Faith & Feelings

What is the ultimate goal of interacting with an emotionally immature person? To stay in control of our own mind and feelings. While we can’t change the person, we can learn ways of interacting with emotionally immature people without sacrificing or losing parts of ourselves. When we learn how to keep an observational perspective, we can stay centered, no matter how the other person behaves. This...

Hitting a wall is not an if , but when . We all have this experience, typically several times throughout our lives. Suddenly, the ways that we learned to cope with childhood wounds and unmet needs begin begin to fail us in adulthood. Unhealthy coping patterns catch up with us. Our souls often begin summoning us to a deeper, inner change through emotional or physical symptoms like panic, anxie...

Are patterns from your past impacting how you show up to your life and relationships today? How we learned to cope with childhood wounds and unmet needs often become the dysfunctional patterns that we live out in adulthood. This is one way that the impact of emotionally immature parenting can leak into our adult lives. Healing starts with noticing and naming these patterns. When we invite God’s sp...

From the time we entered the world, we all began crafting a story that helped us make sense and give meaning to the painful things that happened to us. As we absorbed explicit and implicit messages from family members, authority figures, and peers about who we were and what the world expected of us, we gradually began forming a narrative that explained our lives to us… a narrative that grooved its...

We all need someone who reads us well and believes in us. This is the essence of what security feels like in a relationship: knowing that the other person sees you, understands you, and celebrates who you are. But what happens if you didn’t receive this kind of nurturing love as a child? There is essentially one way to provide this kind nurturing love that we all need to develop and thrive, but th...

Many of us have a confusing relationship with anger. Anger is a complex emotion that can create significant internal conflict, fueling both guilt and fear. Similar to anxiety, it’s a powerful force that can do great harm and also has great value. It’s such a physical emotion, and we can feel anger in our bodies with incredibly intensity. In this episode, I talk about 4 ways that that we tend to av...

If emotional immaturity could be summed up in a sentence, it might be this: “it’s not me, it’s you.” People who are emotionally immature often engage in inappropriate or harmful behavior, and then revert to altering their perceptions of reality to fit what makes sense to them. They lack emotional sensitivity, are self-preoccupied, and often cause others to question reality instead of taking r...

Emotional loneliness is the kind of loneliness that you can feel even in the presence of others. It results from a lack of emotional connection, and it can sometimes be even more painful than being physically alone. It’s that feeling of being unseen… a vague and private experience, not easy to recognize or find words for. While just as wounding as a physical injury, emotional loneliness is less ob...

Have you ever longed to be seen and known as the person you truly are? To share anything with someone and know that you’ll be understood, accepted, and validated? Emotional responsiveness is the single most essential ingredient of human relationships. Our relationships are built and sustained through emotional intimacy, and the feeling that someone is interested in taking time to listen and truly...

Although we’re used to thinking of adults as more mature than their children, what if some children come into the world, and within a few years, are more emotionally mature than their parents?   In this next Faith & Feeling’s podcast series called “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents,” we’re going to talk about the ways that emotionally immature parents impact their childr...

Why does God sometimes feel so far away? The reason for this could be your attachment style. We all experience moments when God's love and presence are tangible. But we can also experience feeling utterly abandoned by God. Why? In this episode, I talk about how your early childhood experiences and attachment (or emotional bond) that you developed with your primary caregivers can influence your rel...

Do you get easily dysregulated? Or struggle to get back to a regulated state when you are dysregulated? There’s a reason for that. In this episode, I connect your present experiences of dysregulation to your relationship — or attachment — with your primary caregivers when you were growing up. You’ll see how the emotional environment that you were raised in, and the ways that your parents interacte...

We all have deep and inherent need for love and acceptance. But, as children, what happens when unconditional love and acceptance were not freely given? In small ways, many of us learn that a “packaging of self” is what is necessary to find approval and affirmation in the eyes of others. As we begin to develop and experience life in the context of our closest relationships and social circles, we l...

I think everyone could testify to how imperceptibly incremental our spiritual growth can feel in some areas of our lives. If you’re like me, you often feel a disconnect between the theology that that you believe and the reactions that leak out of you in everyday life. Even though you know something is true in your head, it doesn’t seem to be shaping your heart or steering your hands.  Sometim...

“We all are born into the world looking for someone looking for us, and we remain in this mode of searching for the rest of our lives.” - Curt Thompson, MD But we all have those experiences of being unseen. Un-chosen. When care was not given. When no one came. Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to stop listening to our gut instincts. We learned to grit it out and turn off the messages of...

What happens when the circumstances of life force you to grow up too quickly & shoulder a weight of responsibility or caretaking far beyond your developmental age? When our bodies carry the story of an interrupted adolescence into adulthood, how can this kind of trauma impact us? And how do we begin to heal? In this conversation, my friend Jonathan shares a recent experience of dysregulation:...

How we walk into a room will always carry evidence of our formation. The way we act, if we get big or small, whether our voices soften or louden, if our shoulders hunch or straighten, whether we anticipate acceptance or brace for unbelonging...it all tells a story. A story about something we’ve lived. In those moments when it feels like you don’t fit in and that shame-filled question wells up insi...

We are in a series on Faith & Feelings all about emotional dysregulation. Another way to describe this term is the inability to control your insides. It’s those moments when everything seems out of sorts. All of us experience emotional dysregulation, but so many of us can get dysregulated without even realizing it.   Whether it looks like exploding or imploding, whether it feels like gett...

Few things impact your minute-to-minute—life more than emotional dysregulation.   Another way to describe this term is the inability to control your insides. It’s that unexpected spiral into anger, anxiety, or insecurity. It’s what happening inside of you during that unsettling relational interaction.  It’s what’s going on when you burst into tears over losing your keys, or emotionally s...

Have you ever walked away from a conversation or situation, feeling bewildered or embarrassed, and thought to yourself, “Why on earth did I do (or say) that?” We all have those disproportionate emotional responses to situations that typically wouldn’t affect us in such dramatic ways. You know in your head that your reaction was not rational, but your body was living out a different story. The coun...

Sometimes suffering lasts…and where is God in this? How do we find joy, hope, and love when life becomes undone?   When life doesn’t make sense, we need a theology of suffering that helps us expand to hold the brokenness & beauty of our world together. Over the last few months, we’ve been hearing from 8 wise, kind, and deeply authentic people about their stories of pain & sorrow, and...

Over the last 6 years of recovering from an eating disorder, I’ve known one thing to be true: mental health struggles are difficult to describe, and they can be exhausting to live with. It’s a daily waking up to an inner battle that can be overwhelmingly unnoticed by others, and there is a certain strength that is required to endure pain that lingers, especially when it’s unseen. As we wrap up our...

I recently heard loneliness described as “an agonizing hunger.” It is possible to be in a room full of people and to feel more lonely than if the room was empty. It is to be unseen. And being unseen by those close to you is, in some ways, worse than having no one see you. This form of loneliness has a name: emotional loneliness, and can be experienced by anyone, regardless of your marital status....

Have you ever poured out your feelings to God, before editing your words?   So many of us have internalized a narrative that stuffing down our emotions is strength. As children, we may have witnessed how “being fine” was praised and celebrated…and in some Christian contexts, even called spiritual maturity. So, we grew into adulthood having learned to disconnect from our own inner cries. &nbsp...

The image of the family is so deeply imprinted onto us: pressed into our minds, hearts, and sense of who we are in the world. What do we do when our families are sources of pain or confusion… or worse, harm, neglect or abuse? In this episode, my friend Ashley joins me to share about a painful relationship with a parent. She puts words to the long-lasting impact that absent or abusive parenting can...