top of page

Good Grief - Week 2: How To Work Through Difficult Emotions?

 

Message 2 – How do we handle difficult emotions

Discuss: What were some things that stood out to you from the message on Sunday?

Read Nahum 1:2-6; Mat 26:36-45

Discuss What do these passage tell us about God and emotions?

 

Read the below extract from the Good Greif devotional by Brent D Christianson

By the rivers of Babylon—    there we sat down and there we wept    when we remembered Zion.


—Psalm 137:1


When I meet with couples preparing for marriage, I always suggest they develop a “vocabulary of feelings.” My experience is that most of us verbally express two emotions—“I’m ticked” or “I’m glad”—and leave all the shades between irritation and exultation alone.


We are wired to be emotional. We are creatures who naturally feel and react.

When we are in grief, especially in the early stage of shock, it can be very hard not only to express feelings but even just to feel. We are, for that time, essentially “protected” from feelings that might be overwhelming or potentially harmful when we are reeling from a significant loss or change. But this protection needs to be temporary.

Emotional release comes at about the time it begins to dawn upon us how dreadful this loss is. As time passes, grief’s impact will come more and more to the forefront. When the Israelites were removed from their beloved city of Jerusalem, which was being destroyed, and banished to Babylon, they saw all they held—their self-understanding, community, and faith—torn away like a dry husk. The realization of the depth of their loss came after the shock, and, commanded by their captors to entertain the Babylonians, they instead hung up their instruments and wept. They could do no other.


Feelings are vast and complicated; they often seem out of our control or frightening. But we don’t need to be afraid of feelings. We should not fall into the trap of saying some feelings are good and some are bad. They are neither good nor bad, they simply are. The positive or negative comes from what we do with those feelings. The most important thing to do is to express them rather than keep them buried inside. There is nearly universal agreement among psychologists and clergy that what we try to hide is what will control us. When we emerge from the shock of grief, it is not only natural but necessary to express the emotions we have not been able to bring out to the open.

I buried pain and it came up as stalks of anger that turned brown and burned as flame and turned the world around me into “desert” that I call “peace.”


Sometimes those emotions are a variation on Paul’s “sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26), and we express our pain in a shriek, a howl, a wordless uttering.


When we are able to express the emotions of grief, we are wise to find another person with whom to share those emotions on an honest and “gut” level. This is where a vocabulary of emotions becomes important. As we share those conversations, we will grow in both understanding and healing.

 

 

Discuss: Are there emotions you have that you tend to find more acceptable and others you find unacceptable? What are they? Why do you think some are more acceptable than others?

 

Read - Philippians 4:6-7


On Sunday Pastor Andrew and Grant Strickland shared about four ideas that help us experience God’s peace which transcends all understanding when we experience difficult emotions:

1. Recognise our difficult emotions with kindness –  Name the emotion. Say to yourself I am feeling ______. – Or “Here is a difficult emotion”.


2. Settle your feelings – do something to settle your feelings and be present to God’s peace and His Holy Spirit.


3. Listen to what your emotions are telling you. Allow the thinking part of our brain (our head) and the feeling part of our brain (our heart) to talk to each other. Rather than suppressing our emotions or being controlled by them, our head’s job (in partnership with God’s Spirit) is to listen to them and give wise counsel to our emotions. “Emotions are good friends but bad leaders.”


4. Be attentive to God’s hidden work amid pain, allowing challenging emotions to reveal and refine what we truly value.

 

Discuss - Which one of these points most resonates with you?


Discuss - Which of the above 4 points do you feel strongest in? Which one weakest in?


Discuss – How do you calm down when you are upset, and you experience emotional turmoil?


Pray: Spend some time praying for each other to help you grow and persevere during emotional storms.

bottom of page