“Don’t Listen to Your Emotions” Is Bad Advice

I’ll probably realize I was wrong in 10 years but a girl can dream, right? And don’t come for me with “the heart is deceitful above all else” bc a lecturer I once had at Bible school said that in Hebrew culture the heart was considered the center of thinking, so we should perhaps read it, “the mind, or one’s own thoughts are deceitful above all else.” This honestly checks out methinks. Using the terminology we use for the head and the heart now, your heart tells you to donate to the starving children, your head tells you that actually you probably can’t really spare the money right now what with the mortgage and the stonks and whatnot. A shoddy example, but I am very lazy, and I’m sure you get the point.

But let’s argue semantics a lil more. Please don’t read the title of this post and think “listen to your emotions” means “act on your emotions”. I understand that’s how we get, “but I love him!!!” I’ve seen the Little Mermaid and I hate Ariel as much as any grown adult should. What I’m saying is listen to your emotions.

I have been kicking against the notion that emotions are at worst bad and at best permissible-but-useless for some time now. I was already kicking against every other ideal in existence, why not toss one more in? Anyway, I’ve been foraging and scavenging useful quotes from various sources, and here is one of my favorites:

“Our emotions can serve us well if we allow them to motivate us toward Godly change. Some emotions quickly sour if we hold onto them. Instead, use them as short term catalysts for change…Anger can show you that justice has been violated. Envy can reveal something is missing. Fear can motivate you to seek help. Some emotions- love, joy, contentment, and desire- are more long term. These can be cultivated for creating and nurturing intimacy…The sooner we understand the purpose for a particular emotion, the sooner we learn what is needed to change and heal.” –Douglas Rosenau

I also stan the entire chapter about the place of emotion in our lives in Kate Conner’s book Enough, but it’s probably illegal to just transcribe her every word so here is one quote:

“Having and expressing emotions adds positively to every interaction (even professional ones). Being mastered by emotions torpedoes every interaction (even intimate ones).”

Reading and hearing from reliable sources that emotions could actually be useful when managed appropriately was wild. It wasn’t until I started looking into stuff like this that I realized my own view of emotion was that it was fine, but ideally it was something I’d grow out of, and served no more purpose than an appendix or vestigial tail. I think this view came from a fusion of hearing my mom say in my early years, “it’s ok to cry, that’s why God gave us tears” (a sentence which brings me to the verge of said tears every time I think about it) and hearing many a Christian leader go on and on about how you shouldn’t listen to your emotions, you can’t do things based on feelings, please resort to stiff-armed stoicism you snivelling cowards.

The other thing that grinds my gears is that we have, in our American church circle, two lines of thought: emotions are unreliable and flippant, and: women are emotional. Is it so wild to say that when we consistently reinforce these two ideas, however separate and caveated they may be, that we will start to form a line of thought that says women are unreliable and untrustworthy. That alas, we are too ruled by the emotions that swirl around in our mysterious inner waters to make hard decisions and be in leadership roles.

Wow I think I just found the world’s newest idea.

Opinions about gender roles aside, and the fact that actually if you read the Bible, it’s the men who are crying all the time (Joseph, David, Jesus) and the women are calmly and collectedly winning people’s trust, letting them sleep in their home, and then stabbing them through the head with a tent peg (Jael, a true queen and I would follow her anywhere)also aside, the fact is that emotional intelligence actually makes you smarter. That’s why it has the word intelligence in it. It helps you with career, relationships, self-awareness, all that good shtuff. And I think most people would agree with me on this, so I think the issue is not a difference of ideals but a poor use of language around emotion. Instead of “don’t trust or listen to your weepy, hungry, horny emotions” may I suggest, “take a moment to introspect, reflect, check your emotions against the truth (common sense, God’s word, the opinion of a wise old woman who lives deep in the forest) before lashing out or letting them take root.” We would all lead richer lives if we did away with the dichotomy of logic and emotion and fused them together into one mega beam of power that would blast us to a higher level of consciousness where we can see seven new colors –you know what, I have clearly become over-excited. Excuse me while I use my emotional intelligence to reflect on this behaviour and grow as a person from this experience.