Teach Me How to Feel Again

Imagine you are walking home one evening, and you are faced with a option: accept a shortcut through a long dark aisle to reach your business firm, or stay on the brightly-lit sidewalk. Which i would you choose?

That twinge of fear we experience as we consider the dark aisle reveals something important – emotions have a purpose. They play a function in our lives equally they guide the states to activity. Fear, for example, is supposed to guide us away from danger and help us survive. Also our other emotions are simply every bit valuable, but we often accept no idea how to manage, empathize, and handle them correctly.

Emotions Are Non a Weakness

In order to sympathize our emotions, we must dispel the myth that emotion = weakness. Recollect virtually it – nosotros usually similar our heroes calm, cool and nerveless under even the most perilous of circumstances. We love watching Jack Bauer race through city streets and defeat terrorists, unfazed by fear. And although nosotros may joke about Mr. Spock's lack of emotion, there is something appealing well-nigh his ability to stay cool and make logical decisions, gratis from the business organisation of human sentimentality.

But in reality, we need emotions. Emotions reveal where we need to go. Emotions reveal our demand for God.

Yes, my soul, find rest in God;
my hope comes from him.
Truly he is my stone and my salvation;
he is my fortress, I will non exist shaken.
My salvation and my accolade depend on God
he is my mighty stone, my refuge.
Trust in him at all times, you people;
pour out your hearts to him,
for God is our refuge.

Psalm 62:v-viii

God is meant to exist a stone. When nosotros tell a person about our feelings, that person will about likely have a reaction. God, on the other hand, is immovable. He can hear anything you demand to say and it will not knock him over. Nosotros need God because we are not meant to walk lonely, dislocated, and handle the ups and downs of life past ourselves.

However, nosotros often decide to numb our feelings instead of pouring them out to God. When that happens, we become "monofeeling," where every emotion has the same name. Sometimes anger is the only emotion we can identify, simply it commonly has a whole range of other feelings underneath it, like embarrassment, fear, disappointment, shame or guilt.

Ignoring our pain tin provide some temporary relief, simply it will eventually catch up to u.s.. In the words of the great Albus Dumbledore,

"Numbing the hurting for a while will make information technology worse when y'all finally feel information technology."
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

What Turns Our Emotions Off?

"'Y'all will be always hearing but never understanding;
you volition be ever seeing but never perceiving.
For this people's heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they take airtight their eyes.
Otherwise they might run across with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
empathize with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.'

Matthew xiii:14-fifteen

Nosotros turn our emotions off when we feel something that we do not desire to feel again. Unless we talk near these feelings, we volition harden to them and callous to each other.We often experience this in dating and marriage relationships. When we harden to our feelings information technology's easy to substitute physical intimacy for emotional intimacy. The problem is that the excitement of physical intimacy will only last a short time; nosotros will somewhen experience empty and unsatisfied as we detect we need emotional and spiritual intimacy in our relationships besides.

How do you handle painful and uncomfortable emotions? We often harden our hearts by making excuses for ourselves or other people, or trying really hard to stay busy and avert our emotions altogether.

How Do Callouses Piece of work?

The Bible gives us iv examples of how callousness can affect our hearts:

Hard Hearts

Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them.

Marker 4:fifteen

Ane thing nosotros know about paths – they are hard.  Hard hearts are numb and browbeaten down. When our hearts are hard, it is because nosotros have been through hurting, and pain turns our emotions off. Having a hard heart doesn't mean you are evil; it just means that you didn't know how to handle what you went through and that y'all didn't turn to God.

Unfinished Business

Others, similar seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive information technology with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a brusk time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the discussion, they chop-chop fall away.

Marking 4:16-17

People with"no root" are people with unfinished business. Think of a tree – it needs roots before it tin grow alpine. When we endeavour to grow spiritually without dealing with our past, our family, our hurts, or our sins, nosotros will non final.  We will cease up trying to "expect good" and "get stuff done" without working on our foundation with God, and our faith will be just superficial.

What unfinished business concern practise you still need to bargain with? Are there any thoughts, feelings, sins or experiences from your by that yous are unwilling to share?

Uncontrolled Fears

All the same others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; simply the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful.

Mark 4:18-19

Take y'all always had uncontrolled fears? See if y'all can chronicle to any of these thoughts:

• What if I don't brand it at my job?
• My spouse is running late – what if something happened to him?
• What are people thinking of me?
• What if I never get married?
• What if something is incorrect with my child?
• Or what if [make full in the blank with whatsoever bad thing] happens?

Unchecked fear turns our emotions off. Similar the scripture says, worries choke God out of our life and we no longer have room for faith. Fear makes us want security, so information technology can even drive our desires for more money, a better job, or a bigger house.

What are the uncontrolled fears in your life? Deciding to acknowledge them to God and friends will soften your middle and leave more room for God in your life.

Articulate Hearts

Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—some 30, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.

Mark 4:20

Having a clear heart ways having nothing unresolved in your life. When y'all are talking with someone, in that location'southward zero yous are feeling that yous won't say. You don't experience anxious because everything is out in the open betwixt yous.

The scripture also teaches that clear hearts produce a crop – significant, when our hearts are articulate we are freed up to love other people.

"To love at all is to exist vulnerable. Dear anything and your center will be wrung and possibly cleaved. If you want to brand sure of keeping it intact you must give information technology to no ane, not fifty-fifty an beast. Wrap it advisedly round with hobbies and niggling luxuries; avert all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or bury of your selfishness. But in that catafalque, safe, dark, motionless, airless, information technology will change. It will not be broken; information technology will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To honey is to be vulnerable."

CS Lewis

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Source: https://bacc.cc/learning-to-feel-again/

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