There Are No Negative Emotions (Part 1)

Toxic Myth in The Church: #1 Your Feelings Can’t Be Trusted

This a massive bite to chew and I’m going to do my best here to not eat the whole elephant but just break off a piece of this kit kat bar in 2 parts. Ha, get it. 

The myth that our feelings cannot be trusted is a harmful belief system rooted inside the religious rhetoric of the church, and I believe, one that has been birthed out of a human need for control.

Stay with me, haha, let me unpack this and give some disclaimers right off the bat—

For, I am not about to be saying to go all Van Gogh on me and cut off your ear because you feel so. 

God bless Van Gogh, but I would beg to say that he didn’t get to that extreme place because he was “trusting his feelings”. 

I would suggest, that he had actually broken trust with his own heart, over and over again, leading him to such a fractured state. 

Trusting our emotions is different than permitting ourselves to be controlled by them. Yet, this statement has muddled this greatly for those of us in the church. 

I have discovered—personally and around me—that more often than not, this shallow-generalized saying of “Your Feelings Can’t Be Trusted” has led others into—black and white, binary modes of thinking—that have produced more harm than good inside the church. 

What do I mean? 

To help further explain, let me respond to a quote I heard just the other day, one that you would typically hear in the church in regards to this subject—

“You’ve got to be aware that sometimes how you feel is going to deceive you. And that self-deceit—of what your emotions are doing, they are real, but they’re not always true. They are real but sometimes they lie to you.”

This ‘feelings can’t be trusted’ narrative is painful on an emotional health level, because it is close to being sound yet when put up against true north—is off by a couple degrees.  

How you are feeling isn’t deceiving you, it’s trying to tell you what’s already leading you—your heart, your mind/thoughts (where feelings actually originate), your fears, pains, core belief systems.

It is self-deceit to not trust what your feelings are saying and face them honestly—good, bad or ugly. 

“Our life and how we find the world now and in the future is, almost totally, a simple result of what we have become in the depths of our being—in our spirit, will or heart. We live from our heart. We live from our depths—most of which we do not understand.” - Dallas Willard

When we don’t trust what our feelings are trying to signal to us, is where emotionally unhealthy spirituality can begin to take place. 

It’s where illusion can take place; living in a lack of contact with the full reality within ourselves and the world around us. Where we can become hyper-spiritualized; finding ourselves inside layers of dissociation, distrust with ourselves and compartmentalization. It is when we can begin hiding in shame, trying to fix ourselves alone, because of experiencing emotions that are labeled “untrustworthy” and uncomfortable.

Or begin feeling like God is mad or disappointed in us for feeling emotions that have been labeled “untrustworthy.”

Then, taken further—in a need for control when we feel out of control, we can dismiss these untrustworthy feelings altogether with bandaids of truth thumping or anxious intercession; until we end up ironically slapping a passive-disconnected-bumper sticker on our car that says, “I hope you are following Jesus this close.”

Sadly, this idea, is also the vein where we can find leaders (even if they are well meaning) micro-managing and controlling towards those they are leading as they are inside their process. 

Let’s continue to break this down further—let’s just talk about emotions real quick:

As humans, we fear what we don’t understand and in our need for reasoning—to feel in control, we judge. 

Judgement is rooted in the fear and insecurity of what feels alienated and unaccepted first within our self—then projected outward onto others and our world. 

If you don’t accept weakness within yourself, you’ll judge it in everyone else. If you don’t accept nuance within yourself then you will judge the one who isn’t living in a polarized state of black or white (ps. this is a root of pharisaical thinking—the us vs. them mentality—so much to be expanded on here for another day). If you don’t allow yourself to follow your dreams because of fear of what people will think, you’ll judge the one who is—without giving a care in the world what others are thinking. If you don’t accept breaking the rules, you’ll judge the person who does. If you don’t accept to not break the rules, you’ll judge the person who is a rule follower. So on and so on, vice versa, vise versa.

Judgement is a mirror, reflecting back onto yourself. 

Jealousy and Envy its siblings. Longing to be more, to be better—they have more and are better. 

Envy, a side eye glance out of our own tunnel vision, looking through a peripheral—never seeing the whole picture. 

Though, we so badly want things to make sense. Including ourselves and our own hearts, our emotions, our human condition. 

So in order to grab onto false “order” we have compartmentalized labels of this is “good” and this is “bad”  

I am “good” when ____ and I am “bad” when _____ or so and so or something is good when ____ or bad when ____. 

Black & white blanketing over a colorful world, in a reach for control. 

In a need for that which feels too nuanced—uncomfortably grey, inside ourselves and our world to make sense. So we choose to live inside compartmentalized category. 

Where this false order masquerades itself as discernment, but is really fear—the unwillingness to face what is or feel what is, uncomfortable.

Labeling emotions—fear, anger, shame, anxiety, disgust as bad! Because these emotions are the ones that make us uncomfortable. 

But joy, gladness, peace, excitement are good because these emotions are comfortable. 

—then more so, what the fruit of dualistic thinking always leads to: toxic shame. 

It is this false labeling as negative or good that causes shame to infringe on the totality of what it simply means to be human, to feel. 

Shame piling on top of us when we feel an emotion like anger and we believe we are bad for it—therefore fracturing from ourselves internally. Our painful and uncomfortable emotions like little kids put in timeout, ‘you can come back once you’re done acting out!’

Shame is rooted in distrust: broken trust within the self, a lack of feeling safe and accepted within which leads to hiding—from others, God and the self. 

A lack of trust and security inside the swirling questions— “Am I good?” “Am I acceptable in this?” “Am I worthy of love like this?” “I am wrong.” “I should be better.” 

 “Am I good?”

Which then, ironically, only keeps us stuck in the very emotions we want to rid ourselves from; held inside the Chinese handcuff of shame.

Feeling as if we are wrong because we feel—anger, anxiety, fear, sadness. 

Yet, in truth, there are no negative emotions.

Emotions are neither good or bad. We’re the ones that have labeled them as such, based off how they make us feel.

But they just are and ever further, they are all good. 

They are defibrillators of the heart, reminding us, that we care. That we are alive. That we have a heart filled with hunger and desire. That it is beautiful and good to be affected. 

Emotions are signals on the dashboard of the heart. 

They are meaningful and kind to teach us how we are affected by others and the world around us. 

It is important to acknowledge them fully for what they are—to listen and sit with what they are telling us about ourselves in our depths, in our belief systems—to trust what that are revealing to us, especially when what they are revealing is painful to face. 

Because ultimately, feelings don’t lead us—belief systems do.

It’s crucial to embrace our emotions and to resist dissociating from them because of shame. 

Again and again, this is different than allowing our emotions to overwhelm us, act irrationally or lead us down destructive paths; especially down paths of sin. 

Our emotions overwhelm us when we fracture from them.

Sin—let’s chat about it real quick. 

The bedrock of all sin is pride. 

It is a white-gripped form of control. A narcissistic, selfish refusal of surrender. A head in the clouds avoidance of making humble contact with reality—with what is really going on in the emotions/thoughts of the heart, ignoring warning signs inside a fractured numbing, altogether disconnected in a state of coping, terrified internally, grabbing onto control for dear life inside a blindfolding self-reliance; it is a total self-abandoning of the heart, a distortion of what it truly means to be human, if unchecked—leading one to utter & marred disillusionment—to dehumanization and death. 

Inside the selfishness of sin, all becomes blurry, like obliviously choosing to wear glasses that you just crunched under your feet on a concrete sidewalk: all is in a fractured state—down is up, and up is down and we no longer trust in what God has said is good—including, ourselves. 

Emotions—the heart, cannot be faced or embraced fully if we feel shame around certain feelings or that it is sinful to feel feelings like anxiety, anger, sadness, pain and/or anything that feels uncomfortable.  

It is not sinful to feel anxiety, anger, sadness, etc…it is sinful when we do not yield to God inside our anxiety, anger, sadness and choose to make humble contact with the truth of what is truly going on inside of ourselves with the help of Holy Spirit. 

We abandon and detach from ourselves internally when we label emotions inside us as negative and “untrustworthy”. 

Ignoring our emotions is turning our back on reality.

Listening to our emotions ushers us into reality.

And reality is where we meet God.

I’ve too often, seen this statement in the church—lead way to many, to live in a fractured state of trust with God and themselves. Unable to reconcile trust inside the full spectrum of emotions within themselves. 

There are no negative emotions.

All emotions are good. 

It is a gift to feel. 

Feelings are a gift. 

They are teachers. 

Even pain is a privilege, it means we’re alive. 

“Emotions are the language of the soul. They are the cry that gives the heart a voice…however, we often turn a deaf ear — through emotional denial, distortion, or disengagement. We strain out anything disturbing in order to gain tenuous control of our inner world. We are frightened and ashamed of what leaks into our consciousness.”
― Peter Scazzero

“But an authentic relationship with Christ also takes us into the depths — the shadows, the strongholds and the darkness deep within our own souls that must be purged. Surrendering to this inward and downward journey is difficult and painful.”
― Peter Scazzero,

The call of the christian faith is to continually commit to making humble contact with the fullness of reality.

No longer avoiding, running, rationalizing, justifying, but laying down our narcissistic need for control and completely yielding.

Stepping fully into the light, vulnerable, naked and needy, surrendering our whole selves to His kindness—unraveling from shame, fully living in contact with reality.

Highly Recommended Book References:

The Voice of The Heart by Chip Dodd

Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero