Why Do I Feel Like This?
Understand Your Difficult Emotions
and Find Grace to Move Through
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CONTENTS
Introduction: It’s Who We Are
1 The Danger of Spiritual Bypassing
2 Uncovering Our Core Beliefs
3 Trauma
Our Need to Tell Our Story
4 Hurt
Our Need to Recover What's Lost
5 Discouragement
Our Need for Confidence and Courage
6 Anxiety
Our Need to Feel Safe
7 Sadness and Depression
Our Need for Healthy Thinking, Connection, and Meaning
8 Envy
Our Need for Enoughness
9 Shame
Our Need for Radical Love
10 When and How to Find Therapy
Epilogue: The Night Shines Like Day
Acknowledgments
Small Group Discussion Guide
Notes
Praise for Why Do I Feel Like This?
About the Author
More Titles from InterVarsity Press
Introduction
IT’S WHO WE ARE
I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I heard Chris Tomlin’s “Good Good
Father.” I was a first-timer at a small group for a church I’d been
newly attending. I had a slight crush on the small group leader, so I
was very on time, alert, and ready to receive. But my divided
attention quickly became undivided when the group’s worship person
cued the music and Chris Tomlin’s lyrics filled the room:
You’re a good good Father—it’s who you are . . .
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And I’m loved by you—it’s who I am . . .
I wasn’t new to faith. Quite the veteran, actually, with a résumé
full of church leadership positions and some sort of record, I’m sure,
for the number of retreats I’d attended. But something about the
words made me feel new. Almost like I was seeing the most
important thing about God for the first time and hearing his most
important thoughts about me. Of all the different things I’d come to
believe about myself—via messages from society, media, friends,
so-called friends, romantic partners, therapists, teachers, mentors—
and all the different labels, descriptions, and names I’d been given,
loved was the one I wanted to hang on to. Loved was decidedly my
favorite.
Loved is the most important thing about who we are. But there
sure are a lot of other characteristics, aren’t there?
For starters, we’re needy. We need love, attention, and care. We
need connection and community. We need to feel important and
significant. We need a sense of meaning for our lives and to be
purposeful and creative.
We value and pursue relationships, but we get hurt and grow
resentful. We harbor bitterness and unforgiveness. We have a hard
time letting things go.
We work hard for what we want but easily grow tired, weary, and
discouraged. We let self-doubt take over our minds and rob us of
motivation and energy.
Sometimes we’re greedy and selfish. Sometimes we’re self-
centered and ungrateful. And at any given moment, there could be
an overflow of negative thoughts and emotions that results in
anxiety, insecurity, envy, or depression.
Can you imagine what Chris Tomlin’s song would have been like
had he tried to include the full reality of who we are? I mean, just
picture it:
You’re a good good Father
It’s who you are, it’s who you are, it’s who you are
And I’m a needy, greedy, selfish, unforgiving, and ungrateful
human being struggling with a problem
It’s who I am, it’s who I am, it’s who I am
Thank God he kept the song simple. Thank God he had the good
sense to focus on what God wanted us to hold on to the most.
But even though we are all of the things above and more, it’s
okay. It’s understandable. Because all of it together is what makes
us human. Loving, helping, and serving is no more human than
hurting, raging, and struggling. We are both beneficiaries and
captives of our own humanity. We are all just trying our best.
This is what I would tell you if, like many of my students and
clients over the years, you were to burst through my office doors with
tear-stained eyes and dwindling hope that you will ever heal from
your heartbreak. Or what I would tell you if you were to call me late
at night, wondering if you’ll ever be able to get right. Or what I would
tell you if you lost your zeal for life and let it slip so that you’re no
longer sure you want to be here.
I would tell you it’s okay that you feel this way. I would tell you
that you’re brave for acknowledging the ugly stuff. I would help you
see the strength in your vulnerability. Because I’m all about taking
the sting out of things. That sting is the pain of toxic shame—and
there’s no place for it in your healing.
My hope and prayer for you as you move through these pages is
that God would fill you with grace, compassion, and understanding.
Perhaps you’re great at offering these to others, but I’m asking that
you extend them to yourself. If you’re struggling with hurt,
heartbreak, discouragement, or any of the other emotions covered in
this book, I don’t wish you to stay where you are. I don’t wish you
endless weeks of pain and frustration. I wish you health, joy, and
freedom. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a mental health
professional, it’s that you can’t hate yourself into healing. You have
to love yourself right on through it. If God himself, perfect as he is,
can love us in the middle of it all, who the heck are we not to?
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THE DANGER OF SPIRITUAL
BYPASSING
S OME YEARS AGO, I sat in a pew hoping for a message that would
encourage my heart. I was fresh out of a breakup, and as a woman
in her thirties, I was starting to experience real doubt that I would
ever get my own happy ending. I was also sick and tired of trying to
figure dating out. Church, however, was a place I’d always found
solace and hope. So I prayed that God would somehow speak to me
that morning and crossed my fingers he would.
About three-fourths into the sermon I realized this was not going
to be the message that encouraged my faith. It was not going to be
the message that helped me feel understood. In fact, this was a
message I would remember for a long time for how frustrated it
made me and so many other women. (Which I found out soon after
service.)
See, at this point in the message, the pastor detoured into talking
about relationships, and everybody perked up! You could tell he’d
struck a chord. He proceeded to talk about the beauty of God’s
timing, trusting the process, and trusting God at his word. All stuff I’d
heard before, but a word doesn’t have to be new to be good.
Then came his final exhortation on the topic. Something to the
tune of: “So ladies, you need to stop worrying and start working. If
you’re not married, it’s because you’re not ready to be. How do I
know that? If you were ready, you would be.”
I froze. The rest of my row, mostly women, froze also. I could feel
us collectively saying, What did he just say?
Being a church girl my whole life, I was used to disagreeing with
pastors in the pulpit. It happens. In fact, if you told me that you
agreed with every single thing your spiritual leader said, I’d be
worried that you’re not doing enough thinking on your own. I was
used to letting things I disagreed with roll off my back and taking
from the message only what I felt God really wanted me to hear. I
was also used to hard words. Words that pierced through sin in a
way you just knew would change you.
But these words weren’t hard. They were antagonistic. Because
from that position of power and influence came a message that
dismissed and invalidated the reality of so many.
It invalidated the challenges of dating in our current culture. A
culture where surface, transactional, what-can-I-get-from-you
relationships seem to be the norm.
It invalidated the challenges of dating while trying to remain
abstinent, which significantly limits your options because many just
don’t share that value.
It invalidated the real worries of women past their twenties, who
confront all kinds of discouraging messages about their ability to find
love and start families.
It invalidated the work, and prayers, that grown women have
already done in preparation for their marriages, and the weariness
and discouragement that comes from years without results. The
pastor’s words invalidated these realities and more.
What was particularly off-putting, however, were the implications
around this idea of readiness. I was a Black professor at a Christian,
conservative, predominantly White institution where “ring before
spring” was a thing. Every year I witnessed a good number of my
senior students get engaged and even married by commencement.
I’d get invited to these weddings and happily attend them, and they
were always beautiful. But the implication of the pastor’s words were
that these young, mostly White women were all “ready” for marriage,
but the women over thirty I knew, many of them from diverse
backgrounds, weren’t.
The pastor’s statement didn’t work for me. The reason for
singleness had to be more complicated than just readiness, and
instead of taking the time to speak into any number of these realities
(which, granted, was a big task), the pastor met our woes with over-
spiritualized, trite, hurtful words. I’d gone to church looking for hope
and encouragement. I left church feeling emotionally dismissed,
deflated, and misunderstood.
THE ANTIWORK OF SPIRITUAL
BYPASSING
Do you have a similar story? Have you ever reached out to a fellow
believer during a personal challenge or looked to a spiritual leader
for counsel and heard some version of the following?
■ Just pray about it.
■ Let go and let God.
■ Just forgive.
■ Be strong in the Lord.
■ Just have faith.
■ There’s a reason for everything.
■ Just don’t worry about it.
■ You have so much to be grateful for.
■ If you were supposed to have it, you would have it.
If you have, let me tell you now, you have been spiritually bypassed. 1
Spiritual bypassing is a term coined by psychotherapist and
author John Welwood, who used it to describe when we, or other
people, use spiritual ideas to belittle our needs, feelings, or personal
challenges or to sidestep deep, necessary emotional work. It’s when
we dole out Christian platitudes and expect the recipient of these
easier-said-than-done words to bounce right back into contentment
and happiness. It’s the equivalent of slapping a fresh cut with a
bandage and hoping that any signs of infection will resolve without
additional effort. We, and our emotions, deserve better.
It’s not that these words of encouragement don’t have truth to
them. They do, to a degree. The problem is that these words
typically come with some sort of expectation that the person
experiencing emotional pain or discomfort can just snap out of it.
This expectation can lead to a sort of spiritual gaslighting where the
reality and gravity of someone’s pain is met with a subtle message
that says if you really walked with God, or if you really had enough
faith, you wouldn’t be feeling this way. Again, we deserve better.
For the record, it is absolutely God’s desire that we hold on to
faith during our personal crises and challenges. It is absolutely his
desire that we pursue and practice love, joy, peace, patience, and all
the other fruits of the Spirit. But we are not robots. There’s no switch
we can turn on to make us automatically become the loftiest version
of ourselves. We are complex and complicated. We deal daily with
our imperfection and brokenness. We are a work in progress, and
God knows this. There would be no need for him in our lives if that
wasn’t the case.
As for the body of Christ, we need to learn to better embrace our
pain. We need to give up our need to have all the answers and
instead embrace humility and unknowing. We can’t truly enter each
other’s pain without the ability to hold complexities and discomfort.
And without these things, we can’t create the kind of community that
leads to true healing. We should certainly continue to offer loving
words of encouragement, but we must respect the purpose of our
emotions and understand that real change, growth, and a deepening
of faith take time.
WHAT EXACTLY ARE EMOTIONS?
“Everyone knows what an emotion is, until asked to give a definition.
Then, it seems, no one knows.” With a touch of humor, researchers
Fehr and Russell articulate in their study what emotion theorists
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have been struggling with for years: emotions are difficult to define!
Yet the more we learn about our emotions, the better we can
appreciate what they offer us. Though there are several broad
theories of emotion that differ in some significant ways, one idea that
emotion theorists can agree on is that emotions are a
multidimensional experience. Here are five components of emotion
that work to give us a sense of what we feel from day to day:
Cognitive appraisal. Much like appraisers do for houses or
cars, we experience our emotions because we assess the
situations that we find ourselves in. We evaluate them. We
form meaning out of these events and decide how important
each event is to us. If we deem something important, we
project what we think needs to be done. Then we decide
who’s responsible for doing what and form expectations
accordingly.
Physiological responses. When we’re experiencing an
emotion, we may experience increased heart rate, sweating,
blushing, nausea, or a number of other physiological
changes. If we were to take a picture of what’s going in our
brain, we would see activation in certain areas.
Expressive behavior. The expressions on our face change as
we experience different emotions. The tone and the inflection
of our voice may change. The way we use touch may shift.
Our nonverbals often express our emotions more honestly
than our words.
Subjective experience. What emotions feel like to us is our
subjective experience of them. Usually this is identified by the
words we use to describe them. We’ll take our appraisals, feel
out the changes happening in our body, and describe our
emotions with feeling words—happy, sad, mad, glad, anxious,
etc. Being able to name what your emotions feel like is an
important first step in being able to work through them.
Action tendencies. Finally, our emotions motivate us to act in
certain ways. Happiness inspires us to show gratitude.
Sadness can lead us to want to sleep. Anger on behalf of
others can lead us to act in ways that will restore justice and
equality. Guilt may motivate us to make amends.
Emotions are judgments. According to cognitive appraisal
theorists, emotions can also be understood as judgments. To
