4 Steps to Untangling Your Emotions
We kicked off Season 2 of the podcast by chatting to Sarah, a GP here in Australia. (You can listen to that chat here). Sarah is also a wife, mother and church-planter with her husband, and she’s back to talk to us about anxiety and mental health challenges from a personal and pastoral side.
Anxiety is Like a Beach Ball
If you grew up in Australia, chances are you spent hours of your childhood at the beach or in a backyard pool. And if that was you, at some point you probably also tried balancing on top of a beach ball while trying to push it under the water. Maybe it was the beach ball your Mum bought for the school holidays, or the inflatable crocodile your Uncle got for all the cousins at Christmas.
Whatever it was, you’ll know that it was hard to get those things to stay under water. It took energy and concentration, and just when we thought we had the ball under control and could keep it there underwater, it'd lurch itself up to the surface and splash us in the face.
Sarah describes our relationship with mental health like a beach ball. As humans, we have a natural drive within us to avoid feelings of fear or pain. We don’t like sitting in uncomfortable emotions, and so we suppress them; we hold them under the water with all our energy, hoping they won’t come up so we won’t have to face them.
But, just like beach balls, our feelings have a way of popping up eventually. So if we’re not supposed to avoid our feelings, what are we supposed to do?
Even though it’s uncomfortable, Sarah explained that we’ll actually feel better when we bring that beach ball up to the surface and examine it for what it really is. Unnamed fears or anxieties are far worse than those we can identify and talk about, and that’s what Sarah encourages us to do. In fact, Sarah shared with us four steps she’s learned to practically deal with our painful emotions.
4 Steps to Untangling Your Emotions
The topic of emotions often comes up in Sarah's medical practice, church life and personal journey. She's found the framework from the book 'Untangling Emotions: God’s Gift of Emotions'¹ particularly insightful for helping people learn to unpack their anxieties and untangle their emotions.
Engage
How can we deal with our anxieties when we don’t even know what they are? We can’t. So the first step we take is to consciously bring up that beach ball. Let the feelings come to the surface, and choose to acknowledge them, even when it’s uncomfortable. As Sarah pointed out, “When we avoid our fears, we’re still suffering.”
Beyond engaging with our own fears and anxieties, we can also help our friends engage too, Sarah explained. “If we sense someone is feeling worry or fear, we often try to help them avoid it or distract them, because that’s what we do to ourselves when we feel worried. We might say to a friend, ‘let’s have lunch and take our minds off it’ or ‘it’s going to be okay, that probably won’t happen’. These things aren’t bad in themselves, but I believe there’s a better way of loving each other. And that is to help your friend bring their beach ball up.”
“When I sniff out that somebody’s feeling anxious about something,” Sarah continued, “I say, ‘friend, tell me more about that’. I keep asking questions so together we can lean into the feeling, examine it, and I can help them understand what they’re anxious about.”
2. Examine
The next step in the process is to ask yourself, What am I feeling? God created us with a huge breadth of emotions to experience. Are you hurt? Lonely? Frustrated? Afraid? Disappointed? Allow yourself to feel those things, and identify them as they come up.
We can also help our friends examine their emotions by asking questions in a calm environment. Questions like, ‘What are you feeling there? Tell me what that might look like? Why might you be feeling this way? What do you think God has to say about this? How can I support you?’
“By giving our friends the opportunity to unpack their feelings, we’re creating a space of safety and vulnerability where they can be supported through their unpleasant feelings.”
3. Evaluate
Anxiety presents us with an opportunity for growth. As Sarah told us, “Emotions are our teachers; they’re teaching us something about ourselves, our God, and our world.”
Fear and anxiety can show us what we love and value when we ask ourselves, Why do I feel this way? Where is this coming from? For example, if you’re feeling anxious about your finances, it might show you that you value security, or that you struggle to trust in God’s provision.
Sarah shared with us that she and her husband help each other evaluate their emotions by scheduling in regular ‘Gnocchi Nights’. Why ‘gnocchi’, you ask? Sarah explained: “To make gnocchi, you make a potato dough and you cook it in batches. You can’t cook it all at once because it rises, and if there’s too much in the saucepan it all sticks together in one big blob. So you need to regularly scoop the gnocchi off the top.”
In the same way, Sarah and her husband make sure they aren’t avoiding their feelings and letting them pile up into a big, sticky mass by scheduling time to check in and scoop it all off the surface. They use paper and mind-map out what they’re feeling frustrated or anxious about, and then examine those emotions together.
4. Act
Sarah shared that once we’ve been through this process and we’ve engaged with what we’re feeling, we can see more clearly what God wants to say to us about it. Once we know what we’re dealing with, we can do something about it. That’ll look different for everyone, but it should start with coming to God and His Word and seeing whether what we’re valuing aligns with what He values.
What Next?
We asked Sarah what she’d say to someone who doesn’t know where to start with the Bible. “I love reading about Jesus and what He did on earth,” Sarah shared.
“Jesus turns to people in pain. That’s a key starter. All throughout the Gospels, we see how He treats those who come to Him. The big message from the Gospels is that He is there for you, concerned with your concerns, meeting your needs, and cares about your body, mind and spirit.”
Jesus doesn’t dismiss our emotions. In fact, he chooses to engage with our troubling, painful emotions, like when Jesus stopped to speak to the woman who was healed just by touching His robe (Luke 8:43-48). Although she’d already received healing, Jesus chose to engage with her in the middle of a crowd that “almost crushed Him”, to show that He saw her pain and that it mattered to Him. As Sarah shared, “Jesus is tender and passionate and meets our deepest need of mercy and forgiveness through His grace. That’s so comforting!”
Not only are these four steps towards untangling our emotions helpful in our own lives, but we can also use them as a source of encouragement and guidance for those around us. “As we grow in knowledge of who we are and who God is, we have something really rich with which we can also comfort others,” Sarah shared. “What a privilege it is that Jesus unites us to Him, and to one another! Because of this, we have a wonderful ministry where we can be a gift to each other.”
“It may well be that we all fear different things, and for some of us, the anxiety will be felt more significantly… But we all have an experience of anxiety that we can use to empathise, relate, and help one another engage with it.”
The more engaged we are with our own emotions and the more we allow God’s Word to have a deeper effect on our lives, the more we’ll be able to help other people to understand their emotions and support them in their own mental health struggles, too.
Sarah also shared with us in Episode 1 of Season 2 about some practical things we can do to help our minds, bodies and spirits better deal with anxiety. You can listen to that episode or read the related blog post.
If you’re experiencing persistent and pervasive feelings of anxiety or depression, it’s important that you seek medical help. You can visit your GP or psychologist, or, if you’re in Australia, take a look at our list of resources that can help you.
¹The book ‘Untangling Emotions: God’s Gift of Emotions’ was written by J. Alasdair Groves and Winston T. Smith.
