For the last several months, I have been doing my MSW practicum helping people who have been abused get TPOs (temporary protection orders) against their abusers. Part of the process involves them recounting incidents when abuse occurred so the judge can see a pattern. One of the themes I see is that the abusers did not learn how to manage their emotions in healthy, godly ways as children. As a result, they act out their emotions on those around them in all sorts of negative, unsafe, ungodly ways.
But it’s not just abusers. Walk out of your house and go anywhere for a few hours and you are likely to see examples of people who can’t manage their emotions well. They have learned unhealthy ways for expressing their emotions – often sadly because they were never taught how to move from childish emotional reactions and behaviors to more mature ones. You may be a parent who struggles with healthy emotional expression, because you were never taught by your parents how to manage your emotions.
While the topic requires more information than can be crammed in a blog post, here are some thoughts to get you started.
- Emotions are not sinful, but how we handle them can become sinful. God created us to have emotions. Even an emotion like anger is initially morally neutral. Emotions, however, if not managed well can encourage you and your children to make poor moral choices in how you express them.
- There are a lot of scriptures about managing emotions in the Bible. Proverbs and James in particular have a lot of wisdom to share. Try searching for Bible verses and the name of a specific emotion for helpful scriptures.
- Acts 2:38 explains one way God can help us with our emotions. When people are baptized by immersion at the age of accountability for the remission of their sins, they also receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This gift can lead to the fruit of the Spirit which in turn will help us manage our emotions more easily. It doesn’t mean if your children are too young to be baptized, they can’t start working on managing their emotions, but merely once they repent and dedicate their lives to God in baptism at the age of accountability, they will have the Holy Spirit to help them.
- The first step is teaching everyone to wait a minute before saying or doing anything. My daughter and I watched an interview several years ago of a well known CEO. The interview was fascinating. She is the only person I have ever seen who took a good thirty to sixty seconds after a question was asked before she responded. That extra bit of time helped her formulate incredibly good answers. Emotional disregulation often goes hand in hand with poor impulse control. Although thinking happens between the stimulus and the emotional reaction, it is so quick the person does not even realize it has happened – much less that a choice was made. Teaching your kids to take 30-60 seconds before responding can greatly improve impulse control. Help them learn to use that time to consider their options and pray to God for guidance. Our minds work fast, so often that can easily be accomplished in a manner of seconds.
- Provide daily opportunities for your kids to process and express their emotions in healthy ways. In my seminars, I regularly encourage parents to create or buy one of those emotion faces charts. If they create some extra time in the bedtime routine (or at dinner or some other time towards the end of the day) for everyone to express one or two emotions they felt most during the day and give them space to share why if they choose, their kids will often wait to deal with what happened until those times. This gives parents an opportunity to guide them towards godly choices.
- Teach your kids options. Let’s be honest. The most popular options for handling emotions as a four year old often involve meltdowns, yelling or physical violence. It’s not that they are particularly proud of those choices, but they have learned those things hurt people, so when they are hurt, they use them. Regularly talking about better ways of handling negative emotions and teaching them a godly conflict resolution model puts more acceptable tools in their emotional regulation tool belt .
- Be consistent in giving correction and consequences for ungodly ways of handling emotions. While it might be “normal” for a two year old to bite when frustrated, it still isn’t right. Correction and consequences should be age appropriate, but never let ungodly behavior go unaddressed. The worst parenting advice that is given consistently is to let children work out their arguments without adult intervention. This allows them to use every negative behavior they know and develop some new ones. Don’t resolve it for them, but teach them how to express their emotions and resolve their conflicts in godly ways. Otherwise, you will raise one of the increasing number of adults who resolve conflicts like a four year old.
Teaching your children how to manage their emotions is an ongoing process. You will probably have to address it periodically until they leave home. Spending the time and effort on training them, however, will help them be more godly and improve any relationships they have.
