Does my emotional health really matter?

So what I remember about going to church as a little boy, like six, seven, eight years old with my mom. That's good you have memories of that. I don't have memories of going to church because I didn't.

Yeah, I didn't go. Well, they're not good memories, really, because I can remember, you know, we're going to church. My dad has just walked out with his girlfriend, left our family. My little brother just died of leukemia. And, you know, we'd walk in and I remember hearing this conversation many times.

So, Janiece, that's my mom's name. How are you doing? Oh, good. Doing really good. And I look up and I'm like, no, we're not.

We're not doing this. But at church, you were supposed to put, I learned this, you were supposed to put on the mask. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

And I'm Dave Wilson. And you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today.

If you had problems or things going on in your life, those were not shared there. It was put on the mask, smile because God is good all the time and your life's OK. That's so sad. Like, think of the trauma as a little boy that you were in at that moment. Yeah. And it would have been great for you to be able to just share your little heart, you know, of all the things going on.

Yeah. So obviously, as a pastor, I always had a phrase like, drop your mask at the door. We don't wear masks here because the truth is we're not OK. Yeah. And so today we get to talk about emotional health, spiritual health, even physical health with an author who wrote a book, which is a great title. Are you really OK?

Deborah Falita, welcome to Family Life Today. Thank you so much for having me and for being brave enough to tackle that question. I think it's a great question that we should all ask. Very few people are writing about this emotional health, especially in the church and in the Christian community, because it's the place where you sort of say God's got it. I have enough faith. I'm OK. So, you know, I'm good when we're not always good. And so obviously this became a passion of yours as a therapist, as a mom, four kids, amazing husband, John, we met at lunch. You're a speaker. You're even a contributor to Relevant magazine. You have your own podcast, which is cool because it's a call in podcast with questions.

What's the name of it? Love and Relationships. So you have listeners calling in with their questions and answering their questions. Yeah. So let's dive into what you've been calling the deep end. Yeah.

You know, where I don't always want to swim. And this is your soapbox, you said. Yeah. This is the passion that God has given me right now is to really have Christians get real about how they're doing and realize that just because you're a Christian doesn't mean you're healthy. And why is this so important and passionate to you? Well, for a couple of reasons. First of all, with working with my clients, seeing people from all over the country, different socioeconomic status, different leaders, teachers, pastors, celebrities all have one thing in common.

And that's the journey with emotional and mental health, the struggle with emotional and mental health. They did this study called the better than average effect where they took a lot of people and they asked them questions about their self assessment questions. How moral are you compared to your peers? How good of a driver are you compared to your peers?

How nice are you? All these different questions rating themselves. The majority of people rated themselves as better than average. But the majority can't be better than average. Mathematically speaking, someone's got to fall below the mean, right?

So they're like, well, maybe this is just like in the suburbs. Let's take the same survey, the same social study into the prisons and ask prisoners how they feel about themselves in comparison to their non-prisoner peers. And we're all assuming that it will be below average. Right. Even prisoners had the same response.

They rated themselves at the majority as better than average. And it's just the reminder that we tend to assume that we are better than we really are. And I think that problem is even bigger in the church. I think we can acknowledge easily that our souls are saved and that Jesus has saved us and we can focus on our spiritual growth and our spiritual health. All the while, our emotional and mental health are lacking. And what we don't realize is that our lack of emotional and mental health is actually sabotaging our spiritual health because it keeps us limited in our growth and maturity. Like God calls us to full healing. When the disciples asked Jesus, what's the greatest commandment? Jesus said, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.

Four parts. Heart represents emotional health. Soul represents spiritual health. Mind represents mental health and strength represents our physical health. I think sometimes we get kind of caught up loving God with our soul. We forget all the other areas are important too. And yet each one affects the other.

We need them all to love God well. I'm surprised by that statistic of this data. Are you? Well, I know I would have rated myself that way. I was thinking about the conversation when I had given my life to Christ and I was so excited to tell everybody in my family. And I was so wrong in the way I did this, but I didn't grow up in the church. So I come in the house, I'm like, you guys, we all need to be saved or we're going to hell. And I remember sitting down with my dad like, Dad, you need Jesus. And he said, No, I really don't. I said, No, it says in the Bible, we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

He goes, Yeah, I'm a really good guy and I'm going to get to heaven. Isn't that something? Yeah.

And so it goes along with this survey. And add to that the effects of social media now, you know, where we literally are conditioned to put our best face out there. Our picture perfect lives are these these snippets that I think sometimes we're so used to living on that superficial perfect level that we forget there's more going on underneath the surface.

And then we struggle with something as a society that I call toxic optimism, where we want to be so optimistic. Everything's good and life is good and and make it Christian. God is good all the time that we forget to really acknowledge and grieve and get to the root of what is hurting, what is wrong, what we need to adjust. But when we look at Jesus, the most incredible example, he wasn't a man who ignored how he felt, even the hard emotions. Biblical scholars have identified over 39 emotions that Jesus felt and expressed, and they weren't all good ones. From grief to agony to sadness to anger. I mean, Jesus felt the spectrum of emotions. What makes him different than us is how he handled his emotions. He expressed them in a healthy way. We sometimes don't even acknowledge them or repress them or we handle them in unhealthy ways. And so the process of becoming an emotionally healthy person starts with acknowledging what I feel and then learning to express it in a healthy way. Yeah.

Help us. Help us understand that because, you know, I didn't come to Christ in my junior year in college. I'm 20 years old.

And one of the things I think I picked up, maybe I was taught it, maybe I just picked it up, was now that I'm in Christ, it's all about the spiritual. The emotions don't matter much anymore. You just sort of if you're having a bad day or you're struggling. And I was like, I don't have panic attacks. I don't have insecurities like everybody else. I'm better than most people.

That's what I'm thinking. And so it's like I was sort of taught it's all spiritual. And if you have any negative emotion, you just push it aside and you pray and you trust God and you move on. You don't deal with it. That's not a big part of your life anymore. It's Jesus. Obviously, I've learned that was very bad theology.

Yeah. And you know that better than anybody. So help us understand why are the emotions important and how do we deal with them?

Well, why is this bad theology like you said, and why is this important? And it's because human beings are like a volcano. You know, when you think about it, what's going on underneath the surface of a volcano is that there's pressure building.

The magma is creating all of this pressure. Emotions are kind of like that. The stress, the discouragement, the insecurities, even the good emotions are building pressure. And when we don't acknowledge and identify those emotions, the pressure just builds and builds and builds until it finds the point of least resistance.

And just like a volcano, we're faced with an emotional explosion. For some people, that looks like addictions, you know, maybe an addiction to porn or infidelity. Maybe it's conflict that comes up in our marriage. Maybe it's depression or isolation and withdrawal, panic attacks, anxiety.

Everyone's emotional explosion looks a little bit different. But the idea is that there are things going on underneath the surface that we haven't dealt with in a healthy way, and they're going to come up at some point outside of your control. And that's why this is important. When we look at leaders and teachers who fall from the height of ministry, it's not because they weren't spiritual. It's because they weren't emotionally healthy.

And there's all this underlying stuff that eventually comes out at the point of least resistance, at the point of weakness when we don't deal with it. So part of being emotionally healthy people is learning, number one, to name what we're feeling, just like Jesus did, to put words to those feelings. And let me remind you, this isn't a gender thing. I think some people think, well, men aren't as good as expressing their emotions, but if you're not convinced by the example of Jesus, look at David.

Look at the Psalms. I mean, this isn't a gender thing because this is something we learn how to do or not learn how to do. And maybe society conditions men not to be good learners when it comes to emotional expression.

But this is a big part of it. So when you say acknowledge it or name what you're feeling, like talk to us as a listener that's never done this. They're listening and hearing this for the first time and they're thinking, I think I'm OK. Like, what do you mean by let's just start naming what you're feeling?

How do they begin? Yeah. And are you really OK? I give you some practical things. So let's talk through some of those things. There's a lot of homework in this book. This isn't a book you read and just be done with.

It's something you kind of have to work through, almost like a therapy session. So one thing I'll have you do is a timeline. Talk me through the things in your life from childhood to today that have impacted you both good and bad. Let's talk through some of those significant things. Another thing I'll have you do is an assessment.

And that assessment is actually something you can download, print out. And it will talk you through check boxes to go through some of the things in the past 12 months that have caused stress in your life, because even good things can cause stress. A marriage is ranked just a little bit lower on stress than a divorce. If you think about it, they're both significant life changes. But I think sometimes we look at our life and we see, oh, good ministry opportunity. I'm publishing a book. I got married.

I had a baby. And we don't realize that all of that builds pressure. When you said that, I was like, whoa, whoa, wait, most of us think a marriage would just bring emotional health rather than cause stress. But it really is a stressor. It's a stressor.

Well, I'm thinking of even the timeline. I think if couples were listening to this, because this is something Dave and I have done as a couple, but we've done it with other couples, where someone will get up and they'll write out a little picture of their timeline and their life, and then they'll share the highs and lows and the things that happen in their lives. I'm telling you, almost every time we've done this with couples and even each other, I like to hear the pain that you've gone through, what you felt. A lot of trauma. Oh, and we cry hearing people's stories.

And maybe when other people are seeing the response, like, oh, is that a big deal? And then I think at the end, we've always prayed for each other. It's the most beautiful, intimate thing that we've done for each other and within our family group of friends, too. It's beautiful.

So I love that. So you're doing the timeline, but even what was the second one? The stress scale. The stress scale.

That's really good. Another activity is the emotional wheel. I talk about this man named Robert Plutchik, who came up with this emotional wheel. It's like a color wheel and gave each emotion a different color. And the mixture of two emotions produces a third emotion. If you Google a list of emotions, you can find lists with like three to 500 different words. I mean, think about all the emotions out there that we don't really take the time to identify.

A lot of times we're just like, well, I'm just stressed. Or how do you feel? Fine. Good.

I'm good. Good isn't actually an emotion. Good is a description of emotion. Some emotions feel good, some feel not so good, but good itself is not an emotion. One of the number one answers people give me when I ask them how they're feeling about something is, I don't know.

I'm not sure. Well, think about it. We've got to do some digging to identify, put words to what we're feeling and then express what we're feeling. That's step two.

How do you help them dig? Because when you said that, I'm like, oh, my goodness, how many times did I say that? Dan would say, so what are you feeling? I'm like, I don't know. Yeah.

Yes, you do. I mean, early it would be, you definitely are feeling something you won't tell me. I'm like, I really don't think I have a feeling. And I didn't know how to process it. Now I know there was stuff connected to my childhood I had never dealt with. Oh, you had shut down your feelings.

But as a married man, I'm wanting to tell her. I really felt like, I don't know, I feel something, but, you know. You know, something that strikes me about your story, and I know this is not there. Oh, here we go. Oh, here we go.

Here we go. When you just, in the intro talked about what you went through, your parents divorcing, your sibling dying of leukemia. When we go through such intense emotional incidents, what our body does oftentimes is it numbs our feelings because that's how we survive. I have to, the emotions are so loud. If I don't turn down the volume, I'm not going to survive this. So we turn down the volume of the emotions.

Our body kind of naturally does that, but then what ends up happening is we live life with the volume down. Oh, that's so interesting. And that's what, I know this isn't a Dave therapy session, but that is what many have complimented me on. Oh, you're just so steady. Right. You're steady.

That's what it looks like from the outside, this steadiness. But you know that, and you've done the work to know this, but really it's an inability to go there. I'd rather not.

I'm just so comfortable with being here in this easy zone. Well, just last month, Dave happened to talk to his sister. Hey, can we be done with me now? Love it Dave.

Can we move on to somebody else? Well, it's just so interesting because their family was so filled with trauma and his siblings really don't talk to one another, but his sister has become a therapist and she's in her seventies. Wow. And she said, my clients are just now teaching me what it means to feel.

Oh man. And so it's exactly what you're saying, Deborah. I've had to turn down all of my emotions to the point where I wasn't feeling and now for the first time I'm able to turn it up. It makes you just give grace.

And that's why even asking your spouse, let's talk about our stories and what you felt. That's a great beginning, but I like this even naming the feelings. That's good. Yeah.

I think it's interesting. And you know this better than anybody, when you do sort of trace that extension cord. When I thought about this as a preacher, I had an extension cord wrapped around me and said, man, I've learned that my emotions and things in my life are connected.

They're plugged into something and you've got to go on this journey. I remember early in our marriage, Ann said to me one day when I blew up at her for something, she just turned to me, I think the kids were very little, so we were married seven, eight, maybe 10 years. She said, you know, I'm not going to share things with you anymore because that's all you do.

You just blow up. And I'm laughing now because when she said that, I go, what are you talking about? And she just looked at me like exhibit A, you know, and I'll never forget it began a journey for me. This is 30 some years ago and I went to my men's group. I had three other guys and I said to these guys one Wednesday morning at 6 AM, we met every week. I said, hey, let me ask you a question of all the emotions you experienced as a man. Which one do you experience the most?

I'll never forget. They all looked at me like, what's an emotion? I mean, they didn't say that, but they're like, give me an example. Like happiness, like sadness, like anger and discouragement. Which one?

They all said, oh, that's easy. Anger. Anger is definitely it. And here's how I knew because anger is a secondary emotion and that's the journey I went on safe emotion.

I didn't know that the easiest one to express because it really doesn't require vulnerability. You're in control. Right.

You are the lion. Right. It takes people away, you know, but what's underneath anger. There's always something more like frustration, hurt, embarrassment, insecurity, you know, feeling like you're not appreciated. There's always something a little bit more painful and vulnerable underneath anger. And for so many people, the journey of learning to express how you feel is questioning.

That's the third step. So identifying what you feel, expressing what you feel. But number three, questioning what you feel. Your feelings are real, but they're not always true.

They're not always truth. Like you talked about the extension cord. I talk about a string of Christmas lights that the emotion lights up in different seasons. It might not be a true emotion. It might feel it's real and I feel it, but maybe my body is signaling something that's not true. For example, when you get worried about something, but let's say you've got something coming up. Let's just even give you an example from my life, you know, traveling. Oftentimes I find myself feeling worried that something might happen to the kids.

My brain just starts going on these rabbit trails of worry and fear and stress. That feeling is real, but it's not necessarily rooted in truth. The truth is that God is in control. The truth is that this is what He's called me to do. The truth is that worrying cannot add one day to my life. And so though my feelings are rooted in something, they might not always be true.

And learning to differentiate that is really important. So you have to question those emotions. Where is this coming from?

Is this real? Is this rooted in God's word? Like what is this feeling rooted in? And then you begin to have control over your emotions and having them be in control of you. One of my favorite things as I was writing the chapter on emotional health was looking at the life of Jesus and the different emotions He experienced. And one of my favorite, most powerful things was seeing Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane when He was bleeding, sweat was pouring out of His body and in little droplets of blood.

There's only three times in history that they've identified that and it's called hematrosis. And it's a condition where your body is under so much stress that they think it's a fight or flight response that causes your body to react in that way. And when you think about Jesus feeling that, His body was telling Him to run. His feelings were like, get out of here, this isn't safe. His feelings were real.

But what did He do next? He relied on God's truth, Lord, if this is your will, whatever your will is, that's what I'm choosing. And He chose to stay even though His feelings told Him to run. He questioned those emotions and He didn't listen to them. He listened to the Father. And so for all of us, it's like, just because I feel something doesn't mean it's true.

It could be rooted in my past history, my triggers, my trauma, my family patterns. What is God's truth and how does that inform what I do next? As we wrap up today in talking about emotional health, Deborah, give us some homework as our listeners. Like, one is get the book, kind of go through it. But as they're listening, what's the first step for them to take? I think emotional journaling is such an important part of the process. If you've never really taken the time to think about how you feel and express it, and maybe you feel like you don't know somebody that you can express your emotions to, start by journaling. Get a blank page, open your heart before the Lord and just say, okay, if I'm going underneath the surface, what are some things that I have felt over the past month? What are some feelings? When I say I'm stressed, let me write out some of the things that are actually happening and the feeling that they induce. Begin to put words to how you feel and bring it before the Lord.

That's good. I know that my journey with the anger being a second emotion, which before that conversation with my buddies, I had never heard that because I went on a sort of a journey, like you're saying, like, what is going on with this anger thing with me? And I learned the things you were saying, like, oh, I'm skipping right past the first emotion, hurt, frustration to this thing. And I learned over the years, I'm not saying I'm great at it, but I call it the ABCs of handling your emotion, A, acknowledge it, which often, even as a father of Christ, like, I'm not angry. Oh yes, you are.

But we think it's sin and it's not sin, but it can lead to sin. B is backtrack to that first emotion. What was it that I went by? Often for me, it was emotional hurt. You know, I'm like, I don't want to admit that, that what you said, what you did hurt me. I'm just going to respond in anger.

Nope. That's a bad way to handle it. She then was confessed it or, you know, speak out that emotion in an appropriate way.

I never knew how to do that. And it was two things. I'm not okay, but God can help me to be okay.

Right? It's everything you're saying in your book. It's such a gift. If we would take that journey that you're telling us to take, it can change not only me, it'll change my marriage, it'll change my legacy because you're laying patterns for your future generations out of your home. You've probably heard it said at some point that hurt people hurt people. That if you have been hurt yourself, if you are hurt, you're more likely to hurt other people.

God comes to us and says, I want to heal those hurts. I want to help you become healthy. I want to give you abundant life so that out of that abundant life, you can help other people get healthy. Deborah Faleta has been talking today about how we diagnose our own spiritual and emotional and mental health.

And I think in this particular season, many of us need to pull back and go, how am I really, am I really okay? Deborah's book is called, are you really okay? And it's a book to help us do just that, to do a self analysis. It's a book we've got in our family life today resource center. You can go to our website, family life today.com to get a copy, or you can call 1-800-FL today and order the book by phone. Again, our website is familylifetoday.com.

The number to call to get Deborah Faleta's book, are you really okay is 1-800-358-6329. That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. You know, here at family life, our goal is to effectively develop godly marriages and families. We believe godly marriages and families can change the world one home at a time. And the month of December is actually a critical month for us as it is for most ministries. It's during this month when we hear from listeners who let us know how God has used the ministry of family life in their lives over the past year, and they make a year in contribution to help continue the work of family life into the coming year.

So we're asking every family life today listener, would you take just a minute and ask yourself this question, has God used family life in my life this year through an event, a resource, maybe something you've read online, maybe it's this daily radio program or podcast that you connect with, and God has been using this to help strengthen your marriage, your family, your walk with Jesus. If that's the case, would you consider making a year in contribution to help this ministry continue not just for you, but for the hundreds of thousands of people who are connecting with us every day from all around the world. When you make a donation during the month of December, whatever amount you donate is going to be matched dollar for dollar. That's up to a total of a million and a half dollars. We've got a matching gift fund that some generous friends have put together for us.

So every donation we receive this month is matched dollar for dollar to that total of a million and a half dollars. In addition, we will send you as a thank you gift, a devotional book from Dane Ortlund called In the Lord I Take Refuge, 150 daily devotions from the book of Psalms. It's a beautiful hardcover book. We're also going to send you a fun item, a deck of playing cards. Each card has a conversation starter on it so that as you play games as a family, you can have some meaningful conversations. The book and the cards are our way of saying thank you for your year in support of this ministry.

You can donate online at familylifetoday.com or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. And please do be praying for us that we would be able to take full advantage of the matching gift that's been made available during the month of December. We look forward to hearing from you and we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to talk about how hurts from the past can sometimes show up in the present and take us by surprise.

And what do we do when that happens? Deborah Folletta will be here. We hope you can be here as well. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.