How receiving grace changes your relationships…

Maybe you’ve never thought of this… but it’s a thing!

I don’t know about you, but I spent a ton of my life not even being aware of my emotions. They just happened – and often carried me off with them. When I started studying the Bible and discovered that the anger of man does not bring about the righteousness of God (James 1:20), I started working harder on self-control.

I had a solid background of experience stuffing my emotions anyway, so it wasn’t that difficult. What I didn’t know was how unhelpful those habits were. I tried venting to friends when I didn’t know the research shows this actually makes us more stressed and angrier.

We don’t have to sit in that seat.

You remember what the bottom line on how bad complaining is… (and just heads-up, this is why we ask our members to not “husband or kid-bash”.)

But after learning about the power of naming my emotions, I was sold. This research shows naming emotions helps us regulate them. This matters because when our emotions are out of control, we can have too much cortisol in our brain – that’s the hormone that is good in small amounts, but too much? We get fight, flight, or freeze responses.

We literally lose executive function in our brain and are pared back to things being run by our amygdala, which in a few words, is all about primitive survival physically, not relational success.

To tap into executive function when emotional, we need to tame those emotions, deal with them with the Lord, then walk out a NEW path, over and over again, so we show up as our true self – the identity of Christ.

And it starts with grace.

So keep doing your journal and naming your feelings throughout this whole journey!

Just getting started with us today? Here’s the first, second, and third posts to get you caught up:

1) The ONE THING you must do to change your marriage

2) What you can DO about the conflict in your marriage

3) How to MASTER conflict situations

Remember “The Connection Steps”?

1. Be in our Now by Naming our own feelings
2. Normalize
3. Receive comfort
4. Listen for a gentle truth
5. Take responsibility
6. Act with Integrity

Now we’re going to spend a few minutes talking about The Connection Step of normalizing. It’s an active moment of dishing grace to ourselves, first by NOT judging ourselves, second by NOT assuming God’s disappointed with us or judging us in what’s happened.

Normalizing recognizes our literal human-ness without judgment. It is grace and connection to the mistakes we all make. I believe one of the reasons God wants us to operate in a community is He of course knows (because He created us) that we are wired to do better when we feel connected to a larger group.

When we take a few moments to realize other humans could feel the same way we feel or have done what we have done, we are connecting ourselves to humanity as a whole. This is important as it reduces the power of feelings, helps us regulate them, and keeps executive functioning working in our brains.

So today, I’m encouraging you to normalize your feelings. This may seem like a wild idea – like you are letting yourself off the hook but hang with me for a second – it is a small mental exercise that helps you move closer to your ideal and vision! His ways are NOT our ways. Don’t be afraid of NOT judging yourself. The Bible tells us there is NO condemnation in Christ Jesus  (Romans 8:1)

You won’t abandon your ethics – you’ll simply choose to engage the compassion that is necessary to help you heal and move forward. Here’s more info on why you need this. Check out all three aspects – you’ll see that the full compassion experience is mindful about the true severity of our situation without diminishing it – just putting things in the proper perspective. Know this too – people simply cannot move forward while repeating the thought pathways of judgment of the past. We HAVE to create a forward positive vision of ourselves, which involves grace, to change.

Telling ourselves that it is normal to feel the way we do, “of course I would react this way given what I’ve been through,” and “many others have experienced similar things,” and, “it makes sense that I’d respond like this – other people have, too.” When we are mindful of our feelings, we don’t let them carry us away. We can experience the Now we are in, without exaggerating our situation by remembering others sometimes have things worse than we do.  We avoid catastrophizing our situation, minimizing it, or stuffing the emotions, all of which are unhealthy options.

You are human and are going to make mistakes.

You will NEED these mental skills if you are going to have any influence on the conflicts in your life.

Assignment:

Continue to journal about your feelings – but add normalizing to your writing. Without self-judgment, allow yourself to see the full compassion experience, normalizing in a balanced, mindful way. Help yourself understand how similar you are to the rest of humanity. This will help you stop striving to be perfect as you will realize that humans make mistakes, perfection is unattainable, and you already have everything you need within you (Jesus!) to do the next thing!

Next week we will discuss the third and fourth Connection Steps – receive comfort and listen for a gentle truth.

What about you? What stood out to you today around this topic?

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Love to you,