarding dating in the subconscious. Consciously the person believes they are strong and worthy of love and deserving of an amazing partner, but if the prover from the subconscious says they were not loved by their parents because they aren’t worthy of love, then their subconscious typically will continue to attract people that will perpetuate that cycle of belief in their life. If they are not aware of that subconscious belief, they are going to feel it’s just their lot in life to have bad dating relationships. Thus, the word “fate”.
In a previous post I wrote about how I believe relationships are valuable and enriching, and how we are made for community, yet my prover says, people don’t want to be in community with me. I can see how my childhood time of being the least needy child and therefore being attended to the least, would give me that kind of belief. I actually remember about 5 years ago, observing how my invitations to others for community were completely unfruitful, and I started asking my husband if we are somehow offensive and don’t know it, or don’t seem trustworthy, or if we have too radically different a value system…you get the idea. I was catching on to the whole prover phenomenon. Now it makes a lot more sense.
In order to find out what is going on in my subconscious emotions about whatever issue, I need to hit pause and let myself dial into the feelings that were attached to that event or season of my life. If I don’t take a time out, I will react to the subconscious emotions driving me like I was taught at home.
Abi gave us a helpful visual to understand how subconscious emotions work. She prefaced this by saying that it is when we are in pain, that we get assaulted with lies from the enemy.
See illustration below:
Copyright Miriam Hosoda 2019
Just by way of explanation, the thoughts and memories that end up in the subconscious (things below the line) are thoughts and events we have rehashed A LOT. Dr. Leaf, a Christian neuroscientist, says it takes 63 days of constant thinking about something to make it become automated, in other words, subconscious. The human being has this built-in phenomena, where it tries to sort what to pay attention to and what to automate.
I have a funny example from growing up in a farmers’ village, but not being a farmer myself. My farmer classmates always smelled like the barn. They couldn’t tell because their noses have detected that smell so many days in a row (more than 63 days) that the brain decided this particular olfactory information can be bypassed, nothing unusual about it, and they become oblivious to it. But my non-exposed olfactory nerves very much detected a difference and never got used to the smell because I never was around them or the barn more than 63 days in a row… Funny example, but it helps me understand how some stuff just ends up in the subconscious part of my brain. I don’t know if that is the only way something ends up in the subconscious memory, but this is one way.
The various scenes in the heart refer to painful things that have occurred in our lives, things we built belief systems on. These are things we have experienced and thought about a lot and they have been moved into the subconscious realm. When something in our present life reminds us of the kind of event from back then, it acts like a hook. Some examples of belief systems that get hooked are “I am not loved” “I’m stupid” “I will never have enough” “I am not worthy” “I don’t belong”. It is clear from the examples that these hooks are rooted in a lie that is based on pain. And that pain connects to the real-life events which now drive me in the present. This is how I find myself feeling level 10 emotions about an issue that would probably warrant a level 1 or 2 emotion.
If you understand nothing else from this section, understand this: it is our subconscious that drives life. This is why we may feel confused sometimes because in our conscious life we understand things differently, we know things cognitively as true and we don’t understand why our feelings don’t agree with it.
As I pay attention and find the pain at the core of the trigger, the hook and the underlying belief system can begin to be replaced with truth and conscious and subconscious me can move into greater harmony.
I am going to draw a heart and write down all the past pain I can detect based on my prover and write them into the subconscious part of the heart. I think it will help me become more aware of where there are potentials for hooks that reach from the present moment into the past and drag up all the previous pain that has gotten stuffed due to not knowing how to process it in a healthy way.
I invite you to do the same for your heart.
In the next post I am going to begin to present 9 places Abi and Justin identified as origins of emotions.
To learn more about the Living Fully Alive course and Abi and Justin Stumvoll, click on the hyperlink.
