One of the earliest things I learned in recovery was the need to FEEL my feelings. I had spent so many years, pushing them down, denying them, even being told that my feelings will lie to me and I shouldn’t listen to them (anyone else get that message from the church?). My first sponsor explained it to me, as she had learned from one of her many mentors, that my feelings are like the instrument panel on my car’s dashboard. If one of them is on, it means there is something wrong, and I need to explore to find out what the problem may be. Perhaps it is something simple. My bright yellow triangle with an exclamation point is currently lit on my Highlander. I’m not particularly worried because I know it is telling me that it is time for an oil change. It prepared me for it the last couple of weeks by reminding me that maintenance would be required soon. It is reliable and constant….every 5000 miles (because I ALWAYS reach that before five months!). But if that light came on suddenly with no preemptive warning, it could mean any number of things are wrong with my car from something as simple as my air filter needing to be replaced to something REALLY serious….thousands of dollars worth of serious. As she explained it to me, to ignore that light and not show curiosity as to the source of what caused it to come on is what we call “denial”. I am, in essence, pretending the light doesn’t matter. And I had learned for many years to do the same with my emotions. I shut them down. I ignored them. I medicated them. Anything to pretend they weren’t there. And most of the time, I was successful…for awhile. Until the dark reaches of the night when insomnia set in, and I found myself all alone with the whispers of my psyche reminding me there was PAIN!!!! “Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!” Is it any wonder that there are so many who give up the fight in the middle of the night, when it is difficult to quiet the voices with noise or busyness or friends. The nights are long and seemingly endless. That is where most of my suicidal thoughts hit me the hardest when I was deep in depression.

When I was working through my first step study in Celebrate Recovery, I was digging deep into my past and answering the questions about my hurts, my beliefs about myself and about God, my parents, and the “family secret”. My sponsor encouraged me to be as honest as I could, that I would get out of the step study what I was willing to put into it. And she told me about the instrument panel thing. My emotions, she told me, are not lying to me, they are actually telling me the truth about what I believe. Now, I may believe a lie (or a number of them), but my emotions are honest about what I feel about that belief. For me, that was the sense of unworthiness, not being good enough, having to be perfect in order to deserve love and acceptance. I believed that I was a waste of space, and that I couldn’t do anything right. And I hated myself above anything and everyone else. I literally thought I deserved to die. I believed I was unlovable. Because of that anguishing belief, I truly FELT there was no way God could REALLY love me. And that belief was truly soul crushing. I had felt the weight of my father’s emotional abuse, my mother’s neglect and inability to connect with me or protect me. I had experienced bullying and rejection so severe that it just reinforced all those early beliefs, that everyone (including me) would have been better off if I had never been born. That was the “truth” that my emotions were telling me, and that I had wanted to escape from as long as I could remember. Emptiness. Worthlessness.

A funny thing happened as I started actually taking the time to look at these emotions and the beliefs that drove them. I started to bring them to Jesus and let Him look at them. And for the first time, I started asking Him if they were true and really listened to the answer. He assured me that they were not only lies from the pit of hell, but that even if no one else wanted me: HE DID!!! There were so many precious things that He communicated to me during this time that I have shared with only a few, but the main thing I came away from that very first step study with was that I was truly LOVED by God. Not only was I loved, but I was wanted. I was precious to Him. He began to show me all the ways He had shown up in my life, in large and small ways, long before I ever knew Him. There were terrible things that were done to me, but He still came in hidden ways that I had not been able to see under the weight of the lies and the blinders my pain had put on me. People He put in my life to be a salve against the cruelties of others. People who were the hands and feet of Jesus long before I acknowledged who He was. As I came to realize and accept this truth in place of the lies, the miraculous happened. I suddenly found myself FREE of depression. I had been depressed at some level or another my entire aware life. But all of that was GONE! I was free of the heavy, heavy weight that had crippled me for so many years. Bob Hamp says that the opposite of depression is not happiness but rather expression. When we DEPRESS what we feel, we are actually turning all those emotions inward as weapons against ourself. Anger at what was done to me was transformed into self loathing. I believed I was the problem. There was something intrinsically wrong with ME. Everything was my fault, and the one person I couldn’t escape was myself. So I suppressed. I dissociated. I denied. But expressing, getting out the feelings, speaking or writing them down, allowed them to come into the light. And The Light, Jesus, was able to shine truth on them.

Just like ignoring that warning light on our dashboard could lead to bigger problems and end up costing us more money than if we just went to get the first thing fixed, so acknowledging our feelings, owning them, bringing them out into the light with a safe person (or people…it just should never be done alone! We need others who see more clearly than we do to be our guides in this) actually begins to fix the core problem that has been spiraling out into other issues that break us down. Our feelings are actually our friends who tell us what is really going on inside, if we are willing to put forth a little courage and see what is going on under the hood.