Thursday, April 13, 2006

Expressing Feelings

In our cell group materials in CCBC, there is an article about the importance of expressing our feelings, which I think is quite spot on:


1. Expressing feelings helps us to understand others, and help others to understand us more.

  • 5 levels of communication - greeting, exchange information, share opinions, express some feelings, express all feelings. The best levels are the last two.

2. Expressing feelings helps us to be healthy.

  • when we are emotional or stressed, our physical health is affected negatively. The pituitary glands of our hypothalamus will secrete a hormone called adrenalin during fight or flight conditions, which is harmful to our bodies. Therefore, it's important for us to deal with our emotion by sharing our feelings.

3. Expressing feelings is the first step of self-acceptance.

  • When we courageously express our feelings, we are honestly facing ourselves, and accepting ourselves.

My mother was saying to me tonight that I am normally quite an expressive person, but at times when it comes to conflicts, I can go into avoidance mode. I have been feeling moody, emotional and vulnerable lately, yet I praise my Lord that He will never leave me or forsake me, no matter what! I pray that I could express my feelings in loving ways, not just good feelings, but bad ones as well. Sometimes I find it difficult to be honest.

8 comments:

Kc said...

Kitty this is an excellent post. This addresses the central problem in many fellowship issues. We're not taught how to properly express what we percieve as negative feelings and opt instead to hide them. This causes numerous problems for everyone. May God bless us all to be more open and to learn to express ourselves appropriately for the good of the body and His glory. ;-)

Matthew Celestine said...

I find it really difficult to express how I feel to people.

Kitty Cheng said...

Kc, I agree that one of the central problems in many fellowship / relationship is the lack of communication and expressing of our negative feelings. I admit that this also caused me problems personally - I either hide them or let them out in a destructive way.

Kitty Cheng said...

Matthew, we all need help from our Lord to learn how to express our feelings in appropriate and loving ways.

Kc said...

It's just not something we do naturally and to add to the problem we're all taught that it's not the social thing to do.

I'm persuaded that if we examine our Example closely we can learn the proper way to express what we think are negative emotions. The greatest distraction from this effort is always fear.

I think the world of both you and Matthew and I pray God will bless us all to learn how better to communicate the hard things.

Kitty Cheng said...

Kc, you are so wise! I also find that fear sometimes stops me from expressing negative emotions, and the things I feel are hard to share. Thanks for your care, concern and prayer. Really appreciate you and Corry!

Mark D said...

Great post, Kitty! One important thing when sharing negative feelings is to word it in such a way that it does not attack the person...and it can be applied to self-talk too. For example, if I did something stupid and I am mad at myself, it is okay to admit that I DID a stupid thing, but it is damaging to say to myself that I AM stupid. Big difference between constructive criticism and that which is destructive.

Kitty Cheng said...

Great insight Mark. Thanks so much for the reminder. I tend to mix up between what I do and who I am...eg: instead of saying I fail in certain things, I would say I am a failure.