Going a little deep
I’m going to dive right into the deep stuff. If this doesn’t hit home now, it may later, as you continue to do this work.
I used to think everyone knew things I didn’t know, and my job was to catch up, somehow. I would always get asked to be a camp counselor, and I’d think, “How did they let me in here?” Eventually, I came to see that we all feel that way, mostly. I think the topic that causes the most trouble is emotions. Read on to find out why that’s not our fault.
In fact, can you think of someone you know whom you would say is truly clear about what emotions are and what we’re supposed to do with them?
As I see it, there are three main reasons for our confusion about emotions:
- The Romans!
- Western parenting practices
- Unhealthy relationships and chronic stress
I’ll explain those things in a minute. But before I go there, I want to tell you why it’s such a big deal.
Creator and Creation
We are made in the image of God. You can interpret that in different ways, but certainly, it’s easy to see that we have three parts, just like He does.
We call our parts, body, soul, and spirit, and at least two of those parts are designed to feel feelings so that we can gather important information. Our feelings are part of a feedback loop, the nervous system, which senses things and sends signals to the brain. The brain then sends signals back to the body that tell it how to respond to the sensation.
Our nervous system enables us to interact with our environment, make decisions, and also connect with others in safety. It’s mostly about safety because we were designed for survival. That’s why we’re brilliant problem-solvers.
After God finished His creative work, He said, “This is good!” That is a clear statement.
Psalm 139:14-15:
- I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made (work or labor). Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven (skillful needlework, intricately mixing colors) in the depths of the earth.
Even after the fall, all the colors of our being are said to be fearfully and wonderfully woven together. I wonder, is part of our “color” our emotional makeup?
The Language of Pain and Discomfort
We feel pain and discomfort in both our bodies and our souls. I have begun to think the nervous system connects all our parts. Is it possible that our nervous system is woven into our whole being and ties us all together? At least the body and the soul both have the ability to experience felt sensations.
I believe the spirit uses the same highways in our nervous system. All three seem to communicate through felt sensation in the body.
- A broken toe is screaming pain. We know why we feel it because we look down and see the toe.
- A hurting soul feels grief in the gut area, most predominantly. Betrayal has its own manifestation in felt sensations, and we all know what irritation feels like. I’m sure you can name a few other “soul sensations.” And don’t forget, numbness is also a feeling.
- The spirit feels a fluttering or waves that undulate through the body. Peace feels like extreme calm in the nervous system.
These are just some of many examples.
Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP) is not feeling physical pain because of genetic mutations in the sensory nerves, and it is a serious disorder. Children who are born with CIP are at risk every day because they have no warning signal for physical harm.
Our physical bodies tell us through discomfort or pain that we are hungry, that we have an unmet need, and that there is danger. Hunger is a danger to a newborn, by the way. It is only the consistent response of the mother that teaches the baby’s nervous system that he is not in mortal danger.
Our souls learn safety at a young age. We learn how to tell safe behavior from unsafe behavior.
Felt sensations are information, the language the body speaks to the brain.
Many of us have numbed our emotions, shut them down, believing they are bad. Or maybe feelings got us in trouble when we were young, and we were told we were too much. We teach ourselves rigid control to avoid the pain of shame. We end up going “unconscious” and missing the signals God has designed us to hear. The problem with that is we can’t regulate or control them if we are no longer aware of them. They tend to run in the background and drive everything.
The Romans!
This problem with pain goes all the way back to Roman times. They dissected life into a duality. There was good and bad, dark and light, high and low. And then they placed it in a hierarchy where one was over another. Roman culture was about power, and power-over was important. They were concerned with who would rule.
Plato came along, and he was a spiritual guy. He said that spirit was good, body was bad, and so, the spirit must rule over the body.
Does that sound familiar? Scripture does not actually say that, but most of us think it does. This is man’s tradition, not God’s. God cannot lie. He cannot contradict Himself. He proclaimed His creation good.
This type of thinking is entrenched in western culture. It was established in philosophical thought in the 3rd century BC, and it has never changed.
We tend to think in terms of authority and rulership, and we tend to want someone to control the “weaker,” or bad, parts of life.
Insecure Attachment
In two of our sessions we will be talking about stages of attachment and how they factor into our eating habits.
I’m going to introduce a little bit of thought here at the beginning of our work so that you can sit with this information and let it settle for a few weeks. Feel free to talk about it, and if you want more information about this, I can refer you to some YouTube resources.
Because of our western culture, we are uncomfortable with emotions. We tend to view them as weakness. And because of that, many people launch into parenthood without realizing that emotions are everything in a child’s life. Emotions and feelings, you know, those BIG FEELINGS little kids have, are God’s design for not only teaching babies and keeping them safe, but for creating healthy and safe attachment to caretakers. Babies are growing a new nervous system and learning about safety. Children do not have words. They have feelings.
Learning about this for the first time can feel shocking to a mom. It was for me. I hope you can be open, and give it some space, because the payoff is great in the end.
Physiology = Function
Our nervous system is designed to primarily track one simple thing. Am I safe?
The brain’s number one function is to keep us alive. It is always seeking danger signals. (This is why negative information feels like velcro and positive information is like teflon. The brain doesn’t see positive information as necessary for its primary job.) The brain’s second main function is to move our bodies to safety. (run!)
The best example of this is a doe eating grass in a meadow. Her ears are turning in every direction as she breaks off grass and chews. Her brain is scanning for negative information. Suddenly, there’s a noise of rustling behind a tree. Her brain instantly sends signals that brace her body, getting ready for action. These are automatic responses. She first freezes and assesses the danger level. If there is another sound, she will leap into a run and the whole herd takes off. We are also wired this way.
When a baby is born, the nervous system is undeveloped. It takes about 6 months for him to develop his own fully functioning nervous system, but that’s OK, he has mom’s nervous system, which he’s been relying on since conception. He shared hers while inside the womb. He needs the nervous system of his caretaker to be tuned into his needs and to decode them for him for a while. He will first learn that someone comes when he cries and he is safe with her. Then he begins to learn that he has fingers and he can get his own food, as he expands into his own abilities.
An attuned mother makes her child feel safe, loved, seen, heard, understood, and empowered, all within the first two years.
In the western world, we have been told that the baby “wants power,” and that our job is to teach it who is in charge. We ignored a lot of the signals we were given, not understanding that this was not a power struggle.
Western parenting teaches numbing. As you can imagine, the signals for both mother and child can become confused.
Attachment is one of the most researched areas of psychology. If you want to see an interesting video, go to the following link to watch an early study.
It’s hard to watch.
This developmental attachment issue was observed in Bosnia after the war and in many other places around the world when children have been institutionalized. The effects of not being securely attached are devastating to our nervous system development.
What does this have to do with our eating habits?
A child who does not have an adult who can help her regulate will learn to eat for emotional regulation at a very young age. We will talk about why that is in our sessions. For now, it’s enough to know that this is one way to calm, or regulate, an overstimulated nervous system.
This is a western culture problem. It’s not “bad” parenting.
For our purposes here, it’s important to just tune into yourself and ask if you have a sense of a secure relationship with your emotions. If not, it may be rooted in attachment issues, and the good news is, this can be fixed!
Unhealthy relationships
Unhealthy relationships are born out of emotional dysregulation. If you think about it, isn’t the inability to self-regulate at the root of a lot of the issue? (What people choose to do is an entirely different study in character and morality.)
Chronic stress sends signals through the body that have deep physiological effects on the metabolism. Not being able to feel safe, at rest, and secure sets the body up for emotional dysregulation that may be numbed for all the reasons stated above.
This may sound like an overwhelming thing to have to deal with, but we are fearfully and wonderfully made. God also designed us for restoration and healing. He knew we would be living with difficulty. Most of what we will be talking about in our Connections talks is how we can attune to our own nervous system, learn to quickly restore and regulate these things, and almost miraculously, the unmet needs can be met.
We truly are fearfully and wonderfully made! We can reset all of this, and it is not that complicated. That’s what we will be learning here.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have some level of misunderstanding or need for healing in this area in their lives, and it’s time to be restored! There are really simple tools we can learn to be able to tune into the messages our physical body is trying to send. I’m excited to talk about this. It can be pretty life changing to understand the nervous system and have tools for regulating it.