Emotions & Abuse: Part 2
The multilayered nature of spiritual abuse requires us to give careful attention to many aspects, including the often neglected emotional impact. Abusers and their defenders often attack victims and call them “too emotional” when they have very normal trauma responses and dysregulated emotions.
God created us with emotions. Our God-given emotions keep us safe, help us live an abundant life, and motivate us to take action based on our values and goals.
Scientifically speaking, we can understand emotions as the meaning our minds make out of our sensations and our circumstances. For example, you could feel a familiar jolt in your gut, but depending on the situation, you might construct an instance of surprise, or fear, or excitement. The meaning your mind gives to the sensation will be informed by your past experiences and what you were taught about certain emotions as you were growing up. The meaning your mind settles on in the moment prepares your body to move or act accordingly. In other words, our minds construct instances of emotion by drawing on the emotion concepts we have learned throughout our lives, by analyzing our interior sensations and external environment, and by predicting what is about to happen next. Emotions get our bodies ready to take action. To understand more about how emotions are made, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made is a good starting place.
Here are some often-asked questions about emotions that I hear from people who have gone through religious trauma, spiritual abuse, or who grew up in high-control religious environments.
How does God feel about emotions?
The Bible depicts God experiencing and expressing emotions throughout the Old Testament and shows many of Jesus’ emotions in the Gospels. God created our human bodies with the capacity to construct and experience emotions in a reflection of God’s own image. In David Lamb’s new book The Emotions of God, he explores Old Testament passages about God’s emotions. He writes about God experiencing hate, anger, jealousy, sorrow, joy, compassion, and love. The Gospels are full of Jesus’ emotions, such as joy (Luke 10); sadness, weeping, and grief (John 11 and Luke 19); and fear and anguish (Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 23). For more on the emotions of Jesus, see The Passions of the Christ by F. Scott Spencer and Jesus’ Emotions in the Gospels by Stephen Voorwinde.
Because God is emotional, and Jesus as God incarnate is emotional, it stands to reason that God not only approves of emotion but also intentionally created us as emotional beings. Our emotions are part of being made as God’s image bearers.
Can I trust my emotions?
We should not fear or distrust our emotions. Our emotions are not uncontrollable forces that rise up unbidden from within us. They are not wild animal instincts we must fight to master, though they may sometimes feel like that when we are experiencing intense emotional surges! As Lisa Feldman Barrett says in her TED Talk, we can actually shape our emotions: “You aren’t at the mercy of your emotions—your brain creates them. You are the architect of your own experience.” We can learn new emotion concepts over time, which our minds can then call on in the moment when we are feeling sensations we need to give meaning to.
Our emotions can help us understand what we are going through and how we feel about it. They can help us make good decisions about what to do next or how to respond.
Trauma and unhealed wounds can impact our emotions. Sometimes we react not to something currently happening but to a painful event in our past that is suddenly brought to mind. It may appear that we are reacting disproportionately to the current situation, and this is because we are actually reacting to something that happened a long time ago.
For example, if a friend has read your text message without replying, you might get upset, feeling abandoned or rejected. And that’s because it reminds you of the time another friend ended your relationship, because you left a harmful church. Your emotions are true and real—you were deeply hurt by that earlier rejection, and your pain is valid.
But in the current situation, your new friend isn’t rejecting you. You might find out later they were in a meeting and couldn’t type a response. So your emotion is real and trustworthy, but the information you have about the situation is lacking. The gap in your knowledge of the circumstances is being filled in with an incorrect assumption from that wounded part of yourself. This is not a case of untrustworthy emotions; this is simply a case of incorrect information and an unhealed wound.
For more on how our emotions give us important insight, see The Wisdom of Your Heart by Marc Alan Schelske. He also offers a helpful journal for examining and processing emotions called the Untangle Workbook.
Am I sinning if I’m angry at my abusers?
The Bible is full of accounts of God being angry at injustice and oppression. See, for example, Isaiah 26:13-14: “Lord our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but your name alone do we honor. They are now dead, they live no more; their spirits do not rise. You punished them and brought them to ruin; you wiped out all memory of them.”
Malachi 3:5 quotes God as saying, “So I will come to put you on trial. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, but do not fear me.”
Amos speaks often about God’s anger and even hatred toward those who harm vulnerable people, especially in chapters 5 and 8. Amos 5 says, “There are those who hate the one who upholds justice in court and detest the one who tells the truth. You levy a straw tax on the poor and impose a tax on their grain (verse 11). …There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes and deprive the poor of justice in the courts (verse 12).” God says, “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. …Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (verses 21-24).
God is angry at those who harm vulnerable people such as widows, orphans, workers, and poor people. God gives direct commands against oppression such as Exodus 22:21-22: “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. Do not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless.”
Abuse is clearly a form of injustice and specifically oppression. Abuse is a mistreatment of people who are vulnerable in a power differential. Abuse is using coercive control against another human out of a sense of entitlement to their submission. So being angry at abuse is actually a reflection of God’s character, whether that abuse is directed at you or someone else.
Anger is an emotion we feel when we are blocked from something we want or are trapped. Abuse is a blocking and a trapping. Anger is a healthy and normal response to abuse.
Emotions are important motivational forces that help us take action toward our goals. We should be angry about abuse, and we should use that anger to motivate us and give us energy to take action to be safe and to be free. Your anger against abuse is not sinful. In fact, it’s a God-given gift.
Becky Castle Miller has served as a discipleship director at an international church and offers trauma-informed pastoral care. She is a PhD student in New Testament working on a dissertation about emotions and discipleship in the Gospel of Luke.
Instagram: @WholeEmotion
Twitter: @BCastleMiller
