Shoal Creek ParenTeen - The Battle of Feelings

 

For the Greeks and Romans, the great human struggle was between the mind and the passions. If you wanted to achieve strength, courage, self-control, and wisdom, you learned to sublimate the emotions to the dictates of reason. 

For modern people, the great struggle is almost the reverse. We believe our deepest feelings are “who we really are” and we must not repress or deny them. 

I was reading this blog post by Timothy Keller this morning, and these quotes really hit home, I think because students (and ourselves as well), struggle significantly with the above concept, and how it relates to life.

We are all emotional beings, that is for sure. But, adolescents tend to be what we might call “more” emotional than your average adult, largely due to the fact that they’re exploring their emotions and their feelings in new ways with new eyes. They’re feeling things they’ve never felt before and trying to figure out what the purpose of those feelings are. They’re trying to understand what those feelings say about their core identity and individuality. Our teens are in a very vulnerable place because of this state of emotional sifting, weighing and parsing that we call adolescence. 

In a bubble, that’s not all bad in and of itself. Teens need freedom to figure out what their feelings are and what their feelings say about them. The problem comes in when, like Keller suggests above, our society’s general stance on feelings proclaims to our teens, “You ARE your feelings. If you feel something, you have permission to act on it. If you deny your feelings, then you’re repressing yourself, which isn’t healthy.” There is no nameable figure to point to that is issuing this statement on life, but this statement comes through very subversively (yet loudly) in the movies, on TV, through the internet, and within social media that our teens are inundated. 

I think a big part of what we have to do as parents and mentors is help them see (mostly from sharing our own experiences) that life isn’t as simple as that. Students need to learn that, “Yes, what you feel DOESsay a lot about you, but your feelings do not define you. Your feelings come from who you are, but that does not mean your feelings are who you are. And that means that you are in control of your path through life. A person can be in control of the change they want to see happen, instead of being held hostage to whatever the predominant emotion du jour may be.”

We have to teach our adolescents that there is something deeper that exists as more foundational to our being than either our feelings, or even our thoughts. That deeper, more foundational piece of who we are is what the bible calls our “heart.”

In Keller’s post (which I strongly encourage you to read in full), he goes on to say:

The “heart” to English speakers means the emotions. But the Bible also says our thinking comes from the heart, as well as our willing, our plans and decisions. This confuses us until we realize the Bible’s view of human nature is revolutionary, different than what you find in other human systems of thought.  

The heart is used as a metaphor for the seat of our most basic orientation, our deepest commitments — what we trust the most; it is what we most love and hope in, what we most treasure, what captures our imagination. Every heart has an inclination, something it is directed toward. The direction of the heart, then, controls everything — our thinking, feeling, and decisions and actions. What we most love we find reasonable, desirable, and doable. Whatever we cherish in our hearts most controls the whole person. No wonder Jesus is so concerned about our hearts…

…You can’t change merely by changing your thinking, or through great acts of will, but rather by changing what you love most. Change happens not only by giving your mind new truths — though it does involve that — but also by feeding the imagination new beauties so you love Jesus supremely. We change when we change what we worship the most.

We can help our adolescents the most by, in our own lives, setting our hearts on Jesus, by getting to know Jesus personally (through reading the bible and prayer). Through our deepened relationship with Jesus we will be able to verbalize and share the heart changes Jesus does in us, so that our teens can see that they DO have some say in who they are, what they feel, and who they can become.