A life in letters: Emotions

I have always struggled with my emotions, though it seems that the struggle grows easier with the passing of time.

In fact it doesn’t seem easy to clearly define ‘emotions’,  since our feelings are so closely linked to the thoughts we entertain, and the impulses for good or evil which surge up unbidden within us.

I have often been aware both of the absence of positive emotions – such as happiness, compassion, empathy with other people’s pain – and the inappropriate presence of negative emotions – including fear, bitterness, hatred and a deep numbing sadness. In situations where positive emotions seem appropriate, I have often had a sense of being outside, looking in through some invisible barrier, unable to share either in people’s joy, or in their pain.

This numbness, as one would expect, affects both everyday life, and my experience of Christian life and worship. Difficult though the absence of appropriate emotions is in a non-religious context, it can be even more difficult in a church environment, where the presence and power of God is emphasised, and the absence of freedom in worship, joy at positive developments in other people’s lives, tears at their times of grief and loss can seem like a spiritual deficiency, a spiritual failure. The experience of God is at one level an emotion. When the emotions are malfunctioning, God either seems absent, or a disturbing, relentlessly-judgemental presence.

It might be worth mentioning that on rare occasions when in conversation reference is made to supernatural evil, I sense a visceral, cold fear which it is easy to interpret as having some dark external origin. And there have been times when I have felt a heaviness of spirit in a church meeting when the last thing I felt like doing was praying in public. Yet when on those occasions I have prayed, the words have come with a sense of ‘givenness’ and the spirit of heaviness has lifted.  As a Christian, I believe that our emotions can be influenced by spiritual realities beyond ourselves.

Somehow, when I was a teenager or earlier, my emotions were broken. Over the years, healing has come, but it has come slowly.  The fundamental reason for my messed-up emotions is my proneness to low-grade depression, free-floating anxiety and sadness, which sometimes makes it seem that I looking out on reality through grey-tinted lenses. When my sense of personal identity is at its most feeble, my emotions are most awry – or is that a tautology? Is a settled sense of self actually an emotion?

How have I coped with broken emotions? I know I have been helped by the anti-depressants which I have been taking for about 20 years, after a decade when I was prescribed various similar products with not particularly helpful results. Anti-depressant were in themselves life-transforming in that while not ‘fixing me’ they gave me sufficient stability to move forward with my life in a more confident, positive way.

But various strategies have also been enormously helpful.

As a young man, I found the following lines (credited to Martin Luther) very helpful, particularly in the context of spiritual emotions:

Feelings come and feelings go

And feelings are deceiving.

I’ll trust in God’s unchanging Word,

Naught else is worth receiving.

And so I have found a key strategy for coping with truculent emotions at difficult times is to cling to, and act upon what I believe to be true rather than what I feel to be true. It means, whether I am dealing with religious emotions or with everyday life, reminding myself of distorting quality of the lens through which I am filtering reality, and making a correction. It means acknowledging the negative perspective, reminding yourself that your emotions don’t always tell the truth about you or about your circumstances, and refusing to define yourself, or define your circumstances according to your emotions. This is hard work, especially when things are going badly in your own life, when there’s bad stuff in the papers and on the news, and the arrows of rational analysis of your situation break pitifully against the ramparts of hopelessness.

In my really hard times when my quiver is empty, my cross-bow shattered, the strength in my arms gone I have, as a Christian, simply sought to entrust myself to God repeating over and over the old Jesus prayer ‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.’  And I have found that the daylight of peace seeps into the prison when I am able to say ‘Thank you’ though not feeling particularly, or at all thankful, the ‘Thank you’ which enumerates the people, the possessions, the circumstances with which I have been blessed.

Sometimes the pain of broken emotions can be so demanding that focus on anything else is impossible. But I have found it helpful, when it becomes possible, to lose myself in something. There is therapy in immersing yourself in the alternative reality of a book. There is therapy in engaging in whatever helps you express your creativity – be it gardening, or cooking, or painting or as in my case, writing. Shaping a piece of work out-with yourself can bring a whisper of order and wholeness to a broken heart.

And, with my roller-coaster emotional experiences, I found it helpful to put my present experience in context, saying something like ‘I have been here before and I will be here again.’ A recognition that I would struggle through and emerge in a better place as I had done before, and a rueful acknowledgement that there would be other hard times in future which I would similarly survive. ‘Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow’ was a helpful line from a hymn, even on days when hope seemed long deferred.

But there were frequently times when hope sustained me – when a word from a book or a phrase from the Bible, an idea in a magazine article, or the kindness of a friend – came to me with a sense of nourishing given-ness when other words and phrases, other articles, other kindnesses from the same friend left me untouched. I believe that these moments of emotional clarity were God-given gifts.

Recently, I have learned how helpful it is to accept the dark stuff in me as being part of me – the negative impulses, the black thoughts. For many years this dark side troubled me.  Did this stuff originate with me, or did it have its origin in some external, demonic source? I tried to ignore the dark stuff, to brush it aside, to bury it, but the more you try to ignore it, the more powerful it becomes. I have learned how liberating it is to acknowledge the dark stuff as originating in me, as being my responsibility. When you acknowledge this dark stuff, and remind yourself that God loves you, dark stuff and all, then somehow it loses much of its power.

I remember when I was in my 30s my GP telling me that people with my kind of condition often reached a place of healing later in life. I looked back at him, highly dubious. But in fact my spiritual journey over the last 20 years as a Christian has been a journey towards wholeness.  I have realised that in earlier life I was struggling to transform myself into the person I thought I was ‘supposed to be’, with the beliefs and experiences and ways of expressing faith which seemed normative for the Christians among whom I moved.

But I have come to realise that God loves me as I am. It’s OK to not experience things exactly the same way as others, OK to have more questions than answers about God, OK not to be a church leader, OK to find it difficult to engage in worship in church, OK to be an introvert, happier at home with a book than in a pew. When I fully enter in to the truth of this, I have an experience of wholeness and purpose, an experience which is the fertile heart-soil in which positive emotions grow.

I sometimes call these days ‘clearer seeing days’ when I feel secure in God’s love, when I sense in my head creative whispers which may come from some place deep within me, but which I believe come from God.

I do not always have that sense of wholeness, but when it comes, or when it is given it transforms the day. I think I experience its effects more often when I am alone – the joy, the thankfulness to God, and the sense of being free. But it also transforms my experience of relationships: the barrier evaporates, and I feel a sense of thankfulness and peace in being with others. Work (and I know I am very fortunate in the job I do) becomes a nourishing joy.

But this experience of wholeness is not consistently present, nor does the coming or going of it seem to lie within my control. The other night my wife and daughters went out for a meal to Bella Italia. It was a lovely evening, and yet my appreciation of the evening, and my family was mind-driven, rather than arising spontaneously from my heart. The emotional barrier was present.

The sense of wholeness comes unpredictably. I see it as a gift from God. I am sitting in church, for example, feeling nothing. And then, something is said, and the words fling apart the curtains in my spirit, and the light floods in. Or perhaps, I become aware at some point in the service, that more is happening than singing and preaching and praying, that God is there, and where God is there is wholeness.

And these good times, these hallelujah times when I know myself loved, held, strong, secure, whole, these are times when I am seeing and experiencing things most clearly, as they really are.

What I would like to learn on the next leg of the journey is how to feel more compassion for and empathy with people in our broken world. I want to learn how to weep with those who weep, to rejoice with those who rejoice.