1-A NEW NORMAL
“Are my feelings normal?”
A young woman asked me that question in a counseling session. She had been promiscuous as a teen, and when she became pregnant, the elders of the church made her stand in front of the congregation and confess her sin to everyone. The deep-seated shame of that traumatic experience still caused her deep emotional pain as an adult and was destroying her life and marriage.
When she asked, “Are my feelings normal?” I replied, “Yes. They are normal human emotions, but they are not what God intended for your life.”
Negative emotions from traumatic circumstances are normal in the same sense that tornadoes in Oklahoma are normal, hurricanes on the gulf coast are normal, and earthquakes in California are normal. The word normal means usual or typical. It’s usual or typical to struggle with negative emotions, especially when something bad happens, but that doesn’t mean your negative emotions are any more acceptable than the behaviors or offenses that caused them.
We live in a fallen world. As the moral fabric of our society continues to erode, so does its emotional health. The number of people on mood-altering medications doubled from 1999 to 2012 according to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
I could give you updated statistics, but is it really necessary?
We all intuitively know that emotional health in our society is eroding at an epidemic pace. Divorce, adultery, violent crime, sexual abuse, bankruptcy, sickness and disease, and other events that can cause emotional trauma, have increased exponentially over the last few years. As destructive behaviors increase, so do toxic emotions.
As if we needed any additional stress in our lives, a global pandemic has turned our world upside down. Is it any wonder we turn to medication, alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, and other addictive behaviors to mask the pain caused by the fallen world and an enemy intent on destroying us? Here is an important question to consider:
Wouldn’t it make sense that if the behaviors are fallen, then our emotional response to the behaviors may be fallen as well?
My wife and I provide marriage counseling for our church. A couple came to us on the verge of divorce. He was struggling with intense anger and would explode with fits of rage at the slightest provocation. After talking for a few minutes, we learned that he was physically, sexually, and emotionally abused by his stepfather when he was a boy. His mother ignored the abuse and sided with her husband and kicked the boy out of the house at age thirteen.
He blamed himself for the abuse and suffered with feelings of abandonment. Later in his teens, he turned to drugs and alcohol so he could dull the pain. He had been clean and sober for two years but was about to lose his wife and family because of unresolved pain from seventeen years prior. His anger was not with his wife, even though that was where it was directed. His deep-seated anger was really toward his mom and stepdad and deep emotional hurts that were unresolved. Those past hurts were about to destroy his present reality.
At the same time, his wife was afraid of his outbursts and had developed great mistrust in his actions. She began to expect him to fall back into his addictions and resigned herself to the fact that he would never change. She had begun taking steps to withdraw from him emotionally to protect herself and her child from what she thought was an inevitable divorce.
His past hurts and her future worries were sabotaging their future. We asked them what their life would be like if the past hurts were resolved and there were no future worries. They acknowledged that their life would be great. They loved each other and believed God had brought them together for something great.
Then they both asked if their feelings were normal.
Is it normal for so many children to be sexually, physically, and emotionally abused? One in four girls and one in five boys will be sexually abused before the age of eighteen. It’s becoming too “usual” and too “typical.” W
