Reading Emotions

What happens when we get stuck in unhealthy patterns? How do we let Jesus into the broken places and step into spiritual and emotional wholeness? In this episode, Gina has a conversation with Ali Ash about the things that get in the way of healthy relationship with God, ourselves and each other.

Ali Ash is a certified Life Purpose Coach. She is also certified in the Restoration Therapy Model, a TRR (The Relationship Resource) trainer and has been cultivating healthy leadership for the nonprofit world for over 10 years. She is passionate about coming alongside people where their mental and emotional health intersects with Spiritual Formation. Seeing people find a renewal of hope, joy and purpose through intentional holistic living is her sweet spot. She and her husband Ryan have been married for 20 years and live in San Diego, CA with their 3 boys.

Follow along below starting at 12:54.

Our Emotions are Indicators

Gina:

It’s easy for believers to dismiss emotions, we shouldn’t be ruled by them, but if you don’t receive them and look at them and go, “Why am I angry? Why am I hurt?” Those are clues to the roots, the things that those are manifesting, something that’s deeper and emotional health is a part of spiritual health.

Like you were saying, they’re integrated. I work with a ministry called Soul Shepherding. They’re doctors of psychology, spiritual directors, and they minister to pastors and leaders to bring emotionally relationally healthy leadership to the church. Let’s just be honest. It’s one of the unhealthiest places, ironically.

That here we know Jesus, we have the Gospel, we have hope, trust Him, all these things. Yet we struggle so much in how we relate with Him and each other. We bring baggage into all of these relationships. Bill Gaultier has an article, one of the founders, wrote about Jesus being an emotionally healthy leader.

He counted in the Gospels, and found that Jesus has 39 different emotions that He goes through from anger to heartbreak to all of the things. It is possible to yield our emotions to the submission of Jesus.

There’s balance, it’s so easy for us to want to throw the baby out with the bath water. We swing the pendulum from emotional, to psychology is bad. We just go running the other direction and want to negate all of the things rather than coming into this. Where do these things intersect, the truth of God’s Word and the Gospel and the way Jesus lived his life, the way He interacted with people, the way He cared for His disciples, the way He gave them permission to get it right and get it wrong.

How do we allow that for ourselves, and then for others? Because it’s one thing to allow it for myself. I’m in the body of Christ, I’m in spiritual community, I’m in my family. How do I give permission for people to be in process and on a journey and have the grace and empathy and compassion for one another in that process?

Ali:

As adults, usually we don’t start to think about some of these things until we’re actually in relationship as adults, I’m learning that, of course we want to be present and future focused, in the sense where we don’t want to dwell in the past, but I’m realizing that when we’re willing to look back and understand where we’ve come from, it’s really helpful to understand how we got where we are and then what changes, possibly, could we make in the direction of our future.

You see in God’s Word, from Genesis to Revelation, a lot of people are looking back for the purpose of it, launching them forward for future promise and also to understand and remind themselves of what God has done and His faithfulness. In our own lives, if you’re willing to look back and go, “What can I take with me that might be helpful to help me understand why I’m so anxious? Why am I so anxious right now?”

Anxiety is something that is more and more prevalent. Currently as Gina and I are talking, we’re still in the midst of the COVID Pandemic. One of the main struggles with people right now is looking at anxiety and seeing that anxiety is actually meant to help them. It’s an emotion that’s meant to show me that I’m at the end of myself and something needs to change.

As you start to unpack anxiety, what is it rooted in? What can it encourage or motivate you to change? Helping our self-talk around anxiety by saying, “Anxiety you’re uncomfortable. I don’t like the way you feel, but you can’t hurt me. Actually you can help me.” If I look into what I could be addressing? From where it came from? What could help me make some changes in what I’m doing?

Another example could be, you’re feeling like you have such a short fuse and you at any moment can fly off the handle with anger. What’s underneath that anger? If you’re willing to pause and ask yourself. Anger’s a secondary emotion. Underneath that anger, am I feeling rejection? Am I feeling abandonment? Am I feeling unwanted?

What we unpack in our skills workshops is, actually looking back to the first time we remember feeling that. When was the first time you remember feeling rejected or unwanted and a lot of times, as silly as it sounds to say out loud, we’ll have a memory from like third grade or second grade.

An example could be, a second grader goes out to play on the playground and a sixth grader takes their backpack and throws their backpack and all their books fall out. That isn’t necessarily traumatizing, but when that little, second grader goes home and looks for mom or dad to tell them about their day and either perceives or the reality is, that mom or dad isn’t available, then now they have all of these emotions that they don’t have tools to process.

Now this event becomes traumatizing instead of just something traumatic that they learn to process and get the skills for by having mom or dad to talk through it with. That’s just an example of how something that we might dismiss as something silly as a little person now influences how we feel as an adult.

When we get that old familiar feeling in our body of being rejected or abandoned or unwanted. Now we think it’s circumstantial to the actual person that we’re in a relationship with. When in reality, they’re just revealing an old familiar wound that was never able to be processed from that little second grader who had their backpack thrown on the playground. There’s all sorts of examples like that.

Now I’m getting into another topic that we talk through in workshop and in coaching called some of the epigenetics or some of the intergenerational transference of trauma, which is a big word basically to say that, as babies, we’re not born with clean hard drives, we’re born with stress responses, that have been passed down to us from mom or dad or from even grandma and grandpa.

There’s this whole other way to understand what’s going on in our brains and in our bodies that if we start to get insight to, can make it less scary, can help us take self agency. Help us see what my choices are now that I know what I know. To live intentionally and to not let this emotion overwhelm me to the point where I’m now feeling isolated, but it can actually inspire and motivate me to make some changes to live an intentional life.

Finding Freedom Through Reading Emotions

Gina:

I want to bring something in. I love this because, depending on maybe the tradition that I was raised in, in my spiritual life, maybe I was raised in a Lutheran Catholic, or maybe I was raised in a very Evangelical, like a Calvary Chapel, or a very Charismatic or Pentecostal environment. We can presume that these things are contrary to maybe what we grew up with.

When you’re even talking about trauma, that we’re not necessarily clean slate when we’re born, that trauma can come with us from generational things in a charismatic world, we might say that’s generational sin or curses or things that have gone through the family line. None of these things are contrary. And that’s what I think is so powerful that if we can look at that.

I’ll just share a little bit of my story. Both of my parents were alcoholics. My parents were not married. Both my parents were adopted. My dad was adopted, my mom was adopted. Although there’s juries out on this, it’s either both parents adopted her or she was my grandmother’s biological, crazy story, a lot there.

My mom battled with alcoholism and bulimia, felt completely rejected. Hard things. Her mom was essentially sold into a marriage when she was 17, a very abusive situation. It just goes back and back and back. Here’s my mom. My mom has me. I’m born into this, it’s a dysfunctional family, but I’m also carrying the weight of all of these things that have tormented the women in my family.

When my mom died, I was 30, that’s a whole another story. I would love to share the testimony of that. God showed up in really profound ways, but she died succumb to her drinking, her alcoholism. The Lord picked me up and there were miraculous things I was seeing happening all around. It was amazing. After about a month, it felt like God put me down. It felt like everything that had a torment in my mom came after me.

I thought I was going to hurt my kids, start drinking. It was an all out assault on my spirit, my emotion, my everything. I did go and receive prayer. It was this sweet couple in their sixties and they prayed and I received significant deliverance. God set me free from some oppressive demonic things that had been passed on that had been tormenting my family, but the guy who prayed for even said, “Okay, these things are gone. They’re not on you or in you. However, that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to knock on your door again, that they’re not going to whisper those familiar things.”

It was powerful. It was beautiful. It was emotional. Those familiar temptations, in some circles called familiar spirits, they will come and try to make themselves at home again, but now I can recognize them. I can identify them. I can call them out for what they are. And I can now take those thoughts captive.

Because if you go earlier in that verse, “I’ve given you the authority to tear down every stronghold and high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.” Now, I’m armed with the knowledge of who God is, who I am. Identifying what is me, what is not. Now, I have the authority to take those thoughts captive. The things that you’re saying, they’re not contradictory to the Spirit. They’re not contradictory to the Word. They’re not contradictory to the supernatural work of God in my life.

They are acknowledging those things and then empowering me to then walk them out. I love that you talked about anxiety. I think there’s so much, even in the Christian world about anxiety, about how to deal with the symptoms of the anxiety in the moment, like breathing, those are very good. How to deescalate the emotion.

But I love that you’re going, “This can’t hurt me. This is actually telling me something.” Not just looking at the anxiety, how do I just get rid of it, but how do I actually use that anxiety to experience further freedom?

Ali:

Just to address that topic, trying to ignore or suppress the anxiety actually is what leads us into panic attacks. If we’re able to just acknowledge it and find there’s that panic, there’s that anxiety, there she comes. “You know what? Anxiety you’re uncomfortable, but you can’t hurt me.” You actually address it by acknowledgement and process. What it’s feeling like? Even though it’s uncomfortable and we don’t want to, it’s actually really helpful to then, start to release whatever it is that has been built up to the point where you feel like you’re going to panic.

Going back to what you shared. I love your story, Gina. I love that, not only are you a miraculous daughter of Jesus, who is now living in this whole other world. When you talk about where you came from, just genetically and your parents and grandparents, it really is miraculous. You are able to see, even though you had people will say it’s just the way I am.

It’s the way my mom was. It’s the way my grandma was. It’s just the cards I was dealt. Now you’re saying, “No, actually God’s Word says that we’re free, indeed.” Jesus came to give us this life and life abundant and filled with joy and peace. If we know that and we see what God’s Word says, but then we live in this broken world where our experience is much different.

What we’re both talking about and we get excited about, is reconciling those two. And learning how to, not only, address and deal with and acknowledge the brokenness, but then to go after and even receive what God says, and what He came to do and why Jesus even exists.

I did want to address, when you look at the beginning in Genesis, God created us and He created us in His image and we were outside in the garden in this perfect love relationship with the Lord and with another person. You see that God cares about human relationship as well. Then you see Genesis 3, sin enters the world, and now we’re still here living in this broken world yet with the hope of what’s to come and a victory already in Jesus.

It’s really powerful when you can start to dive into the truth of what God says. But then what you were sharing, that you still had some of the struggles and the maybe tendencies to cope through some of the things that you shared, you saw your mom struggle with, or your dad struggle with. We say in class a lot that “The brain does what’s easy, comfortable, and practiced until you teach it something new. It’s going to do what it’s always done.”