How to Feel Your Way Into Relationship
In my previous trilogy-post God(s), Humanity, and Open Eyes, I showed how relationship is central to our being created in the imago dei — the image of God. Everything in life is either a movement into relationship or a movement away. A movement into life or a movement into death. Because life is intrinsically found in inter-connectedness with others, with creation, and with God. We long to be connected to others, to be seen and accepted by others, precisely because we’re created to be. It’s where life is found. But beyond this simply being a theological argument, both psychology and biology back up the fact that we are wired for relationship. For example, infants deprived of touch will stop developing and eventually die due to lack of intentional, loving touch, even if provided with proper nutrition. And, as this post will explain, the human experience of emotions, I argue, serves to draw the individual into relationship with others.
Human connection is essential to human survival and so inherently wired within the human person is a system of emotions that read a given situation and both inform and invite the individual into deeper relationship. Emotions are a natural response within the human person that draws us toward human connectivity — toward relationship. All emotions. Including the emotions that have been given a negative wrap, like anger and shame, because most of our experiences with them — as well as Hollywood’s portrayal of them — have been of unhealthy emotional expressions. The core purpose of emotions, beyond providing color to life, is to inform you how to connect even deeper with the people around you.
According to Pia Mellody there are eight core emotions: anger, fear, pain, joy, passion, love, shame, and guilt. All other emotions are derivatives of these eight and all eight categories of emotions are only fulfilled in the joining with and sharing with another person. Take joy for instance: when you get accepted into the college of your dreams or get the job you had worked so hard for, the first thing you want to do is tell somebody. Because to hold joy without the ability to share it with another makes joy painful. Fear also invites you to seek relational connection. Think of horror movies: when confronted with danger, sure our amygdala fires in our brain and we instinctively respond by seeking to get away from the danger (which may be another human being), but the emotional response of the victim usually sends them yelling and searching for help. Fear is a natural emotion that informs the individual that they cannot or should not handle something on their own and should seek help from another. An invitation to human connection.
Other emotions are easier to see how they draw people into relationship: love is all about inter-connection, passion sweeps people up together in shared experience (think of someone who is super passionate about Harry Potter [“What?! You’ve never read it?! Here are my books…] — all they want is for others to experience and share their passion for it), pain invites you to receive care from another, guilt invites you to mend a relationship. But what of anger and shame?
Anger is one of the most important emotions in sustaining relationship. However, most of our ideas and images we conjure up around anger are of an anger that is destructive and detrimental to relationship: vases being thrown against the wall, harmful words being spewed at the other person, physical harm. All of these are unhealthy expressions of anger that stem from a mistrust of relationship — a mistrust that the other will genuinely care for them when they vulnerably express their frustration and hurt (because anger almost always stems from pain). Thus, unhealthy anger shows up as a means to weaken relational attachment and to separate us from the other because we believe the other won’t work on things with us and instead will use our vulnerability to harm us more. However, this only leads to unresolved pain.
Anger is a natural response within us that illuminates a tension or issue within the relationship that needs to be resolved because the issue is causing relational distance. Again, we are wired for relationship and emotions inform us about interference to relational bonding. However, anger inherently is vulnerable because anger points to something outside of our control — something we cannot fix ourselves and requires another to meet us and work with us on it. This terrifies many, which is why anger so often is engaged unhealthily. Anger at its core gives us the strength to speak up, yet, if we are unwilling to engage the vulnerability found within it we use it to “protect” ourselves because it provides a boundedness (think of clenched fists) that elicits a sense of control over a situation we have no control over. To seek control over the other is to avoid intimacy and vulnerability and only serves to create more relational distancing. However, a healthy engagement of anger invites the other to care for you and work through the issue that is causing relational distancing in order for the relationship to grow closer. This “invitation” is often experienced as shame.
Shame is a healthy emotional response that leads one toward relational restoration through containment. Shame is what is experienced on the receiving end of anger when the anger is illuminating how you may have caused pain or relational tension. A healthy engagement with shame allows you to recognize how you may have negatively impacted the relationship and reigns in your actions or behavior to better facilitate healthy relational bonding. For example, at a party your spouse gets frustrated and tells you you’re becoming too wild (causing her to want to distance herself from you), and so you experience shame, which offers a containment and a healthy humility that keeps you in relational closeness. Nevertheless, shame, like anger (and all the other emotions for that matter), can lead us into relational isolation if we mistrust the motivation of the other.
Shame can lead us into thinking that “we are bad” or “unwanted” if we mistrust that the other is for us. Instead, we hear the anger as an attack on our being rather than a desire to be close in a situation that isn’t inviting closeness — which can either cause us to shut down or stand our ground, missing the invitation for relational (re)connection. When we fail to bear our own shame (ownership of how we are impacting the relationship) we hand our shame over to the other, which is experienced by the other as worthlessness. An “I am not worth having my discomfort cared for by my spouse,” which, again, fuels relational disconnection but begs the individual to return to anger and once more illuminate the now growing issue at hand that is causing separation. It is especially important for anger to show up in situations of shamelessness and feelings of worthlessness because anger inherently validates an individual’s value — it declares that “no, this is not ok; I am worth being considered” and it invites the other to move in toward relationship.
All emotions lead us into deeper relationship. Every emotion contains within it an invitation to relational connection and informs us what is needed in a given moment for such a connection to take place. Because without authentic, caring, vulnerable relationship we would die (looking at you Gen. 3). It is wired within us — whether you look at it theologically in being created in the image of a relational God or psychologically and biologically — we need relationship to survive. But not just to survive: to truly live. Jesus said he came to give us life and “have it to the full” and throughout his time he called people to “repent,” which in Hebrew is teshuvah, “return.” Come back. Return from relational mistrust and emotional isolation and come back to vulnerable connection. Reconnect with the core way in which you were created to be and experience life in this world. Return to relationship.
So may you listen to what your emotions have to say and learn to hear how they are inviting you into deeper relationship and connection with those around you.
May you teshuvah.
