It was 2 P.M. on a Saturday.
I was lying down on a couch in the basement of a man who’s become a sort of spiritual father to me over the years, staring at the ceiling.
I hadn’t slept much the night before, tossing and turning as I ruminated about a recent conversation I had with a loved one, which signaled that our lives in the next season would likely look quite different than the last.
The issue was that I really loved the previous season and wasn’t ready to see it end.
I felt waves of emotions that I didn’t understand as my friend put his hand on my head, prayed for me, and encouraged me with Scripture.
Among the emotions I felt as he prayed for me was embarrassment.
It is, quite literally, my job to help men figure out their emotions. Yet here I was…sitting in a pile of emotions that I had no idea how to make sense of.
What exactly are we supposed to do when we have no idea how to make sense of what we feel?
If you’ve ever asked yourself that question in frustration, now you know—so have I.
What exactly are we supposed to do when we have no idea how to make sense of what we feel?
So let’s try to answer that question together.
What is “Emotional Intelligence?”
Before we directly tackle the question at hand today, let’s backtrack a bit and talk about the concept of emotional intelligence.
In essence, emotional intelligence is our ability to reason about emotions and use them to guide our thinking and actions.
In other words, it’s our ability to accurately make sense of our own and others’ emotions and to steward them purposefully.
It’s an important skill for every man because decades of psychological research have linked it to everything from more effective leadership to better job performance, to greater relationship satisfaction, and higher life satisfaction.
Emotional intelligence is our ability to reason about emotions and use them to guide our thinking and actions.
So, here’s the deal: a man’s ability to make sense of his emotional life is a skill that matters significantly in almost every arena of his life.
Thankfully, it’s a skill that we can grow by learning and practicing emotional processing.
So What is “Emotional Processing?”
The beauty of the concept of emotional processing is that it reminds us that making sense of our emotions is a process we go through, not a technique to be mastered.
After years of studying this clinically, I still find that I have to go through this process personally.
Before we go into what this process looks like, I need to dispel some myths by telling you what it’s not.
Emotional processing is not trying to feel emotions more intensely, nor is it trying to get rid of those emotions.
Most men fall into one of two traps: either ignoring/distrusting their emotions, or, on the other side of the ditch, becoming controlled by emotions they don’t understand.
When we don’t know how to process emotions, we get stuck either in avoidance (i.e., “I don’t want to feel this,”) or rumination (i.e., “I can’t stop thinking about this.”).
Here’s the thing: emotions never disappear…they just change form.
Trying to suppress or deny emotions often leads to irritability, anger, chronic anxiety, numbness, or repeated relational conflicts.
Most men end up stuck in those places.
Emotions never disappear…they just change form.
So, how do we get out of them?
I like to think of the healthy processing of emotions as consisting of four steps:
1. Experiencing the Emotions
The first step is important because we’re often tempted to avoid facing our emotions, which delays their processing and leaves us stuck. We want to stay with the emotions—which isn’t easy—in a thoughtful and mindful way.
2. Understanding the Emotions
If we’re able to stay with the emotions, we can begin to understand them. The key to understanding what we feel is accurately naming it. As psychologist Daniel Siegel puts it, we have to “name it to tame it.” This is where every therapist’s best friend—the feelings wheel—can come in handy. Having someone else present to ask you questions about what you’re feeling (e.g., “What is this emotion trying to tell you?”) can also be helpful. For me, as I lay on that couch, it took some time for me to understand and clearly name that what I was feeling was the emotion of grief.
3. Integrating the Emotions
As we begin to accurately name and understand our emotions, we can begin to accept them and integrate them into the broader story of our lives. As we explore our emotions, we can begin to connect them to our past experiences, core beliefs, needs, and most importantly, our deepest values. In this phase of emotional processing, we’re trying to find the meaning underneath our emotions. Often, if we dig deep enough, many of our intense emotions actually reveal our deepest values. For instance, anger tells us that something is getting in the way or threatening what we value most, while sadness or grief tells us that what we’ve lost is something we deeply love.
4. Responding to the Emotions
Once we’ve found the core value beneath the emotion and integrated it into the story of our lives, we’re able to respond wisely to the emotion, adapt, and move forward. Whether the emotion calls for responses like action, persistence, acceptance, grieving, forgiveness, or repentance, accurately integrating it gives us insight into what to do with it next.
Ultimately, emotional processing is not about eliminating emotions, nor is it about being dominated by them.
It’s about acknowledging them, understanding them, and ultimately, as a disciple of Christ, bringing them into a relationship with the Lord.
Meeting God with Our Emotions
The Book of Psalms is filled with example after example of the healthy processing of emotions within the context of relationship with the Lord.
We can find one of the clearest biblical pictures of all 4 steps of healthy emotional processing in Psalm 73, where the writer records his experience of the various phases of emotional processing.
In Psalm 73:14 (“For all day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning…”), we see the Psalmist fully experiencing the pain of what he’s carrying in his daily life.
Earlier in Psalm 73:3 (“For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked…”), we see that the Psalmist has come to understand what he felt, which has allowed him to accurately name his painful emotion as envy.
Then in Psalm 73:16-17, we see him integrating the emotion into his ultimate value for the presence of God (“…when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God…”).
As a result, he was able to repent of the painful emotion and step into an appropriate response: worship. In Psalm 73:24-26, we see some of the most passionate words of worship in the entire book of Psalms (e.g., “…there is nothing on earth that I desire besides You.”). A meaningful, eternally significant response was birthed out of the healthy processing of his initial emotion of envy.
Ultimately, if men can just stay with our emotions long enough to make sense of them, we will find ourselves growing in our emotional health, and may even discover some eternal purposes within them, as we see in Psalm 73.
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