Remember These Two Things When Your Emotions Feel out of Control
Embrace God’s Design for Your Emotions
The issue of controlling your emotions when you feel totally out of whack or when you feel like your emotions own you and they just spill out and you can’t manage them is really tricky. It's tricky because what you want when you’re in that situation is to press a button and just have your emotions come under control. I know how I'm going to feel. I can shape how I’m going to feel. Or at the very least, even if I’m feeling stuff inside, then I can control what I do about it. I have myself in a neat, little box that I can control.
And that’s not true for many of us. And we could have a whole other conversation about people who are always originally in control, and that is not necessarily the goal here. But if you are someone who experiences just being out of control, I’d want to say two things.
Untangling Emotions
J. Alasdair Groves, Winston T. Smith
This book sets forth a holistic view of emotions rooted in the Bible, offering a practical approach to engaging with both positive and negative emotions in a God-honoring way.
I want to start with the counterintuitive one. My first thought is there’s actually something deeply right about being out of control of your emotions. We were not made to control our emotions—at least not in that sense. We were made to be affected by the world around us. We were made to be distraught by what makes God distraught. We’re supposed to be horrified by sin and deeply distressed by suffering.
Like Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus. He’s not shedding a tiny, little tear as he looks at the stone rolled across a grave, seeing the impact on his beloved friends, Mary and Martha. He’s weeping. Scripture says he’s troubled and deeply distressed in spirit, depending on the translation.
That idea of being broken up in response to something bad is deeply right and biblical, and the most human of us all, Jesus Christ, displays that. So there’s a right way to say that what you love shapes what you feel. Therefore, when you see something going wonderfully in your church, or you see betrayal, sadness, and damage, you’re meant to be affected by that—not in a way that you can just control.
So, the right piece of this is you are experiencing how you were made to be—vulnerable to the world around you, to love so much that you are, in one sense, at the mercy of the creation and the things happening around you.
We were made to be distraught by what makes God distraught.
Now, of course, there is a flip side. The flip side is we are people who want to grow in self-control. The more we love the Lord, the more we’ll be vulnerable to the hard things that happen in life, and the more we will be grieved by what is grievous.
But there’s also a way in which we want to be ever more focused on others in how we love and how we serve. And there’s a way in which we can get taken over by our emotions, especially the more our emotions are directed inward and towards us, thinking about me and my world. That does have a tendency to pull us away from being able to love, to serve, to move toward, to walk alongside, and to care about the impact on others.
So I would ask where do we aspire to really grow in controlling our emotions? It’s not so much about keeping our emotions tamped down. It’s about being focused on another person so that we can love and serve. It’s about being focused on what is going to bless and glorify the Lord.
And in the midst of that, I think we have the freedom to be undone in grief and to lament more so than we might feel comfortable with. The control comes in loving, serving, and having our hearts oriented outward. That’s what’s going to give us a healthy spillover of emotion into the conversation and a holding back because we’re able to say, What that person needs is for me to ask a question, not for me to fly off the handle or turn into my own little self.
J. Alasdair Groves is coauthor with Winston T. Smith of Untangling Emotions.
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