As I cracked open Jennie Allen’s Untangle Your Emotions, I was hopeful for some guidance in navigating through the chaotic, knotted-up ball that describes our feelings. Overall, her book offers some great, general advice. Feel your feelings before you attempt to simply fix your feelings. We were created to feel, and so our feelings can be gifts from God Himself. Her acknowledgment that we are all feelers was also deeply appreciated. (I always cringe when someone says they’re not emotional. No, we all have emotions even if we’re not all expressive in the same ways.) Her attempt to remind the Church that emotions in and of themselves need not be sin—it is what we do with our emotions that can lead to sin—is a poignant truth we need to acknowledge. It cannot suffice to simply tell someone, “Well, you shouldn’t feel that way,” and leave it at that. At best, it’s unhelpful, and at worst, it’s even more harmful. Particularly helpful was the second section of her book where she framed an approach to notice, name, feel, share, and choose our emotions as a method to untangle them. I found the chapter The Vocabulary of Emotion (naming your emotions) especially helpful, as she named the big four emotions and their secondary counterparts.
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