Untangle Your Emotions

Picture this: You're standing in your kitchen making dinner when your adult daughter casually mentions her dreams of adventure—perhaps moving out of state, maybe even out of the country for a few years. It should be a normal conversation about young dreams and possibilities. Instead, your chest tightens, your breathing becomes shallow, and waves of anxiety crash over you like a tsunami. You manage to hold it together in the moment, but later you're left wondering: where did that overwhelming reaction come from?

This scenario isn't unusual. Most of us have experienced moments when our emotional response far exceeds what a situation seems to warrant. We find ourselves crying over minor disappointments, raging over small inconveniences, or feeling mysteriously anxious about perfectly ordinary circumstances. We've learned to control these reactions, cope with them through various distractions, or conceal them entirely—anything to avoid the discomfort of actually feeling what we feel. Yet these buried emotions don't disappear; they create tangles in our hearts that affect every relationship and every decision we make. Understanding how to untangle these emotional knots isn't just about feeling better—it's about living fully alive, deeply connected to ourselves, others, and God in ways we never thought possible.

Kate had just gotten married in the most beautiful ceremony imaginable. Everything was perfect—the weather, the venue, the joy of family and friends celebrating this wonderful union. There was so much to be grateful for, so much happiness to embrace. But within weeks of the wedding, when Kate began talking about her dreams for the future with her new husband Charlie, something shifted dramatically. Over dinner one evening, she mentioned possibilities of adventure, of travel, of experiences "out of the state" and "maybe out of the country" for "a few years."

The words hit like a physical blow. The room seemed to close in, breathing became difficult, and panic set in. This wasn't a rational response to a daughter's natural desire for adventure with her spouse. This was something much deeper, something that had been waiting in the shadows for years. The trigger wasn't really about Kate's dreams at all—it was about an old wound that had never fully healed.

Years earlier, during a terrifying period when her husband Zac lay in a hospital bed with dangerously high blood pressure that doctors couldn't control, she had learned what it felt like to face the possibility of being left alone. Night after night, she would wake up to check if he was still breathing, consumed by the fear that he might not survive. The medical crisis had passed, but the fear of abandonment had taken root deep in her heart.

When we experience overwhelming emotions that seem disproportionate to our current circumstances, we're often encountering what therapists call triggered responses—our present situation is activating unresolved pain from our past. The fear behind the fear of Kate moving away wasn't really about geography; it was about the terror of being left alone that had been planted during those hospital vigils. Our emotions are trying to tell us something important about wounds that need attention, memories that need healing, and fears that need to be brought into the light where they can finally find peace.

Standing at the stove one evening while preparing dinner for her family, she felt that familiar itch in her mind and soul—that nagging sense that something wasn't quite right. Her teenage son was lamenting relationship drama, another child was making a case for money needed for something urgent, and her husband was getting increasingly exasperated with both kids. The natural response would have been to pour a glass of wine, blow past everything to get dinner on the table, or explode at everyone to just stop. Instead, she chose a different path.

For the first time in years, she paused and asked herself a simple but revolutionary question: "How am I feeling?" The answer came clearly: "Not okay." This wasn't fine, the default response she'd been giving for decades. This was honest acknowledgment that something was stirring beneath the surface that needed attention.

This moment of noticing marked the beginning of a different way of living. Most of us have become experts at observing everything except our own emotional states. We notice when celebrities have new relationships, when our grocery store stocks our favorite items, when someone gives us a strange look. But ask us how we're really feeling, and we reflexively respond with "fine"—that masterful word that covers up every uncomfortable truth about our inner lives.

The cost of not noticing our emotions is higher than we realize. Research shows that suppressing emotions can increase our risk of premature death by thirty percent and raise our cancer risk by seventy percent. We were designed to feel, and when we disconnect from our emotional reality, we disconnect from our own aliveness. Learning to notice means moving from "fine" to honest categories like "okay" or "not okay." It means paying attention to what our bodies are telling us through tight shoulders, racing hearts, or churning stomachs. The path to emotional health begins with the courage to stop, listen, and acknowledge what's actually happening inside us, even when it's uncomfortable or inconvenient.

"How does that make you feel?" became the most dreaded question in counseling sessions—not because it was intrusive, but because finding an answer felt impossible. After decades of operating primarily from thoughts rather than emotions, the vocabulary for inner experience had all but disappeared. It was like being a kindergartner again, needing to learn basic emotional words that others seemed to know instinctively.

This struggle with naming emotions is more common than we might think. Many of us weren't taught to identify feelings, or we were actively discouraged from giving voice to them. We learned that some emotions might be sinful, that expressing feelings was burdensome to others, or that staying busy was easier than staying present to our inner landscape. The result is a generation of adults who can analyze complex situations but can't tell you whether they're feeling disappointed, frustrated, or afraid.

The process of learning emotional vocabulary began with understanding four primary emotions: joy, anger, sadness, and fear. But even these broad categories needed refinement. Sadness might actually be disappointment about being excluded, or despair over a terminal diagnosis. Anger might be irritation at a minor inconvenience, or rage over a serious injustice. The goal became emotional granularity—the ability to describe feelings with nuanced precision rather than generic terms.

What's fascinating about this precision is its direct connection to health and wellbeing. Research shows that people who can specifically describe their emotional states experience better mental health, physical health, and relational connections. The more accurately we can name what's happening inside us, the more flexibility we gain in responding to those emotions. Like ancient practices of naming to claim authority, learning to name our emotions helps us partner with them rather than be controlled by them. This isn't about managing or fixing feelings, but about developing the vocabulary to honor and understand the rich emotional landscape that makes us fully human.

The retreat setting felt both familiar and terrifying. Surrounded by beloved friends who had known her for a decade, she found herself preparing to do something that felt completely foreign—share not just what she thought about her struggles, but how she actually felt. Years of being the fixer, the problem-solver, the one who helped others work through their issues, had left her unpracticed in the art of vulnerability.

When her turn came to speak, the words poured out through tears: anger at God for calling her so far out into ministry and then seemingly abandoning her there, exhaustion from the relentless pressure, fear that she might disappoint the very God she was trying to serve. The tears came in waves, the kind that make breathing difficult and cause others to shift uncomfortably in their seats.

The initial responses from her friends were predictably helpful but ultimately unhelpful: "God isn't like that." "This just isn't true." "Something else must be going on." Their instinct was to fix, to correct, to redirect her away from the uncomfortable emotions toward more palatable truths. But when the facilitator asked how she felt about their responses, she chose honesty over politeness: "I feel hurt. I thought it was safe to share this with you, but now I feel judged for feeling what I feel."

Everything shifted when her friends moved from trying to fix her feelings to simply feeling with her. "I feel sad that you feel misunderstood," one friend offered. "I feel proud of you for being honest with us." These simple "I feel" statements accomplished what all their theological corrections could not—they created connection. The knots in her soul began to loosen not because her circumstances changed, but because she no longer felt alone in carrying them.

This is how emotional healing actually works. We don't heal in isolation; we heal in relationship. When someone bears witness to our pain without trying to rush us past it, when they stay present with our struggle instead of offering quick solutions, something profound happens in our nervous system. The neural pathways that trauma has damaged begin to reconnect. The parts of us that have felt unseen and unsafe finally experience the comfort of being known. Sharing our emotional reality isn't just about getting things off our chest—it's about remembering that we were never meant to carry the weight of life alone.

After noticing, naming, feeling, and sharing our emotions, we inevitably arrive at a crucial junction: what do we do with what we feel? Even when we've honored our emotional reality and found safe people to share it with, we still must choose how to respond. This choosing isn't about controlling our emotions or making them disappear—it's about letting them fulfill their intended purpose of drawing us closer to God and to each other.

The first choice is always to bring our feelings to God, not as problems to be solved but as invitations to deeper relationship. When anger rises, instead of exploding at others or stuffing it down, we can run to the One who understands righteous indignation. When fear overwhelms us, we can seek refuge in the God who promises to be our shelter. When sadness threatens to pull us under, we can turn to the One who is close to the brokenhearted. Our emotions become prayer, a constant conversation with the God who feels deeply and wants to walk with us through every valley and celebration.

Sometimes our emotional responses signal the need for concrete action. Persistent anxiety might require counseling or medical attention. Ongoing sadness might need professional support or lifestyle changes. Recurring anger might indicate unhealthy patterns that need interrupting. The goal isn't to eliminate difficult emotions but to let them guide us toward the help and healing we need. This might mean uncomfortable conversations, boundary-setting, or significant life changes—whatever is necessary for wholeness.

The most important choice is often the decision to stay engaged rather than retreat into old patterns of control, coping, or concealment. When life feels overwhelming, the temptation is always to go back to what feels safe and familiar, even if it's ultimately destructive. But choosing to remain open to our emotional experience, even when it's messy and unpredictable, is choosing to remain open to the fullness of life itself. It's choosing connection over isolation, authenticity over performance, and growth over stagnation.

This ongoing choice to engage with our emotions rather than resist them transforms not just our inner world but our relationships and our capacity to serve others. When we're no longer burning energy trying to manage or avoid our feelings, that energy becomes available for creativity, compassion, and contribution. We discover that the very emotions we once feared are actually the pathways to the abundant life God intended for us all along.

The journey from emotional numbness to wholehearted living isn't about learning to have perfect feelings or never struggling with difficult emotions. It's about discovering that our feelings—all of them—are sacred messengers designed to connect us more deeply to ourselves, to others, and to God. When we learn to notice what we're experiencing, name it with precision, allow ourselves to feel it fully, and share it with safe people, something remarkable happens: the tangled knots in our hearts begin to loosen, and we find ourselves living with an aliveness we had forgotten was possible.

This process requires courage because it means releasing the illusion of control and embracing the beautiful messiness of authentic human experience. It means admitting that "fine" is often a lie, that our struggles are real and valid, and that healing happens not in isolation but in the context of caring relationships. Most importantly, it means trusting that the God who created us with the capacity for joy, anger, sadness, and fear is not threatened by our emotional reality but delighted when we bring our whole selves into relationship with Him. The feelings we've been afraid of are actually the very pathway to the connection, purpose, and peace our hearts have been longing for all along.