Episode #25: Sticky and Prickly — Dealing with Our Tricky Holiday Emotions

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Grit ‘n’ Grace: Good Girls Breaking Bad Rules

Episode #25: Sticky and Prickly — Dealing with Our Tricky Holiday Emotions

 

Cheri:

So I want you to do this. This is the letter ‘B’ for babble. When I get off on a riff that really isn’t going anywhere and if I’m really bad…

 

Amy:

I do not think you do that! I always think I do that!

 

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Cheri:

Hey, this is Cheri Gregory, and you’re listening to Grit ‘n’ Grace: Good Girls Breaking Bad Rules.

Welcome to the 8th episode in our Holiday Break series. If you’ve missed any, you can find them all at GritNGrace.info — that’s Grit, the letter N, Grace, all one word, dot info.

Today, my deLIGHT-full co-host, Amy Carroll, and I are discussing why so many of us struggle with our own emotions during the Holiday season … and how to respond to our own tender hearts with compassion, without letting our feelings take control.

Alright, so for this episode we’re talking about our own emotions going into the Christmas season now that it’s December. And the bad rule specifically is that peace and joy are the only acceptable emotions for you to feel. How does that rule work out for you, Amy?

 

Amy:

Not so well. Because I have actually believed this for so long. I didn’t recognize it as a bad rule, I thought it was the rule. Here’s an example, during my pregnancies I was very sick, both of them. It was beyond, people would always say to me, “Honey, put some crackers by your bed when you get up.” Well I tried that day one. So I really wanted to slap people who said that to me. Month two of throwing my guts up every day.

 

Cheri:

Oh no.

 

Amy:

But what happened during that time, this pattern emerged in my life where I really withdrew

from God during both my pregnancies. What I’ve realized about that in retrospect is that I

thought I needed to be cheerful for God.

 

Cheri:

Oh….honey.

 

Amy:

So I’d come to God cheerful. And when I couldn’t be cheerful because I was so sick, I didn’t go

to God.

 

Cheri:

Okay, you’re getting me all choked up here. Keep going.

 

Amy:

Well, I just recognized this pattern in myself. And it’s a long story of how I started to realize

that, but what I realized is that I’ve done this particularly during Christmas. So during the time

when we should feel closest to God, I’m withdrawing from God. During the time I’m supposed

to be feeling closest to other people, I’m kind of withdrawing from them too. Because

inevitably when there are a lot of people around, there are going to be a lot of frustrations.

God’s been redoing my insides for a long, long time. Well since the beginning really, but this

whole idea of perfection particularly in the last decade. But even 2 years ago my family – my

whole extended family, my brother, he has six children, my mom and dad, my whole family –

and we were together on a trip for Christmas. Just like we’re doing for this Christmas, it was

wonderful. We had a great time, but listen. You get that many people in the mix, as you say in

the south, “That’s a lot of fleas on one dog.”

 

Cheri:

I want to become a southerner so bad!

 

Amy:

And you know what fleas do, right? They bite you and make you itch! So it’s the same thing

with a whole gaggle of people! And I had, instead of taking frustrations day by day, moment by

moment to the Lord, I stuffed them. So the last day as we’re packing up, my mother, who is my

biggest cheerleader, one of my best friends in the whole world, she said something to me and I

just snapped her head off! And I even, as I was getting ready for this recording, thought about

that, it brought tears to my eyes because I thought, “If I had dealt with the frustrations one by

one and taken to them to God and surrendered them instead, it would’ve been different.”

 

Cheri:

Yeah. Wow. Wow. For me, I grew up with the sense that emotions were the enemy. And that

reason was what made us truly human and truly Christian. And so logic and emotions were

always pitted against each other. So the first time I saw the Disney move Frozen, I like just

bawled the whole way through. And that song, “Conceal Don’t Feel, don’t let your emotions

show, don’t let others know how you’re feeling,” totally resonated with me. And what I’ve come

to realize, in part, because thanks to the movie Inside Out, I don’t know what it says about me

that I learn the most from Pixar and Disney movies, we just won’t even analyze that at all.

But emotions aren’t the problem. It’s my reactions to my emotions that are the problem.

Feeling anger, or feeling jealousy, or feeling any of them is not an issue. And I do get a little

frustrated because I see out on social media all sorts of advice to wrangle your emotions to the

ground’. It’s like, “No, no, no. As soon as it’s turned into a reaction, it’s not the emotion

anymore. It’s the reaction. It’s the habit. It’s that instinct, the knee-jerk response that we have.

That’s the issue.” And the emotion isn’t actually the issue. The emotion is just the expression of

the beliefs and the attitudes, in what we call the bad rules that are the instigator of those

emotions. If you want to change the emotion, you have to go all the way back to the beliefs and

the attitudes and break the bad rules. Break the bad rule, and it’ll have a trickle-down effect.

And the emotions will change.

But if all we do is squash the emotions down… you know, Brené Brown has told us from her

research that we can’t selectively repress emotions. And so if we’re going to squash down the

negative, we’re also squashing down, as I’m sure you’ve experienced as you withdrew, it meant

you were also withdrawing from love, and joy, and peace, and happiness, and all the positive

emotions. We can’t just pick and choose. There’s a book called The Listening Life by Adam

McHugh and he has a quote I just love. He says, “We ought to listen to our emotions before we

start preaching to them. Let’s not tell them what to do before they tell us what they are already

doing.”

 

Amy:

Ohhhhh….so good. And I want to piggyback on that because I think that you said we react to

our emotions based on our beliefs.

 

Cheri:

Yes.

 

Amy:

What I realized is it went all the way back to my belief about who God is. I was afraid to express

my emotions, afraid to take my emotions to him because I thought it displeased him.

 

Cheri:

Oh wow.

 

Amy:

And that’s not true! I love the Psalms 62:8, it says, “Trust in him at all times, you people; pour

out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.” Ahhhh! I love it so much! And I realize that it

was, this is the last few years, that a lot of these things is just trust issues with God.

 

Cheri:

Yeah.

 

Amy:

“Trust in him at all times, pour out your hearts to him for he is your refuge.” I didn’t see him as

my refuge, I saw him as somebody, again, I had to perform for. So if we can feel the feelings like

you just said, and then surrender them. It’s a two-step deal.

 

Cheri:

Mm hmm. Well you know, and one of the things I was thinking back to, when I was a kid, we

used to go to the beach a lot in Southern California and I took swimming lessons, so I was

strong swimmer. I wasn’t afraid of the water but I was afraid of the waves. And I kept trying to

go out to the deeper water beyond the breakers where my dad and my brother were. I had this

approach to the waves where I would be almost brave and then I would chicken out at the last

minute. And they would tumble over me and I would go under the water and choke and think I

was drowning. And so I got even more and more scared. And I kind of feel like emotion, I always

call it the emotion ocean because emotions come over me in waves.

 

Amy:

Mm hmm.

 

Cheri:

And you can’t, I can’t stop the actual wave, but I’ve learned that I can approach the emotion

ocean wave in the same way my dad taught me to actually approach the real ocean waves. And

what he taught me to do was to get as close as possible and then as that wave started to crest

and really rise up above me, to dive straight into the base of it. Now that seems counter

intuitive, and at first it was really scary, but I still remember the first time I did that, and I dove

in. There’s no turbulence there! You dive in, you come up and you’ve missed all of that being

scrambled up and feeling like you’ve been put through a blender. And so I’ve found that I have

certain things I can do, I won’t spend a lot of time here, we can put it up on the website for this

episode. But I have certain steps I can take that are kind of the equivalent of diving into the

base of an emotion ocean wave. So that I’m not ignoring it, I’m not running from it, but I’m also

not wallowing and getting all mixed up in it, and drowning in it, and basically being victimized

by it.

 

Amy:

Yes. So good. One our interns wrote something, we have our interns giving us ideas for these

episodes now. But she wrote this, “One year as I was decorating the tree I pondered that I

always get so depressed in thinking about bad childhood memories. Somehow it hit me that

many of the decorations I had were from my childhood. And although they bring back some

fond memories, they put me back in that growing up household, which is one place I’d rather

not be. It was too late that year, but I wondered what would happened if I packed away the

offending decorations separately. The following year I didn’t even open that box and things

were amazingly different. By the next year I had donated them to Good Will.”

 

Cheri:

Woo hoo!

 

Amy:

It’s that great pattern. She recognized where the emotion was coming from, she processed it

I’m assuming with God because this is a Godly woman, and then she dove into the base of the

wave and took an action step to change her own emotions. I just thought, “What a healthy,

amazing way to process all of that.”

 

Cheri:

Well and I think it takes grit to face that kind of thing.

 

Amy:

Yes.

 

Cheri:

And rather than stay in the pattern or the habit of, “Oh we’ve always done it this way, we

always have to do it this way.” And to recognize that sometimes we need to sit back and

evaluate, sometimes in advance, sometimes maybe after the fact. We’ll be doing a wrapping up

episode for our holiday break, but as much as now, to be looking ahead and thinking, “Okay,

are there clothes I need to not wear this year? Are there recipes I could not fix this year? Are

there events we could not go to this year? Ornaments we could not put on the tree?” To

recognize what our triggers are. I have a bad habit of thinking it’s the people that trigger me,

it’s not the people themselves. It’s the tone of voice. Or it’s the smell of someone’s perfume. Or

it’s that particular dish of food. It’s never the actual person. But boy! Is it easy for me to blame

other people and say, “You made me…fill in the blank. You made me mad. You made me sad.”

No, it’s not their fault. They were there when it happened.

 

Amy:

Sure.

 

Cheri:

But something else is happening within me that’s triggering those emotions. And learning to

take responsibility for that. That also takes grit.

 

Amy:

Sure. I agree with that. And for me, I have realized it takes grit to overcome my wrong beliefs

about God, that he would judge me for my emotions instead of helping me with my emotions.

And it takes grit to take that step of faith and take those things to God. The beautiful thing

about that like with anything else, is that when we take that step of faith and we get a positive

outcome, it builds our faith.

 

Cheri:

Yes.

 

Amy:

It builds our trust. Next time, we’re more likely to run to God with those things. But sometimes

it takes that “fake it ‘til you make it” mentality, and to take that first step it takes that grit.

 

Cheri:

Absolutely. Well and next week, we’ll talk more about others’ emotions, but I’ll tell you the

grace part for me. When I’m learning – as I’m learning, not when, it’s not in the past – as I’m

still learning to embrace my own emotions and surrender them, is to allow other’s to have their

emotions just the way I want to give myself permission. Because frankly, I still would rather be

the only person in the room with that kind of permission, because other people’s emotions are

just too messy and they bump up against mine and mess with me too much so I’m like, I’m still

kind of at that stage where it’s like, “Oh no, I want all the privilege but I don’t want you to have

the privileges because they mess with mine.” So that’s where the grace piece comes in.

 

Amy:

That’s good.

 

Cheri:

And like I said, we’ll talk more about that next week.

 

Amy:

Yes.

 

Cheri:

Let’s go back to the Mathew 11 scripture. I’ll go ahead and read it for us. “Are you tired, worn

out, burnt out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show

you how to take a real rest. Walk with me, and work with me, watch how I do it. Learn the

unforced rhythms of grace and I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep-company

with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” And that’s Matthew 11:28-30 from The

Message.

 

Amy:

Mmm, as I re-read that this morning I realized that there are a lot of emotions wrapped up in

“tired, worn out and burned out.” And Jesus addresses that in that passage and he addresses it

with such kindness and tenderness. He really reveals his heart towards us, and our bundle of

emotion is part of us.

 

Cheri:

Yeah.

 

Amy:

And I think we should take that as a signal that it’s okay to take care of ourselves. That yes,

scripture talks about selflessness and making it about others. I actually thought about our

emphasis on joy, and people probably heard that acronym that joy can be an acronym for:

Jesus, Others, Yourself. But I think that perfectionists, people-pleasers and HSP’s often – we

don’t have JOY, we have JO.

 

Cheri:

Oh my goodness that’s so true!

 

Amy:

Jesus and Others. And we totally leave ourselves out of it. And it really is a form of self-abuse.

 

Cheri:

Yeah.

 

Amy:

That we decide that we’re not worth even addressing, when Jesus NEVER treats us that way.

 

Cheri:

Uh huh! My goodness, this is so good! I can hardly talk! Okay so, you, oh my word! Amy – ah!

We need to do this more often! Do you want to do a daily podcast?

 

Amy:

That was after my third cup of coffee this morning.

 

Cheri:

You need more coffee girl. So you had a great truth that we can focus on to replace the bad rule

that peace and joy are the only acceptable emotions for you to feel. What was that?

 

Amy:

Feel, but surrender every emotion. So we feel it, and then we surrender it. I’m a big

organization person. One of the rules that I really love is only touch a piece of paper once. So,

we pick it up, we decide what to do with it, we put it in the trash can, we put it in the recycling

bin, or we file it. But we don’t touch it twice. Now, our emotions are not that manageable. It’d

be nice to say.

 

Cheri:

I was going to say, “If yours are, you need to write a new book!”

 

Amy:

No, but! I think we could say, “I’m going to touch that once today.” Today, right? So you give

yourself some time to feel it, give yourself some time to surrender it to Jesus, and then you

move forward with your day. And when it comes up again, you say, “Okay, I’m going to touch

this once.” But we don’t touch it, hold it, feel it, hold it to our heart.

 

Cheri:

Feed it, let it sleep with us, no, that makes total sense.

If you’re an HSP — a Highly Sensitive Person — let me share with you a quote that gives me so

much comfort. It goes like this, “You will never ever hear God say that you are more trouble

than you’re worth.”

If you head on over to the web page for today’s episode at GritNGrace.info, you’ll find several

free downloadables, including this week’s “permission slip.”

Print it out and post it as a reminder you that you don’t HAVE to obey the bad rule that says,

“Peace and joy are the only acceptable emotions for you to feel.”

Instead, you can receive permission to, “Feel and surrender every emotion.”

 

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We hope you’ve enjoyed Episode 25 of Grit ‘n’ Grace: Good Girls Breaking Bad Rules. Join Amy

and me for next week’s HOLIDAY BREAK, when we’ll be talking about responding to OTHER

people’s emotions during the holidays.

For today, grow your grit … embrace God’s grace … and when you run across a bad rule, you

know what to do! Go right on ahead and BREAK IT!