Mark W. PhD Baker - Managing Your Emotions for a Healthier Life

There are eight main emotions people feel every day all over the world. You know them because you have felt them. God has put down some pretty wise advice in the Bible for how to deal with these emotions, and that advice has been compiled for you in this book.

I spent the past twenty-five years as a psychologist studying what the Bible and modern psychology have to say about every human emotion. In the pages that follow, I will explain from a psychological perspective how healing is possible for our emotional pain today based upon Gods wisdom taken from the Bible, and I will give you many examples of this from the real lives of people I have worked with and known. Some of the illustrations I use will be of everyday emotional experiences that are pretty common, and some will be of more severe psychological conditions, but all of them will be examples or composites of real people dealing with true-life emotional events. If you have ever felt you could use some help in the emotional side of your life, or perhaps have even considered talking to a psychologist, this book will give you a very good idea of how other people have been helped with their emotional struggles, some of which might be just like yours.

First, let me say just a word about emotions. Some scientists use the term emotion to refer to the physiological reaction stored in the right hemisphere of the brain that begins before the ability to think and express ourselves with the left hemisphere is even developed. Then, when we can put these right hemisphere emotions into words, we call them feelings . However, for our purposes in this book, this distinction is not necessary, so I will be using the terms interchangeably. So emotions, or feelings, are a physical reaction we have in our bodies that we give meaning to in our minds. They are an instantaneous way of evaluating whats happening to us. Scientists have tried to distill human emotions down to a finite list, and while they dont all agree on what that list is exactly, the eight sections listed in this book are a pretty good example of the eight basic emotions felt by human beings all over the world.

Emotions are not simply bodily sensations, such as hunger, thirst, sleepiness, or physical pain. They are physical reactions that we interpret to help us make meaning out of our lives. Emotions are a combination of something going on in our bodies and minds at the same time. This can be confusing, because we also have moods and general feelings that are vague, and some emotions are complex combinations of several feelings all at the same time. So understanding your emotions is not always easy to do. However, an awareness of the eight emotions I will describe for you will go a long way toward helping you identify and express what you are feeling and give you some handles on how to deal with your life in meaningful ways.

Many psychologists think humans are motivated to do what we do more by emotions than reasoning because the emotional part of the brain is many times faster than the thinking part, and having emotions responded to by caregivers is now known to be critical for the development of the human brain. Emotions are the filters through which we make meaning out of our day-to-day experiences, the markers that cause us to know whether something is significant or not, and the vehicle through which we intimately connect to others. In your most important experiences in life, you will not remember the facts with very much accuracy, but you are not likely to forget what you felt. When it comes to really meaningful things that happen to you, your emotions play a much greater part than your thinking in ways we are only beginning to understand.

This book is divided into eight parts; each part will address a different essential emotion. The first six parts address the painful emotions of hurt, guilt/shame, anger, anxiety, sorrow, and fear. The last two parts address happiness and love. While these last two emotions are about good feelings, the mishandling of them can lead to tremendous hurt for us all.

So how does God heal our hurt feelings? Well, certainly not by taking them away every time we ask him to. The fact that we struggle emotionally as a result of the way the world is made is inescapable. But Gods role in the world did not stop with the act of creating it. He also provided us with tremendous wisdom on how to deal with the emotions that exist in our lives. If you have picked up this book to find some help for important feelings in your life, then I hope you will find Gods soothing presence as a result of reading it.

My graduate degrees in psychology and theology, as well as my advanced training in psychodynamic psychotherapy, led me to the conclusion that good psychology and good theology point us toward health. Decades of psychological research support this conclusion, along with the many people who have shared with me how this has been true for them in very personal ways. We are emotional and spiritual creatures who hurt and loveyou cant have one without the other. Learning how God can heal your emotional hurt will also teach you how God will bring more love and happiness into your life.