Emotions & Abuse
Becky Castle Miller joins us for a guest series on emotions and abuse. Becky is currently a PhD student in New Testament; her dissertation is about emotions and discipleship in the Gospel of Luke.
I was raised in a conservative Christian homeschooling family. My parents were fairly emotionally healthy, but unfortunately, they were influenced by some very unhealthy Christian resources. So the culture that shaped me at church and at homeschooling conferences and in books was emotionally unhealthy. My emotional struggles as a young adult came from the messages that I absorbed from the teaching around me.
I grew up thinking that emotions weren’t to be trusted, and that to be a good Christian, I needed to suppress my emotions. I needed to be joyful all the time; it was important for women to always smile and have a cheerful countenance. There wasn’t a lot of space for difficult or uncomfortable emotions.
I was and still am a serious Christian, and it was important to me to obey God. But I thought that meant I had to do things that felt really bad to me. If it felt hard, that was probably God telling me to do something.
Now as a parent of five kids, I realize a good parent would never be like that. I want my kids to be healthy and happy and safe, and also have space for their uncomfortable emotions. And I don’t want to control their emotions.
I learned to distrust my intuition and my emotions. I thought there wasn’t room for grief and homesickness. My dad was a military chaplain, and so we moved often. I thought there wasn’t room for grieving those losses because what we were doing was tied to ministry, was doing what God was calling us to do. I didn’t think there was room to be sad about losing my home and friends over and over, which actually just shows my lack of biblical knowledge.
Even though I was steeped in the Bible, I wasn’t really aware of the whole Bible. I hadn’t read the entire Bible for myself so I missed out on the deep emotionality of the Psalms and the prophets and even the Gospels. I missed out on Paul's emotionality in his letters. I would read so many Bible verses and Bible passages, but I wasn’t reading whole books. So with the combination of bad teaching and a lack of Bible knowledge, I thought I had to have these very truncated and compartmentalized emotions.
Right after college, I got married and moved again to where my new husband wanted us to live. And I was just so spiritually and emotionally dry because I had shut down all my normal human emotions. When we drove away from our wedding, I burst into tears because I was leaving my home, leaving my church, leaving my family, leaving my friends, and it hit me all at once. But while I was sobbing, there was a part of me saying, wait, you can’t be unhappy, this is supposed to be the happiest day of your life. So I quickly shut that down, hard. I didn’t cry again for years, at anything.
After I had my first two kids, I had undiagnosed postpartum depression. I didn’t have a vocabulary for that, didn’t know what was wrong with me, and didn’t know why I was struggling so much to adjust to motherhood. I also had this deep ache that I later identified as homesickness because I had never processed any of those lost homes.
I went back to my hometown for a family event, and I had a complete emotional breakdown. The damn broke and all the emotions I had never grappled with, all the wounds I had never healed came rushing out. And then I cried every day for months and started to process it all.
A good friend lovingly pointed out, “Hey, you might have postpartum depression. It would be really good for you to see a therapist.” Thankfully I listened to her, and I got diagnosed me with postpartum depression and found an antidepressant that worked for me. I found a licensed counselor who happened to be a Christian and did therapy with her. She’s the one who taught me how to feel my emotions. She helped me reparent myself with the emotional development people should learn when they’re in kindergarten. Like, I feel sad. Here’s why I feel sad. It’s okay to feel sad. I can feel this sadness in my body.
She helped me understand that intense physical manifestations of emotion, like weeping, can only be sustained in our bodies for a few minutes. If you let your body release that, you will survive it. You’ll be okay, and it’s healthy to express those emotions. I did so much emotion processing over the next few years.
I re-examined a lot of my beliefs, starting with emotions. I reconsidered everything I had been taught about emotions and emotional health and realized how unhealthy it all was. I started reading more about emotional health. I started wondering, if everything I was taught about emotions was wrong, what else do I need to rethink? I started reading about spiritual abuse and realized a lot of the things I learned were actually cult-like and spiritually abusive.
A few years ago, I started seeing a trauma therapist to deal with my symptoms of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Using EMDR and Internal Family Systems methodologies, he helped me advance the healing work I had started with my first therapist. I’ve continued to study emotional health, trauma, and spiritual abuse, and I am now pursuing a PhD in New Testament to look at emotions in the Gospels. This study is shedding light on how we can approach emotional discipleship in healthier ways in the church. Abuse and trauma and emotion are all intertwined, and looking at them together can help us get healthy in holistic ways.
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
