Feel It to Heal It

One of the reasons why some young girls grow up with a superficial spirituality instead of an authentic Christianity is because they've never seen their moms grappling with real issues in their own lives and seen how the gospel applies to those issues. Here's author and counselor Tara Mattson. The issues I'm seeing most often in Christian homes would be a lot of performance-based Christianity, pressure to be perfect, which doesn't look like the gospel, but performance-based, just a lot of pressure.

You need to look the part. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Anne Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. Tara Mattson believes that our daughters need to see us as their parents grappling with the real issues in our lives and living out our faith in the midst of those challenging issues.

We'll talk more about how we do that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. You're a mom of three sons. And a granddaughter. Well, yeah, I know. But you loved being a boy mom, didn't you? I did, yeah. You liked raising boys. Absolutely. And she was good at it.

Let me tell you, she really was. Did you ever wish, did you ever think, oh, why didn't we get a daughter? Well, it's interesting. I have a sister and two brothers, and we had between us 12 grandkids for my parents. All 12 are boys. You're kidding.

Wow. And so I thought I was going to have the last one. And I was the youngest. I thought, this will be the girl. And no, it was not the girl. He's all boy. Did you grieve at all, not having daughters?

Yes. So did my sister. We both grieved because there was a real loss of not having a daughter. Because it's fun to raise boys. You loved raising boys. But there is something special.

There is. And especially as the boys get older, they cling to their wives, which they should. And so there's a sense of loneliness, not having a daughter. But we have that granddaughter.

That's what I was going to ask. And we have some great daughter-in-laws, but it's still a little different. Now that you have a granddaughter, are you finding the experience to be magical? You know what's so interesting that I've never had with sons is I see my granddaughter watching me do everything.

My sons never watched me do anything. They were watching Dave. But I realized she watches me put on my makeup. She stares at me when I do my hair. And she never stops talking. So that's great. She comments on everything she sees. It's true. And I'm like, I'm having these conversations that are amazing.

Yeah, you never have those with boys. We're going to talk about what it is to raise the next generation of Christian women, godly women, and we've got a friend who's joining us to do that. Tara Mattson is here. Tara, welcome to Family Life Today.

Thank you for having me. Tara and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest. She is a writer, a conference speaker, a counselor, and her book Courageous is— Gee whiz, anything else you do? Sounds like— You're pretty impressive, Tara. I take naps.

Yeah, I hope so. And you're a mother of? Two, two girls. So you're right in the thick of what you wrote about in your book, being daughters rooted in grace. You're talking about the fact that all women are daughters. Yes, this is the—I'm really addressing the root of every woman and the needs that girls have, whether we are 65 or we are five. Raising daughters today in this era, in this culture, does it feel different? There are some fundamental differences in terms of the voices we're hearing and the pressures, but the core of who God made us hasn't changed. And that's the piece that I want to really draw attention to, that the needs of who God is and who He made us to be, that just hasn't changed. And so how do we address it today with the different voices? And what is it in your life that made you passionate about this subject?

It's such a good question. I would say that over the years, I didn't really set out to be a voice for women, but my personal journey is I was raised by a dad who wanted boys, football player. And he had two girls, and he raised us to be—I could throw a football better than most boys.

In fact, Jeff brags about that. So the idea of fishing and gutting my own fish and all those things were part of my growing years, and wonderful parts, I think, that gave me a lot of strength. I had a very involved dad. The piece that I missed was appreciating my femininity and understanding what it meant to be a woman, and I've been a woman in the midst of many men for most of my life. God has had me in a role, whether it's been on a church staff, I've been invited into the leadership room, and I'm the only woman. And so I've had to learn how to use my voice. And then being a counselor, I've just spent the last 20 years listening to women at 60 years old talk about the woundings of their story and not have anywhere to go.

And then the 13-year-old girl coming in and confused about her sexuality and just everything in between. And I've just heard a consistency of women feeling really lonely, and I resonate with that. I kind of look the part, and so people assume I'm okay. And for years, I had a hidden life, struggling with bulimia, and nobody knew.

I was the quintessential leader in helping everybody else. And that was a part of what drew me into wanting to go into the confidential places with people and give them a sacred space to listen to what they're struggling with and where they're hiding. And I just think that being a girl who didn't have a voice or didn't feel confident in that and then coming into my own voice, God is using that to help girls in the church and women to be able to find their voice. How is it, I'm looking at two women here who are both leaders in ministry, and we have two men on this side of the table. What's it like being a woman with men in ministry? Is it hard?

Is it fun? Is it struggle? To be honest, there's a lot of second guessing and wondering if what I say is going to be heard. I would say I experienced that myself, but I've heard it from hundreds and hundreds of women, whether it's a wife or whether it's a female leader as part of a leadership team. So it's a lot of second guessing, wondering if I want to be told that I'm too emotional, too passionate. And I think I've been around a lot of really great men who have given me and fanned the flame and said, Tara, what do you think? Just like what you're doing right now. That has really helped me build my confidence in saying that God has given me a voice and something to share at the table.

But that's taken years to build. I'm now in my 40s and so to do it now, but when I was in my 20s and at the table, I was quiet. I was listening. And then I would go process with my safe people and say, is this appropriate to say? I wasn't confident enough to bring it to the table. And you didn't feel that in a room with women. No, not at all. In fact, I'm leading usually with women.

It's very different. I would say that same thing with women, there is a freedom. I'd never calculated my words before I spoke, but I wasn't as wise as you were because in my 20s, I was very verbal and vocal in the midst of men. And I think some of that was shot down and so then I would walk away second guessing thinking, oh, I shouldn't have said that. What should I say?

What is appropriate? How am I being heard? And so you start to second guess yourself of who you are and how you should act with men in leadership especially. So here's what's interesting to me about you guys describing this because I'm hearing you talk about the important need that I think that you have and that we all need for women to have strength and to have a voice. We need women to have a voice, all of us do.

You need to have a voice and to be at the table and to be a part of shaping what's going on in our world. At the same time, you're talking about the need for women to understand femininity. Yes. And we hear both of those and go, that sounds like it's two different things. But, Tara, you would say, no, it's not two different things.

She's shaking her head right now. I love that. I love that you're picking up on that because I think that's the confusion. It's got to be either or and that's what happened in my own story. That was really the core of my wrestling with bulimia was the struggle with my body and my emotions, the femininity side of me. I didn't know what to do with my emotions. Nobody trained me or helped me. Well, you said you didn't even express your emotions for years.

No. Everything was spun with a positive can-do. I didn't even know I had as much of emotions until I got married.

Anybody? And then it started flying. And I think we laugh because we say, Jeff married this woman who was so loving and compassionate. And now he's got 20 years later and definitely using my voice. And I have to kind of rein it back a little more with humility.

Well, go back to why didn't you use your voice or have emotion back when you were younger? Yeah. Was this a woman thing? Because I'm sitting there thinking, ah, this might be a woman thing. It might just be a family thing. It's a family thing. It's a family thing. But I think wiring-wise, women, because of God's design, we do have more hormones and a lot more emotions at the forefront. The variety and the mood swings do happen.

And yet that gets used against us rather than validating it and just saying, yeah, that's part of the journey. I want to teach women to appreciate the humanity of how God made us and the beauty of it versus we laugh about it, we shame it, and it gets mocked. I remember when we would sit at the dinner table with the four kids and my parents. And my sister, who was six years older than me, wasn't in the room yet. And my brothers would say, let's calculate how long it takes before we can get our sister to cry. And so there would be a competition of they would say things to get her to cry. And I remember thinking, they will never get me to cry. And so you learn to be tough and to put a mask on and hiding our femininity. So the weeds are, I struggle with body image, I struggle with insecurity, I struggle with sex addiction, I struggle with I can't speak up with my husband and I feel like he's too powerful with me.

Whatever the weeds are, the root is I don't know how to process how I feel and I don't know how to put a voice to that. So we have to learn that. And so I want to go back to teaching these girls. And it starts with mom, because she's watching.

Your daughter's watching. And we learn how to process our emotions through our parents. And it's not to blame and shame, but it's saying we have to feel it to heal it. And I got tired of hearing the sermons that emotions are bad. Because when I read the scripture, I see a lot of emotion coming from God.

And by the way, I've never preached that sermon. Amen, good. Emotions are good. I probably said some things about the need for us to trust our thinking more than we trust our emotions. You'd agree with that, right? I would agree with that.

I would say we need to hear both. I would say the emotions are sitting to my left, and my cognitive thinking is sitting to my right, and my spirit is sitting across from me. And like the Trinity, we need to hear them all, but to dismiss one person at the table is doing us to stress.

And I'll say amen to that. In fact, I remember an interview we did years ago with, I've never forgotten this, Robertson McQuilkin, who was the president of Columbia Bible College and Seminary for years. He told the story of being on a trip with his wife, and she was expressing her emotion. And he was doing what husbands are all too often prone to do, trying to logically explain to her why her emotions were not rational.

And in the middle of the conversation, she stopped him, and she said, Robertson, logic isn't everything, and emotions aren't nothing. And I remember him telling that story, and I remember thinking, I would tend to say, yes, logic over here, you should listen to that a whole lot more than you listen to your emotions. And that story was a good realignment for me to say your emotions are a part of what God's given you to give you data and input so that you can make a decision factoring in both what you know and what you feel to make the right decision. And did that help you, Bob, with your daughters?

I think it helped me with my wife, and I think it helped me with my daughters. I think it helped me understand to your point what we've just been talking about. Emotions are not the enemy. Emotions are not something that are invalid. Emotions are a data point that come into the equation that we've got to pay attention to. When your emotions are pinging, that's giving you information. That's giving you data that you need to take into account and should not simply ignore and say, well, I just need to stay with what I'm thinking. No, your emotions are trying to give you some kind of a data point. So what does that feel it, heal it, what's that mean? Well, there's two sides, so there's maybe women like me who kind of jump over the emotions, dismiss it, and then we just move on.

Life is going on, and so there's no time. I've got my kids, my spouse has needs, everyone's got needs around me, and I'm used to attuning to everybody else's emotions. What happens as a result if we do that step? It leaks, and we find ourselves way down the road in my office, processing and ending up in an affair, ending up, you know, struggling with a lot of self-loathing or in comparison game. Very, very, very dangerous over time of dismissing our emotions. So the feel it to heal it, I give a five-step process that made sense to me, and again, because I'm used to talking from the logical down into the emotions. Step one is I need to be able to identify emotions.

Do I even have language? So a lot of times we're just, what is that that I'm feeling right now? I don't know. You hear frustration a lot from somebody who doesn't know how to articulate their emotions. They're just frustrated. Makes sense. It's like a log in the middle of the road.

You can't go anywhere. So yes, you're frustrated, but there's more there. So building some vocabulary, and I want that for our girls, but we've got to start first in our own life. Walk us through that. Like if you were counseling someone and they're just kind of venting and they're in the weeds, but then you're thinking, okay, I need to help them to verbalize feelings.

How do you do that? I'm tuning into your body language more than I am tuning into your words. So I might notice your eyes start tearing up and I say, what's going on right there? And you might have to pause instead of the narrative.

You're focusing on the content. You're going now to your emotions. Now the next question is, where is it in your body?

This is the funky part that everyone goes, what? But this is the piece and then feel it to heal it. You got to be aware because a lot of us who don't process our emotions are holding it in our body. So you've got the backache, we've got the shoulder tension, we've got the jaw biting. And we don't realize we're actually feeling stuff in the room. And pretty soon that over time is, again, creating funky things. I've lost four teeth, perfect, beautiful teeth, not by cavities, but by clenching. I've broken them. And the doctor or the dentist will say, are you stressed?

And I'll think, I don't think so. But then he's like, well, obviously something's happening. Is that because I'm not processing the pain or the stress? We're absorbing the world around us.

Most women, not all, but most women were caretakers. And so we're taking it all on and feeling it all. And so, yeah, your jaw is telling you something. And then I would say, if you're ready to process it, it would give it a chance like a psalm, like King David. Write a psalm, give it words, name what is all in that jaw or talk about your excitement. But God wants to hear it all.

He wants to hear it all. I want nothing more for my girls to come to me and to tell me what's going on at the deeper places. So you didn't experience that as a girl growing up. No. But are you experiencing that with your daughters?

Have you been able to change the legacy? Yeah, when they come home and they say, someone was super mean to me today. Yeah. And my tendency is to be too busy for that or to give them the, you'll be fine, like the I'm the suck it up kind of. That's my go to. But then I have to pause and the Holy Spirit quickens me to say, what do they need? And they need me to get down on my knees and to look them in the eye and to just listen to them and let them process. And when you process, it will not end up in their body. It will not leak out in the funky ways that we see with our kids, the cutting, the eating disorders, the sexuality. Those are emotions that are trying to get heard and kids don't know that.

They don't know that. So we're connecting the dot with something very simple to what all us parents are trying to prevent. Yeah.

Right? And to say if we can help our kids process their emotions in safe ways in our marriages as well, then we might see some of the reduction of some of the behaviors we see. Are dads important in this too? Dads and daughters are huge. I just felt uncomfortable with how much dads were getting blamed because in my office, it was the moms that I was hearing. So when I sat with the 55-year-old woman and we talked about her family of origin, we talked about what was womanhood modeled, how did that look. And it was mom. It was what she was doing, what she wasn't doing, how she processed her emotions, how she used her voice or didn't use her voice, how she was abused but wanted something different for her daughter.

And the cycle continued. So that's where the heart of this came from was even though dads are huge, they build confidence into girls, they help us to feel as equals. You know, when a dad says, what do you think about that political issue?

And then letting her talk and process even if it makes no sense. But moms are the ones that girls are watching in terms of what does it mean to be a girl. And so what are the issues today that you think, oh, moms, we need to address this and help this with our daughters. Does it start with our daughters or does it start with us? And if it starts with us, what do we do?

My bias is that it starts with us. And the good news is that relationship is really the core. So if you have a relationship with your kids, then that really trumps a lot of things. And a relationship is tuning into their inner life, caring about their emotions, not just praising them for what they do but for who they are. And so the issues I'm seeing most often in Christian homes would be a lot of performance-based Christianity. Pressure to be perfect, which doesn't look like the gospel in my mind at all.

But performance-based, just a lot of pressure, you need to look the part. And feeling lonely. And so kids are on social media, we know that, and they're more vulnerable. A lot of confusion and a lot of mistrust of those that they don't have relationship with. There's a lot of abuse happening, peer-to-peer abuse happening. Because parents are not as involved, they're on their own social media, they're all checking out.

There's something that has to shift with mom. What is she hiding? So here's a common theme is a lot of women have friends, but they don't maybe have a friend who knows everything about them. Who knows how their marriage really is going.

So I would say start there. Who in your life are you telling everything to? It's interesting as I'm listening, actually I think I'm just listening to two women have a conversation. I feel like, yeah, we kind of took over. I'm sorry.

Which is awesome. No, that's fine. No, it's good. It's not what I would think if I see the title courageous. That's what I want to hear you say, because it's like, oh, when you think courageous women, they're going to skip over this and be strong. And you're trying to say, no, this is a big part, right, of becoming a courageous woman. Well, you have to be able to recognize your own humanity.

A courageous woman is open to saying, I'm a human being. I got stuff. Instead of pretending like that stuff doesn't impact me or God's got it all, yes, he does, but you got to do your work. So the story is the idea that God uses the icky in our life. Wherever that's coming from, he uses it to grow the fruit in our life, but we've got to hand it over. And oftentimes we shove it off into the side and we think nobody can smell it. And it's the reality is it's still there and we can smell it. And who can smell it the most?

Our kids. Yeah, it's interesting. I was speaking at a women's retreat and I was really dealing with this because I have so much in my own past of self-loathing and the lies that would go over and over in my head, never realizing that so many women are dealing with those lies in their head. And so I asked the women to take out a piece of paper and write down the lies that they were repeating over and over in their head, whether now or in the past or both. And I had them write those down into a piece of paper and then I had them visualize just handing it to Jesus because they're lies.

And the enemy of our soul, Satan, is the accuser of the brethren. And so he's constantly repeating lies and our past and pain from other people, we're hearing those lies. And I had them ball those up and take them to the cross, which was on the floor, and just drop them on the floor. And we did some other things after, but when everyone had left, I was the only one in the building and I went to the cross and I read these pieces of papers. And I'm telling you, it wasn't just one lie, it was a multitude of lies of, I'm ugly, I'm fat, I'm worthless, I'm abandoned. And I just sat and I prayed.

I mean, there were hundreds. And I sat there and wept and prayed for each one that God would reveal the truth to these women because they're in bondage to the lies and they can't be free to be who God made them to be until they deal with the issues and pain in their lives. Yeah, I love that, Ann. It's so hard and I see the tears and it's heavy and that's the weight, that's where this book comes from, sitting with that over and over and thinking, you love Jesus?

Yeah. You've been walking with Jesus for how long and you're still? And I think that's part of the message of grace, to say our humanity is with us till the day we go to see Jesus. And I think there's a message in the church that says, the more mature you are, the less you struggle. I'm believing that a daughter rooted in grace who's courageous, she can stand before her God and say, I'm still struggling and that's why I need you.

Yes. And I want to shift that just a little bit because there's even shame in going, I still have the lie. So, the lie that comes for me is that I'm alone. I have to fight that. I fight it in my marriage, I fight it. And I know the truth, never alone. I have an amazing group of friends.

I have to literally write these things down over and over and over. And it doesn't make me less mature. It makes me more mature to be able to come right back to the Lord. I said, what do we do with our pain? We have to have safe people in addition to our walk with God.

And that's the part I'm really asking a courageous woman to do is to say, who are your safe people? Have you let a couple people in, outside of your spouse, let a couple women in and let them see all of who you are? It changes you. It does change you. Changes you. I think there's a tendency to think that to be courageous means that when fears or lies or negative thoughts come, you compartmentalize or ignore.

Push them down. Right. And that's what it means to be courageous. What I'm learning today is that to be courageous is to say, no, we move into them. We address them. We take them on.

We don't pretend like they're not there or they don't matter. But courage is to dive in. That's central to what you're saying in the book Courageous, Being Daughters Rooted in Grace. It's a book we've got in our Family Life Today Resource Center. Listeners can get a copy when they go online at familylifetoday.com or they can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to get a copy of Tara Matson's book Courageous, Being Daughters Rooted in Grace.

Again, order online at familylifetoday.com or call to order 1-800-358-6329, 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word Today. Our goal, our mission here at Family Life is to help moms and dads, husbands and wives, everybody in a family, help them thrive by creating an environment that is spiritually healthy, emotionally healthy, physically healthy. We want your marriage and your family to be a safe and a healthy place. We want to help strengthen the foundations of your relationships and we recognize that the best way to do that is to address the spiritual issues that are going on in relationships.

Our team has put together a resource that we're excited about. It's called Take Your Marriage From Good to Great. We know a lot of marriages have been facing stress and pressure over the last several months. We've all been facing that and so this resource has a couple of online video courses, audio messages from Vody Baucom and Paul David Tripp, Gary Chapman, Julie Slattery, a downloadable e-book. All of these resources are there to help you work on the foundation of your marriage together in a way that is fun and engaging and relaxing. You can listen to these messages together, go through the courses online together.

It's all free and when you sign up for the Take Your Marriage From Good to Great resource to get the download, you're automatically entered in a contest. Somebody's name will be drawn and you will be our guests at a Family Life Today recording session. We'll include dinner with Dave and Ann Wilson that night. We'll cover the cost of flying you in, the hotel, the rental car.

There's no purchase necessary. The contest ends on August 14th, restrictions apply. You can find all the rules when you go to familylife.com slash good contest. We hope you'll take advantage of the resource and maybe we'll see you at Family Life for an upcoming recording session. In addition, we're making available this month as a thank you gift to Family Life Today listeners a copy of my book Love Like You Mean It.

It's just been out a few weeks now. The book is all about how you build a marriage that has the kind of strong, enduring, committed, real love that goes beyond just the emotions of love and goes to the root. The book looks at what the Bible has to say about what real love looks like, looking at 1 Corinthians 13. And it's our gift to you when you make a donation this month to support the ministry of family life. This ministry depends on your donations. The fact that we're able to have this conversation today is because so many of you in the past have made a donation to make this conversation possible. So, if you can make a donation today, be sure to ask for a copy of the book Love Like You Mean It as a thank you gift.

You can donate online at familylifetoday.com or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. We look forward to hearing from you and look forward to having somebody join us at an upcoming recording session for Family Life Today. And we hope you can be back with us again tomorrow. Tara Matson will be here again and we'll continue our conversation about what real courage looks like as we raise our sons and especially our daughters. That's really the focus this week, so I hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. MUSIC