The heart of the matter

At various points over the years I’ve had a heavy heart every time I’ve heard the realm of emotions demonised within Christian arenas.

I’m encouraged by the new level of receptivity in recent years, but we still have a long way to go.

God gave each of us a heart and I believe He wants us to live with our hearts open to what life has to offer.   Whilst also exercising wisdom and discernment in the face of avoidable pain.

But if we avoid the heart by focusing on the spiritual alone, the physical, mental and emotional do not cease to exist or cease to be adversely impacted through cumulative neglect.

I was reminded of this recently when I attended a training day delivered by a fellow Christian and member of BACP.  This individual specialises in working with those struggling with addictions in sex, porn and love.

In the simplest form, the root cause of these addictions is an inability to tolerate painful emotions combined with genuine unmet emotional needs. This is further exacerbated by the experience of trauma especially when it occurs during the formative years.

Basically, exactly the same as what drives every other type of addiction or unhealthy behaviour whether around food, drink, drugs, sex, porn, spending, gambling, over work or the more blatant and physical self harm of cutting, burning etc.

But whichever way you look at it, the above are all forms of self harm.

And yet the most important commandment in the bible is still to love the lord your God and love your neighbour as YOURSELF.

It is ironic that our failure to learn how to love ourselves when we hurt can result in us hurting ourselves even more.

The above behaviours which we all fall victim to in various ways are a form of communication that as a society we just haven’t learned how to look after our hearts.

We have not learned how to love or comfort or sooth ourselves when we get hurt.  And as we cannot go through life without getting hurt unless we shut our hearts down, which isn’t living, this is pretty important.

Unmet emotional needs drive all our dysfunctions, insecurities, fears and harmful behaviours.

Yet this stuff can be learned.

We all have to learn how to proactively look after our physical health. We understand that we need certain conditions starting from birth for our physical bodies to grow up and mature in as healthy a way as possible.  We can’t choose our DNA but we can choose whether to look after our body’s in a healthy or harmful way.

In the same vein, none of us can choose the family we are born in to or the surrounding culture but we can each choose to proactively create the required conditions that facilitate our hearts as well as our minds growing in to maturity.  This doesn’t just happen.  We have to proactively take responsibility for implementing a healthy rather than harmful way to do so.  In short, this means responding to our broken, hurting hearts with love, understanding and compassion.

Not more harmful behaviours.

To neglect our body, mind or heart is to fail to appreciate or understand their worth or their requirements for healthy working.  

And such neglect leads to unnecessary harm.

Furthermore we must learn to look after our hearts for a failure to do so can also lead to manifestations of illness within the body.

This means we must get over our collective, ‘no feelings please, we’re British’ approach.

Irrespective of age or gender, every one of us has a heart.

It contains feelings we like and feelings we don’t and the more willing we are to learn how to manage the feelings we dislike, the less vulnerable we are to engaging in unhealthy behaviours or at the extreme, addictions.

Feelings matter.

The heart matters.

Our unmet emotional needs matter.

And fortunately we all have access to a God to whom WE matter.

A God who is able and willing to meet our unmet emotional needs both through those around us and through Him direct.

He is equally able to help us to tolerate rather than deny our difficult emotions.

And He is willing. 

Nothing shocks Him. 

Let’s face it, there is literally nothing on this earth that He has not seen!

Will we seek His help in the matters of the heart?

Will we accept professional help when He guides us to do so?

Or will we individually and collectively continue to live our lives in little emotional prisons of our own creation because actually on a heart level, we don’t believe God will help us to have a different experience?

The time has come to wake up and realise that the heart matters.