Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: It's Impossible to Be Spiritually Mature, While Remaining Emotionally Immature

Differentiation involves the ability to hold on to who you are and who you are not. The degree to which you are able to affirm your distinct values and goals apart from the pressures around you (separateness) while remaining close to people important to you (togetherness) helps determine your level of differentiation.

We forget that change comes through brutal honesty and vulnerability before God.5

Avoid and withdraw and cut off

When we deny our pain, losses, and feelings year after year, we become less and less human. We transform slowly into empty shells with smiley faces painted on them. Sad to say, that is the fruit of much of our discipleship in our churches. But when I began to allow myself to feel a wider range of emotions, including sadness, depression, fear, and a

The path we must walk is initially very hard. Powerful forces around and inside us work to smother the process of nurturing the seeds planted in each of us.14 At the same time the God of the universe has made his home in us

Are deeply in tune with their own emotional world and able to enter into the feelings, needs, and concerns of others without losing themselves

Hide behind God talk, deflecting the spotlight from my inner cracks, and become defensive about my failures

Geri’s leaving the church pushed me over the brink to look beneath the surface of my iceberg to depths that were, until this time, too frightening to consider. Pain has an amazing ability to open us to new truth and to get us moving.

The work of growing in Christ (what theologians call sanctification) does not mean we don’t go back to the past as we press ahead to what God has for us. It actually demands we go back in order to break free from unhealthy and destructive patterns that prevent us from loving ourselves and others as God designed.

I carry an overwhelming feeling of being shameful, guilty, and/or defective.