How emotion blesses and oppresses
Every emotion has a beautiful place and purpose, but they can also become warped and distorted far away from what they were intended to do and be for us.
How many people do you know right now in your life who are hurting in some way emotionally?
For me, there’s an emotional element to the experience of almost everyone I know who is suffering acutely in some way - whether that involves intense anger, anxiety, despair, or longing.
It’s easy to start viewing our emotional experience as a kind of threat to be guarded against. But from a mindfulness perspective, there is a place and purpose for every emotion (when used wisely). Our tendency as people today, of course, is often to control and try to fix different emotions that fall outside the spectrum of normality (or sanity). Yet again, there’s a fascinating sense in the mindfulness-contemplative tradition that we can learn to make space for a much more expansive range of feelings…working with them, learning from them, and responding to them skillfully.
This isn’t to say that every feeling and emotion passing through is somehow “good” or “right” and certainly not “who we are.” That is where many Americans seem eager to go next, but it’s a step that would depart sharply from the teaching of virtually all major faiths, including Buddhism and Christianity (both of which have a clear sense of right or wrong in terms of thought and behavior).
No, according to the world’s greatest religious traditions (and the best of modern psychology too), something can go very wrong in our deployment and application of a certain emotion - and particularly, in seeing the emergence of extreme and wild versions of their more noble incarnations (e.g., rage instead of indignation, lust instead of longing, despair in place of sorrow, and panic instead of watchfulness).
It’s this latter warping and contortion of emotion that I think needs more attention, especially if we hope to foster more emotional freedom and wellness in our families and our own lives. My experience has been that this is not well understood, in part, because we all so commonly get trapped in these cycles ourselves. (It’s hard to see a pattern clearly when it’s got you by the throat!)
But let’s try. And see if any of this below makes a practical difference in your own ability to rise above some of these especially common and uniquely painful emotional pitfalls.
Manipulating enmity
I tried to teach my boys at dinner a few weeks ago about how God created in His sons and daughters the capacity to feel hatred, disgust and anger for a particular reason: so that this same hostility or “enmity” would separate us from what is wrong and evil in our lives.
“Wilt thou make me that I may shake at the appearance of sin?” one ancient prophet asks in prayer. “May the gates of hell be shut continually before me.”
Alma likewise encourages his son to teach their people an “everlasting hatred against sin.”
Hatred and aversion…as a protection?
This is an important teaching in our own faith - and meaningfully distinct from Buddhist teaching, which tends to portray any aversion as causing suffering. But again, what about an aversion and repulsion towards what is harmful?
The power of this protective insight is something I’ve come to appreciate more lately, as we’ve all been witnessing escalating hostility in America not towards evil, but towards each other. Why this is taking place on a spiritual level is what I was hoping my boys could understand more - teaching them:
Those feelings of hatred, anger and hostility have a specific and powerful purpose - by design. And the adversary, when he found this out, basically decided to take advantage of this, saying, “oh yeah, well, then I’m going to take these feelings you’ve created to separate your children from me, and I’m going to twist and distort them to turn the children of God against each other.”
And that’s exactly what he’s done….husbands turned against wives, brother against brother, fathers against children - with the “love of many grow[ing] cold” - just as Jesus predicted, in a corrosion running exactly counter to Malachi’s more hopeful anticipation that “before the coming of the great and awesome Day of the LORD,” God would work through the prophet Elijah to “turn the heart of fathers to the children, and the heart of children to their fathers.”
Truly, it’s the best of times, and the worst of times, as Dickens wrote. (Although I’m drawing upon religious language, my conclusion here is not dissimilar to others in the bridge-building community who have drawn attention to “professional polarizers” and asked whether we are “being manipulated to hate” in our surrounding media system today).
It’s not just within families we’re being turned against each other, of course…but also on a societal level, as men and women turn against each other, black against white, poor against rich, nonreligious against religious, Jew against Arab, Russian against Ukranian, American against immigrant, liberal against conservative…in a wide-scale escalation-of-enmity that is all profoundly and tragically misdirected, once again, as people turn against each other (their own flesh and blood), rather than evil itself - which motivates thoughts, desires, and actions which betray all that is true, good and beautiful.
That has always been the true enemy of our souls.
All this leads our Father God to weep - as documented in restoration scripture. Upon seeing these divine tears, Enoch was surprised, “How is it that the heavens weep, and shed forth their tears as the rain upon the mountains?”
The God of heaven responds, “Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands.” To them, the Lord continues, he has “given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood.” (italics added).
Deforming desire
After been taught this for years, it’s finally sinking in for me. I’ve also been realizing that this is not the only emotion that is getting twisted and deformed in the darkness of our day.
This is, more or less, what seems to be happening with another intense emotion in our lives as well: longing, yearning, and craving - reflecting the intensity of desire. Like enmity (the raw urge to push away something), I believe the visceral ache and hunger to pull something close is also something God created in us physically, emotionally, relationally, spiritually - be that, an aching hunger for nourishing food and enlightening truth, or a yearning for a human intimacy and community belonging which lets us know we are deeply loved.
Truth, nourishment, relationships - these are all obviously such a vital and beautiful part of life, that it makes sense we would be deeply drawn to them all. Given that, what does the adversary do?
Once again, the master contortionist of God’s creation twists our innate longing:
“Let’s take that beautiful ability to be drawn to goodness and truth, and deform it so you’re drawn instead to lies and filth.”
“Let’s take your hunger for nourishment, and turn you towards substances that hollow out your brain.”
“And let’s leverage that yearning to be deeply known and attached to others - hacking that until you’re willing to bond with anything at all, including corrupting connection that will inevitably ‘war against your soul.’”
Doesn’t that remind you of all the experiences of pornography addiction and other kinds of sexual compulsivity, as well as many other kinds of drug, alcohol and food compulsions?
Inflaming sorrow and anxiety
At this point, I start to wonder: is this same pattern taking place anywhere else, like maybe with all the intense emotions?
For instance, take the common experience of feeling deep concern, worry and caution. “Watch and pray always,” Jesus taught repeatedly, so his followers would not be lured away by things that hurt us.
So, what would we expect the same adversary do with this crucial emotion? “Oh yea, well, let’s take that emotion and turn it against the human family.”
Instead of being wisely watchful, and thoughtfully attentive about what’s truly threatening, so many of us have found this capacity-for-caution getting contorted and warped to the point that we become anxious-about-everything.
If you study the physiological system of highly anxious human beings, that maps onto what’s going on pretty well: the entire flight-or-flight system can become cued to respond to everything, including a great number of things which are plainly not threats.
And what about sorrow?
We watched a Chosen episode recently with the boys where Jesus grieves and mourns John the Baptist’s death. “One thing I hope you take from this,” I told the boys, is that “it’s okay to be sad. That’s not a bad thing.”
Sorrow, even in intense forms, is something we all feel - often as a way to teach us about love and loss, meaning and purpose. But in much the same way, our experience of sorrow can very quickly turn into utter despair: something so excessive and agonizing that it feels like it can crush us, what scripture calls being “weigh[ed] …. down unto death” or “sorrowful, even unto death.”
None of this is to imply, by the way, that spiritual forces are somehow the sole driver of our emotional state. There are hundreds of potential contributors to excessive sorrow - which research has been a big emphasis of my past work.
I’m simply highlighting the fact that a healthy experience of sorrow (which God intends for us to experience and learn from) can for any of us become an unhealthy experience of despair (which I believe God does not intend for us to remain in, and wants to help us overcome).
Drawing us to all that is good vs. all that is not
In sum, God has created in human beings a fantastically rich emotional system allowing us to experience both a hostility that helps us push away that which will harm us, and an attraction towards that which will bless us.
Yet the adversary of our souls, compared in scripture to a “roaring lion” who “walks around” or “prowls around … looking for someone to devour,” comes to each of us and essentially says, “not a problem. Let’s get you attracted to that which will harm you, and hostile to those people and ideas that will help you.”
Our Creator has likewise created internal cues of sorrow and concern to signal to us when something is amiss in our lives or environment. So why would those not also become targets?
”No problem, let’s take advantage of those cues so you get overwhelmed to the point of giving up and decide things are screwed up with everything around you, including things that are wonderful and right.”
Said another way, God designed our bodies and minds to experience emotion for wonderful, ennobling, exalting reasons - to help us learn, grow and become more like Him. But there are other forces primed to thwart these wonderful purposes by deforming the emotions so intrinsically involved in the whole of God’s plan.
Some gratitude is in order. Thank heavens our attraction can draw us towards everything good, true and beautiful. And let’s be equally appreciative that built-in aversion and concern pushes us away from that which is inherently negative, false and ugly - while sorrow (and unease) alerts us to something happening that needs recalibration, or which needs to be grieved.
We might think about this distortion of feelings as a scope issue - shifting the true purpose of our emotional experience away from their God-given, custom-designed purposes, to a more diffuse target that goes far beyond what God intends. That is:
Instead of allowing attraction to draw each of us to exalting love, we can become goaded-and-socialized to allow these same intense feelings to draw ourselves to anyone-and-everyone who happens to attract our sexual appetite.
Instead of pushing away only that which is evil, we can become incited-and-inflamed to push away everything that makes us uncomfortable - including anything that happens to bother us in the moment and whatever we don’t happen to like.
Instead of feeling sorrow or anxiety for especially those things which sadden God’s heart, we can be bullied-and-badgered into these emotions turning into feeling sorry-about-everything…and anxious-about-everything.
However abstract all this may seem on the page, you’re no doubt aware how each of these patterns has concrete, specific, tangible consequences for how people end up living (and not living) their lives.
Especially when it comes to who they love … and how they love.
Loving what God doesn’t want us to love
In the Book of Moses - a Joseph Smith translation of the Book of Genesis - the beautiful text describes how Adam and Eve tried to teach their sons and daughters the truths of the gospel after entering the fallen world. But guess who else came along?
“And Satan came among them, saying: I am also a son of God; and he commanded them, saying: Believe it not; and they believed it not, and they loved Satan more than God.” (italics added)
Later, we learn that Cain, in particular, “loved Satan more than God” - leading him on a very different, tragic life trajectory compared with his brothers.
Jesus warns of much the same, when he explains to Nicodemus the reason people come to suffer under “condemnation” and “judgment.” As he teaches, “light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light.”
Bottom line: If we allow ourselves to yield to the enticings of this fallen world, we will almost certainly end up loving those things God does not love.
But we don’t have to forever! In my own life, I’ve learned the joy of coming to love more deeply what God loves - and yes, learning to feel something else towards the things God despises.
Learning to hate what harms our spirits
That brings us full circle to this: When was the last time you prayed for more hatred and hostility?
In a darkening world around us, that seems like the last thing any of us needs to feel - but remember, there’s a purpose to these emotions, like everything else we feel. And as a way to protect us from this very real darkness, a little well-placed, well-directed, functioning-as-designed enmity may do us all some good.
Remember this: The first time people take a step that is harmful, it’s normal for them to feel a sickness or shock to the system. This is common in stories of people’s first drink of alcohol, or their first exposure to porn as a teenager - sickness, shock, repulsion…alongside a strange attraction.
I believe that deep repulsion bears witness of the truth of what these things truly are. But if we push through that initial shock, we all know what happens next: We can start to enjoy that which was once repulsive and disgusting to us.
Even if a particular choice leaves us empty, anxious and sad, we can just as easily rationalize that away, and overlook the fact that these emotions come in the wake of our betrayals of God’s will.
OR we can do something else. We can stop ignoring and rationalizing. And we can fix our eye on what’s actually happening: That we are coming to love that which-ought-not-be-loved - and experiencing the bitter fruits of that inner corruption in our lives.
All that extra sorrow and anxiety is telling you something.
Namely … stop. You don’t really want this. This isn’t who you are. This isn’t how you want to live.
Listen to that. Pay attention. And do your best to follow.
Join Nephi in making this a new prayer in your life: “Make me shake at the appearance of sin … yes, help me to feel repulsed and estranged from that which will hurt my heart, my spirit and my sweetest relationships.”
Even more importantly, let’s all seek to live our lives day-by-day so that the deepest parts of us can fall in love again, more and more, with goodness, truth, and beauty, as reflected in the faces of every one of God’s sons and daughters.
Precious people who are not enemies to go to war with, but brothers and sisters to support, encourage, teach and gather home - yes, even and especially those who believe and feel very differently from you right now.