Myths about emotion

In his book “feel: the power of listening to your heart” Matthew Elliot warns us of two myths about emotion. First, “we have made our relationship with God more about fulfilling our duty than expressing our passion”. Second, “we have become indoctrinated in the belief that emotions are unreliable, dangerous, and bad.” 


Some points he makes about this are

1.       1. The Bible tells him that people who simply pursue duty and follow the rules often miss the party. Everyone who encountered Jesus began to feel.

2.       2.  Joy is the serious business of heaven. In our lives in general we spend our time doing the duties we’ve been taught we must do in order to be a good person and in the constant checking off of items on that list, we miss the celebration entirely.

3.       3.  Emotion is not an illogical reflex, unreliable and fickle. Emotions cut through all our talk, all our spin, and take us right to the truth of the matter. Emotion was made to supply energy and vitality to our lives. It was made to work hand in hand with reason and logic to guide our decisions. We claim the high ground when our passions match our convictions.

4.       4.  We do so many things to stuff our emotions, to push our passions down, to fight our feelings. Emotions, both good and bad, must be dealt with, but they can never be ignored.

5.       5.  If emotion is the power to drive our lives in positive ways, then lack of emotion deprives us of the power to live whole and healthy lives. Without emotion, our live becomes dependent on sheer will. So our lives are not really about feeling joy, hope, and love, but about keeping those ideas afloat in our minds. There is great sin here.

6.       6. The difference between duty and obedience is passion. God made us emotional beings. His love for us is a passionate verb and it grieves Him when we love him back with a lifeless noun. What we feel – our loves – reveals what we really believe and becomes the motivation for how we live.

A  lot of what Elliott is saying here can be found in the psychologists notion of “emotion regulation”. This theory suggests that as we experience events in our life, emotions occur. The issue is the degree to which felt emotion becomes expressed emotion. If we deem the felt emotion to not be appropriate, we suppress it so that we do not act consistent with it. This leads to stress and burnout. The more healthy way to control the unwanted behavioral effects of felt emotion is to reappraise. This means that we can “think about” the event in a different way so that we do not even have the negative felt emotion we had before. This is used in the service industry to help people who engage the public to deal more productively with irate or difficult customers by telling themselves, “it’s not personal, they are just having a bad day.”

Reappraisal is really the message of Elliott’s book in that he is saying that our emotions and mind work in harmony. We cannot emphasize one over the other. While our emotions reveal to us what we may really believe, we are not to succumb to them but let them point us to what we must really believe. Then let God transform our minds so that our emotions are free to flow in a Godly way.

For example, "The Holy Spirit bears witness that we are children of God." Does this generate no emotion? Does this not make the Christian excited? Can we not embrace that excitement because it comes from something (the HS) we can trust? Just saying ...

Now reappraisal has the risk of simply becoming “rationalization”.  So can we make sense of ourselves and the things around us without “conning” ourselves into accepting emotions to meet our own needs and that keep us out of God’s will. I believe it goes back to whether reappraisal is occurring from a carnal mind or Kingdom mind (psychologists don’t know this). If we rethink events from a carnal mind so that the felt emotions become acceptable and passions that we can act on, we are simply letting our need for respect, pleasure, significance, safety, security, etc. transform our emotions. If we rethink from a Kingdom mind, then the transforming power is our faith in what God has said about us and Himself and what He has done about it.

There’s a lot here but reappraising your myths about emotion can set you free!!  Think about it …