The six deadly emotions

If you've ever felt trapped by one or many emotions and unable to dig your way out, this one is for you.

You've heard of the seven deadly sins. We do a pretty good job of avoiding those. But what about our emotions? Why talk about emotions? Because emotions are really just how we feel. They drive how we move through our life and our days.

Emotions are a response to something external.

Sometimes these responses are based on learned patterns and sometimes stuff just happens. In the short term, emotions are natural. They're normal. They're no big deal.

Ultimately we need to feel through our emotions so we don't bottle them up and stuff them down into some crazy little corner of our brain where we decide that we're either going to deal with it later or just not going to deal with it at all.

When we're locked in a negative feeling and we can't seem to move through it or past it, that's when life gets really hard, really fast. So for the purposes of this post, I'm going to call this the six deadly emotions.

And again, they can all be normal.

It's when we stay locked in those patterns is when the problems begin.

The first emotion I wanted to touch on is fear. Fear is a response to a perceived threat which can be real or imagined. It triggers a sense of danger or helplessness. Fear is really designed to protect.

When it goes sideways is when we leave it unchecked, or it stems from limiting beliefs, or it's not even dealing with an actual danger.

If fear is designed to protect, then the opposite of fear is safety.

Fear can signal where trust needs to be restored in order to reestablish safety.

Fear is a response to a perceived threat. We are most likely, very safe.

This is where our own thoughts on how to handle the world come into play. How you handle the world and what you perceive as a threat may be totally different from someone else.

Also, the threat could be real or imagined. Why would we be afraid of something imagined? An example may be—if a mom thinks that she's not doing enough for her kids, she starts overextending herself. She's afraid that she's lacking.

She's not, but she's imagining that she is.

So in fear, we need to look for safety. How we handle that fear and how long we plan to sit in it are going to affect our quality of life.

Next is anger. This definition is similar to fear. Anger is a reaction to a perceived injustice, violation, or frustration. Anger is not inherently bad or sinful, but what it does do is it reveals where boundaries have been crossed or where maybe pain exists underneath.

Anger is a reaction to a perceived injustice. How what you perceive as an injustice and what I perceive as an injustice can be two different things.

Anger is an indicator to us that there is a deeper pain about something that we need to work through and to deal with.

If it's a boundary that's been crossed, why aren't we holding our boundaries? Why are we allowing them to be crossed? If it is a place where you don't have that kind of control over the situation and people are crossing boundaries, why are you in that situation?

Anger is an indicator that something's wrong. We have to go back and we have to take a look at what is going on that's making us feel that anger. We need to take a step back and then, instead of reacting in anger, we need to feel the anger. That doesn't mean that we need to lash out. We need to take a step back and then turn our next move into something healthy. We reevaluate what’s going on or just identify what the root cause of that anger is.

Is it a pain? Is it a boundary? Is it a frustration? What is it? And why are we feeling that anger? Which again is not wrong. It's just a trigger. It's a beacon to us to know that something is wrong and we need to fix it.

As for sadness, it is more that feeling of loss or disappointment or somebody didn't meet your expectations.

Sadness, too, is another place to pause, but we pause because we may be grieving or just have some kind of loss that we need to deal with and we need to take a look at what's mattering in our heart.

Typically sadness has to do with something that we did hold dear to ourselves, to our heart.

It offers an opportunity for healing and introspection.

We forget that even in the Bible, even Jesus got sad. He wept on several occasions. When he lost friends, when he was sad. When he was facing persecution and death, he was sad. He was sad for many things.

As moms, we can feel sadness when as we watch our children grow and we have that realization that life is changing fast. What we enjoyed when they were little is no longer because they are becoming their own people. Not only that, also sad that our role is changing in their life which affects our identity. When kids are young we're doing everything for them. As they get older and they become more independent and they think and act more independently, they don't need us as much. What do we do with that role as mother?

That can be very saddening for us. But it's also the time to grieve the stage of life that we're moving out of and looking forward to what matters most.

Hurt is the emotional pain resulting from being wounded by words, actions, or unmet needs. With both sadness and hurt, there can be unmet expectations and unmet needs.

Hurt often shows up before anger or sadness and can sometimes be tied to vulnerability and to attachment.

Now, it's okay to be vulnerable and it is okay to be healthily attached.

But sometimes even those things, when taken to another level, can be very limiting to us.

We're hurt because maybe someone is talking about us behind our back. Or because someone said that they don't think you're a good parent because you're doing X, Y, and Z.

When they first say these things to you, then it really does hit you as hurt. Then when we stew over the hurt for a while, that's when it can move into anger, but it can also move into sadness.

Maybe it’s because you believe what they've said.

So hurt really needs truth.

It needs a little more tenderness than some of these other things. Hurt is an indicator to us that we need to look at why we're hurting. We still need to feel that hurt. We need to move through it.

We need to take a look and see where this hurt is coming from? Why is this hurting me so much?

Do I feel like somebody's attacking me? Do I feel like I'm actually not doing a good job?

And I don't know about you, but those are things that I can sometimes grapple with.

Sometimes people say things without a cruel intention, but when we're already in a hurt mindset, we get hurt by it. We kind of create our own hurt in that situation.

Hurt can spiral out of control into some of these other emotions. But again, it's a trigger.

These last two emotions can seem similar. I'm going to go through them both individually but then I want to point out the differences between the two.

These two emotions are guilt and shame.

Guilt is just that feeling that comes up from doing something wrong or that you failed to meet a moral or some kind of relational standard and it's action focused.

For example, when...

You yell at your child, you feel guilty. Because you don't want to yell at him.

The action is to apologize and to commit to doing things better in the next go-round when they drive you crazy and up the wall.

Guilt can be almost redemptive when it leads you to repentance or repair or growth. Guilt can lead to life. It's learning from your mistakes. It can bring some clarity.

When we look at shame...

Shame is a feeling of being inherently flawed, unworthy, or bad as a person. It's identity focused and it's destructive.

For example, saying, “I'm bad.” “I did wrong.”

Shame isolates you. Shame corrodes your self-worth. For example, feeling shame for not keeping a perfectly clean and tidy house. We take that and we make that a reflection of our identity.

And that's where we start to self-destruct.

We forget that shame is not from God, because God doesn't define us by our worst moments.

Guilt and shame hit us a lot. Whether we choose to admit it or not, they're there.

For comparison, guilt, again, is that I actually did something wrong, versus shame, it's more of something's wrong with me.

Where guilt may motivate change and repair, shame leads to hiding, withdrawal, or disconnection from the world, from your loved ones, from everything that you might hold dear.

Where guilt comes down to confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation, what shame needs is truth, love, and grace.

Shame requires us to work on self-worth and identity in Christ.

The key point is to take is that emotions are normal. It's when we let them spin out of control that it can start to have a negative effect on your life. They can be deadly—particularly shame, because shame tears away your self-worth.

There is a phrase by Samantha Skelly that says, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”

You always have a choice whether to stay locked in those negative emotional patterns and to suffer, or will you use these emotions as a way to learn, to change, to grow, to recognize that something deeper is off. Then take what you've learned and change and live.

I encourage you to think about which of these six emotions of those six seems like it's currently running the show. I want you to look at it, take some time to dig into it, and see what the root cause might be. How can I learn? How can I change? And how can I grow from this? How can I turn it into something positive?