Sarah Fry on Being an Emotionally Healthy Church

At our 2022 Healthy Church Conference, Sarah Fry spoke in the first Saturday session on how to be an emotionally healthy church. A healthy church is one where people are learning both how to regulate their own emotions and treat lovingly other people’s emotions. We easily fall into a “fix-it” mentality. We love one another by listening and letting others know that we are safe for them. 

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

It's really hard to be comfortable enough with yourself to sit with someone's pain and not fix it. You have to be comfortable enough with God to sit with things that don't make sense and not fix it.

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You're listening to a special episode of the Holy Joys Podcast. The following audio was recorded at the first annual Healthy Church Conference in Frankfurt, Indiana. Join us next year on August 24th through the 26th.

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A whole church full of emotionally healthy people is sort of like, yeah, right, you know. But uh an emotionally healthy church is a church full of people who are working on being emotionally healthy, right? And we're doing this together, ideally. So these are my four points. I may not get to all of them, but the first point is that emotions are actually good. The second point is talking about healthy emotional regulation. Third point is co-regulation, and then fourth one is how do we grow in this? So at least that's the outline if I don't get to all of it. The first, the first thought is that emotions are actually good. So I think I think many times, I mean, I grew up in the church, in this world, and it may not have been said explicitly, but definitely many of us caught the fact that emotions are a liability. Um, if you are an emotional person, it's a weakness. And most emotions are outright sin, if not almost sin. And we have, I was listening to a podcast the other day about this, and they pulled out some of the books that were like hot items when I was a kid, and very much saying emotions, can you trust them? You know, like emotions are bad, emotions don't tell you the truth. We were taught, I caught, I should say, and I don't have a mouse in my pocket, I caught the fact that you really can't trust yourself, you can't trust your heart because it's deceitful and desperately wicked. You certainly can't trust your emotions, and nobody even knew what a highly sensitive person was when I was born 45 years ago. So it was like the more emotionally healthy you are, the less emotions you have. And I I just kind of look around at the people that I know and the stories that I hear, and I think, what in the world was God thinking creating beings who are inherently emotional? Like that's some of the most beautiful parts of us are emotional. If those emotions are bad and dangerous and sinful. And also, God is emotional. If you read the whole Bible, it is full of emotion. One of the things that's helped me with this is to really become more familiar with the psalm and the power of lament and the power of emotion in the Bible. And that many of the many of the references in the Bible to things that God cares about are said with emotion. They're expressed with emotion. I don't have time to get into that and show all of it. But I want to talk a little bit about the Psalms because the more I learn about the Psalms, the more I read about it, the more, the richer it becomes. I used to think that the fact that the Psalms gave me comfort was because I was just a theological weenie, you know. And I just, the Psalms gave me comfort because I can't really dig into the you know the good stuff. And um, then I start learning the richness of the Psalms and the power of lament. And I love how Walter Berguman talks about the cycle of disorientation. Okay, you read the Psalms, and and David is like, bash their baby's heads against rocks, kill them. Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I'm gonna go eat worms, God, you know, vindicate me. And and then he comes back around at the end and says, But in you I trust, you're God, I back off, you know. So there's this disorientation and reorientation over and over and over. It is a powerful demonstration of how to emotionally regulate. You don't emotionally regulate by stuffing it, you emotionally regulate by processing through it, coming back to the truth of what you believe in. That's that's a really basic thing. But lament is powerful. I I talk to so many people who simply haven't processed through their grief. Grief isn't just when somebody dies, grief is when something doesn't turn out the way it was supposed to. And you have to process through that and be sad about it and work through it, come back to the fact that, and yet in God I will trust. God is my rock. And so if you don't, if you don't work through it, if you stuff it, you don't um you don't process it and it stays there. It stays in your body, it stays in your nervous system. So we tend to think that emotional regulation means you have less emotions. Okay? So normally people would look at my husband and I and say, he's an extremely emotionally regulated person. She's a mess. But you know, like it we just we deal with our emotions differently. And he he already shared just a tiny bit of his great wealth of emotional processing. Come back to him. So we just got kind of got to put that away and say it's not, we're all so different. And you I've I've had some really cool uh discussions with my kids about empathy. And sometimes we think, in order to be a healthy emotionally person, you have things, nothing bothers you, and you don't feel lots of things. Sometimes we think in order to be emotionally healthy, you have to feel all the things. So he said to me before, I'm sorry I can't just say this with lots of emotional passion or something. I don't know. But like we have these expectations of what it means to be emotionally healthy. Well, you can't take your personality out of this. And so it doesn't mean you feel lots of emotions or you don't feel lots of emotions. It has to do with how you process what is coming to you in life. Are you stuffing it or are you letting it out in an appropriate way and working through it? Okay, so that is that is sort of the turning emotions on its head, is the fact that we you actually have to feel them in order to work through them. And stuffing it looks like it works, but it doesn't. The Bible talks about what happens when you stuff emotions. Unprocessed emotions dry up the bones, unprocessed anger lodges in your bosom. Um, what's the bosom of the fools scripture? Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the bosom of the fools. That's one of our kids would anger lodges in the bosom of fools. One of our kids would say, anger lodges in the bosom of the fools. One of my favorite scriptures. But but scripture doesn't condemn emotions, it doesn't condemn anger. I was just reading through a bunch of emotional scriptures the other day. It condemns emotions that are not processed so that they become dangerous, so that they become explosive or rotten. They're stuck and so they're dangerous. If you have lots of anger that's unprocessed, lots of grief that's unprocessed, then it's gonna come out somehow, which we'll hope we might get to talk about. So we've we've looked at all these scriptures about, you know, put away anger, put away this, put away that, don't be passionate. I was sort of offended the other day. I was like, how come it's saying so many times not to be passionate? That doesn't make any sense. It doesn't say that, but it's it talks about somebody whose spirit is unruled. Well, it's unruled if it's not dealt with. Okay, so true emotional healthy regulation is being able to process through it, and then you come back to remembering something true about God in this process, at least as Christians. It really does talk a lot about the emotions tied to health. A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones. So this is one of my favorite graphics. I hope it's big enough. This is not an emotionally regulated nervous system. This isn't always calm, it's not not good. Okay? This, where you're just always up or always way down, or always way up or always way down. Some of us have more of a personality towards that. We're the Anne of Green Gables of the world, not the Marillas of the world. But this is what true healthy regulation looks like: that you're able to go in and out of hard days and hard times and come in and out and keep tracking. All right? This is not in any way, if if you struggle with a mental illness that causes this to be very difficult or that you have more of a tendency towards this. Perhaps you had a very difficult childhood and this is how you survive. This is not in any way to criticize any of that. But this is just about us all growing wherever we are. Whether you're coming from this or whether you're coming from this. Our goal is to be able to move in and out of life and in and out of motion, being fully present. I have a friend who's going through a really challenging time in their ministry, and I said, How can I pray for you? And she said, Pray that I'll be present through this painful time. That I won't hide away from how much this hurts. She wants to be present in it and feel the goodbyes she's having to say and the different difficult decisions she's having to make. So that is that is emotional health. Pray that I won't try to get away from how hard this is. Okay? And then she will come out of that much better. I'm not sure what I've gotten here. Okay, so these are some of the things that we've heard. Um, sin is sin is ang sin is anger is sin, so you need to just push it down. Uh, rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice. Worry is a sin, anxiety is a sin. Lots of things that we've heard. So this is uh by Dr. Allison Cook. I don't know, it might be too small for you to see. This is called spiritual bypassing. It won't fit on the screen. Spiritual bypassing is when we make everything like the Lord will work it out, Eloise used to say. The Lord will work it out. And so, and everything's just like gotta be okay all the time. We bypass real emotions by just making it spiritual, and it really, it really isn't healthy. So this is spiritual support, this is spiritual bypassing. Your love can cure them, love will make it all okay. Um, God wouldn't give you more than you can handle. Real real, real bad life. Uh, there's hurt that you're hearing. I'm sorry you're hurting, I wish you didn't have to go through this. So instead of just saying, God won't give you more than you can handle, to say, this is this is too much, this is too much. I know you're hurting. Instead of saying God always gives a clear sign, say, it's brave to step into uncertainty. I'm praying with you. Faith removes fear. It is scary. I get it, I'm with you. You need to let go and let God. I see how hard you've been working, you're bearing such beautiful fruit. So this is harder to give because it's not as certain. It doesn't give answers. We want to give answers. We want to make everything okay. We want to make the emotions go away. When our kids are freaking out, we just want it to stop. Just stop. Stop. Stop feeling all of that. And then I'm feeling things about how you're feeling.

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Okay?

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And it just doesn't work. And we just want to make it stop. So sometimes we just spank them till they stop, you know, like that's kind of been the way. If they're not controlling themselves, you spank them till they control themselves. And so then it teaches them all kinds of horrible things. So it's harder to do this. First of all, we don't really know how, it's uncomfortable, it feels weird, but also because this is just so much tidier. We want it to be tidy, and it's just not tidy. An emotionally healthy church is messy, it's messy. Okay, underneath, we're gonna use anger. Anger gets a lot of attention in the Christian world, okay? Because it's the one that's the most sinful. If you say you're frustrated, then it's okay. If you say it's righteous indignation, it's okay. If you say I'm angry for them, it's okay. If you're angry about something that affects you, it's sinful. It doesn't make any sense. The Bible does warn about the danger of anger. I'm not saying that. It does. Anger can get you into whole heaps of trouble. But it doesn't say that anger itself is a sin. It wants you to deal with it in a proper way. And we've missed that nuance in a really bad way. Underneath anger, there is usually some other feeling, usually there is something else, hurt or fear, or uncertainty, or something. And anger is often the pressure release for many people, for many different kinds of emotions. So you can put other kinds of things up here at the top, other emotions. Many times there's more going on than just that feeling. Okay, there's other things that are feeding into that. So, but we are told that anger is a sin, so we learn how to stuff it. Don't be angry. You are angry. You can't like just make yourself not angry, especially when you're eight years old. And when you're 45 years old, if you're angry, there's usually a reason for it. So we stuff it and it works. Kind of works. Do you guys know about that? That whole pressure cooker exploding thing. Um, often it just causes us to really tightly close everything up, button everything up really tightly, and just keep it all inside. But what that causes is loneliness, anxiety, depression, perfectionism, lack of trust, self-medication, disconnection, overwork, strained relationships. When everything is pushed inside, it's a lack of vulnerability. Because we've been taught that's what we're supposed to do. I am so glad I'm not a man because I know how much pressure there is as a woman to not be emotional. I can't even imagine. I cannot even imagine in this culture how hard it is as a man to be a vulnerable and open and honest person with the kind of pressure there is. Because people are people are disrespectful to women who are emotional, much less a man, and it kind of ticks me off. Okay, unhealthy emotional patterns. One of this is okay, so this is really about church. I I started studying, watching. Why do so many people feel like they don't belong in church? I mean, we're fellowshipping, we're fellowshipping so much. I've still I didn't even I'm just overfellowshipped because everybody's lonely. Everybody's lonely and people don't belong. And I was like, so what's going on here? And I finally realized it's a sense of belonging. And then as I start watching people who are healing from not belonging, and I'll say, What made you feel like you belong? And it's when you're able to be safe enough to share yourself to be real, not with the whole church. You know, there's certain people that come to testify, and the preachers just go, you know, they get a song ready. I'm not talking about anybody here. I'm not, but I don't, there's appropriate and inappropriate ways, obviously. But if you don't have anyone that you can tell everything to, that is super lonely. It's a weakness of our church. There are a lot of reasons why this has happened because emotions aren't safe, you're not strong, you're not a good Christian if you're emotional, if you're falling apart. You just go home and cry, and your husband's the only one that knows. It's it's dumb. And we talk about each other, and that really ticks me off. We talk about each other and it's dumb. And we don't know what to say, so sometimes we're not safe. You know, I if you if you tell someone you're struggling in again and they say, Oh, I thought you were over that, then you're not gonna probably take that to them again. And and it we haven't been trained. I mean, Dr. Graham is so good at teaching us how to respond when someone shares something. But if you just share in a way that says, Wow, that was really hard, I'm sorry, then then that's just opens the door to safety if we don't try to fix it. Okay, so there's lots of reasons. We're not bad, we're just learning. And I my counselor helped me realize this. One of the reasons that we have some generational lack of emotional attunement is because we came out of, this is this is our theory, my counselor and I, okay. We came out of the depression where I don't know if you've heard of the hierarchy of needs, but people really had to put all of their energy into food on the table, heat turned on. I mean, even my parents, um, my mom put an incredible amount of energy into making two nickels turn into $2,000. And she did it. I didn't even know we were poor. And and there was a lot, they they me that's she's generations down from the really, really hard stuff, but they didn't have space, they didn't have space to really process through a lot of things. Okay, some of this is generational. This doesn't answer all of it, but it's a piece that really helped me understand that that there were so many, many really basic important needs that took all of the energy. We don't really deal with that. Even when we're financially tight, we have food. I mean, there's probably five food pantries, six food pantries in this town. Um, so we're not just trying to keep food on the table. And so we have space. The generations below us have space to deal with some of these other things on the hierarchy of needs. If that doesn't mean anything to you, that's okay. But if you're one of these people that wants to understand what's going on here, that really helped me to understand. Sometimes it makes some of the, I'm not gonna name the generation because they get a lot of flack, but it kind of makes me seem like snowflakes because they just feel all the things. They feel all the things. Some of them are up here giggling. Alright. But it's not a bad thing that they feel all the things. They're raised different, they're raised in a different world than we were raised in. They're not gonna do what you say just because you say it. They're not gonna act like they're okay if they're not. Okay? So you might want to tell them to put their big girl pants on, but it's just the way it is. They're going to talk to each other about how they feel more than we did. I don't understand all of it, but I understand a little bit. Okay, so this is a cool, cool piece of it, and I'm gonna quit soon. Co-regulation is such a powerful, powerful thing for the church. And it is the science of interpersonal neurobiology. Okay, God designed us in a way that when we see someone doing an action, our brain actually fires in a way as if we were doing that action ourselves. First of all, this has so many implications for what our kids are watching. So many implications. Literally, they can scan the brain, and somebody over here, what the monkey over on this side of the cage is knocking himself in the head, and then your kid over here watching it is inside his brain, his brain is firing as if he's knocking himself in the head. Okay? That actually happens. They can take pictures of it. This isn't hocus focus, it's science. Pictures show it, okay? So when you see someone sad, or when you see someone happy, or when you see someone acting in a way, we interact with each other on a biological level. We affect each other's brain regulation. Okay? Eye contact. David and I were in counseling one time, on marriage counseling, and the counselor was like, Would you guys just look at each other, please? And she said, When you make eye contact, it calms your nervous system. So there's powerful things that go on. Again, that could be a whole other session. But within the body, God is just so smart. He, when he tried to make us understand how this is supposed to work, what picture did he give us? The body. That the body interacts. You can't have, you can't have one part without the other part, and this part and this part, and it all works together. The body is unbelievable the way it's connected. And um, the more I learn about it, the more I'm just like, it's just unspeakable how powerful the design is. If he gave us that picture for this, I'm like, not sure. How was the break? We've been praying for you. Okay, so mirror neurons, eye contact, interpersonal neurobiology, and the power of empathy. The older I get, the more I think empathy might be one of the most powerful elements in the whole that God created in the papers. When you actually sit in an empathetic place, somebody, that doesn't mean having empathy doesn't mean you feel the same thing they're feeling. There are so many definitions of empathy. I just want to clear some stuff up. Let's just say empathy is responding in a gentle and understanding way. That's the Sarah version. There's more to it than that, you know. But there are lots of ways to get better at giving empathy. You can respond in a way that says, I hear you, and I respect what you're saying and I care. Even if what they're saying you think is complete odd watch. Many times he listens to me and he's like, She's just so wrong. I mean, she's just so wrong. But he's learning to respond in a way that says, I hear you and I care. Okay? There's a big difference, and we're sort of bad at it. I mean, in general, I remember in grad school, we're all there because we want to be counselors because we listen good, right? And we, and I know that was bad for them. We were sitting in class and we're learning to listen empathetically, and we're like stinking at it. We just want to talk, right? We want to make it better, we want to tell you how to fix it. So we have to go over and over and over, practicing groups in class to learn how to just listen and then let them know I heard you. Many, many, many times. We're thinking about what we want to say to fix it instead of just listening. When you sit in the presence of someone who's really good at that and is also spirit-filled, it is it is one of the most powerful experiences you can have. It can be life-changing if you've never had it before. Someone who, and you add to that knowledge, that's why a really good counselor, a really good spirit-filled counselor, it's a powerful thing, because they have knowledge and they have experience and they they are they know how to give empathy. And when you sit in that safe place, all of a sudden you're like, it's it's a little it's a little um disarming, it's a little scary because we're not used to it. But can you even imagine if just the 50 people in this room got really good at that? I have said so many times, you shouldn't have to pay $150 to get empathy. We can do this. We can learn to listen to one another, to slow down, to take time, and stop trying to fix it. Many times people can come up with their own solutions, but they need, they need courage, they need to be heard. Many people are surrounded by people who really aren't tuned into them. I was speaking at the homeschooling convention downtown, and I said, When you were a child, was there someone that was tuned into you emotionally and your needs? And the room just got like silent. People were just like, I mean, this was supposed to be about their kids, and all of a sudden it wasn't. So being in tune, slowing down enough to be in tune. One another, it's very uncomfortable because you can't fix it. Life hurts and you can't fix it. But if the whole church can learn to do this, we can be the body a lot better. Um I think that Jesus tried to tell us things so simply that we missed it because we we we want things to be, I don't know, different than how you told us. And and and they were like, let's trick Jesus, let's say, what's this whole thing about? What's the whole Jesus thing about? He's like, Love me with everything you have, love others the same way. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, what's this really about? And when he summarized it, he said, learn to love each other well. That only starts if you love Jesus, right? If you're still serving yourself, this doesn't work. But learn to love me with everything, and then it's all about loving each other. This is not about keeping rules. He said that over and over and over and over and over and over and over in history and the half years of ministry. This is not about keeping rules to make me happy. This is about loving one another. You love one another by listening, by being present, by being safe. Okay, so half of everything is about this. So, co-regulation, first of all, in order to co-regulate, this is a lot, too much. I'm gonna stop. You have to learn to regulate yourself, you have to pay attention to your own stuff. You could do a whole conference just on this, just on learning to understand your own stuff, why you act the way you do, why you're so put together. What in the world? Nobody's that put together. Or why you're always falling apart? There's a reason for that, okay? You and you've got to start paying attention to that. Alright? Give people your full attention when someone's talking to you. Now, there are people who will suck all that they can get, and you have to use body language and eye contact to stop the conversation because you have to go work. You know, there are times that you don't give people your full attention. But in a situation where someone's opening up to you, don't check your phone and don't look at your watch that tells you you need to check your phone. Make eye contact, listen and focus with curiosity. You're not listening to fix it. They don't even want you to fix it. Okay? If they say, What should I do? Go for it. They show empathy, restatements of what you hear them saying, and then they get to fix it if you heard it wrong. Listen again, then they get to clarify and add. They put a little bit out there and find out if you're safe. Many times I'll put a little bit out there, find out somebody's not safe, and I'm like, bam, we're we're on this level here, maybe not this level here. You can tell by the way they respond. Every friend doesn't have to be at the same level, by the way. You can have fluffy friends, you can have deep friends. You only really have to have one deep friend. Offer positive regard, but don't try to disregard the issue. So somebody says, I'm such a failure, everything I do is a failure. No, you're not a failure, you do everything great. You didn't hear them. You're trying to fix it. So you say, I love you just as you are, you know, I love you very much, I know this is really hard, I know you're feeling overwhelmed right now. That's different than just trying to say something that'll make it feel better. These are pieces of co-regulation, it's been zoomed through too fast. In order to improve this stuff, like most of the people in this room will go go probably leave and be exactly the same because this is super uncomfortable. Getting better at this means you've got to get to know yourself a little bit better. Gotta get out of your comfort zone. And so that's one reason I think that we are as we are as the church, because this is really hard. It's really hard to be comfortable enough with yourself to sit with someone's pain and not fix it. You have to be comfortable enough with God to sit with things that don't make sense and not fix it. In order to learn about myself, I have to slow down. I have to sit silently, sometimes in my life. Do you have any idea how little we just sit? Silently, without a phone or music or something? It's unbelievable how little. And when you sit, one of my David and I's favorite quotes is talking about when you go and wait for silence and solitude, you twitch for a few days. It takes my nervous system 24 hours to settle down. I'm not kidding, I've done it a lot. After about 24 hours, then I can really like, okay, now we're down to business. When's the last time you sat for five minutes? Okay, then we're getting into motions 101, but we don't have time for that, about just what do you do to calm your nervous system? We have mistreated emotions. And we can do better. I'm trying to learn to do better. And what we all try to learn to do better, it starts with us. It doesn't start with us just like having the answers for everyone and being like all counselors. It's about loving one another well enough to show.

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Thank you for listening to the Holy Joys Podcast. Email your questions to podcast at holyjoys.org. They may be featured on a future episode. Our labors for a holy happy church are supported by generous listeners like you. Please pray about partnering with us at holyjoys.org forward slash donate.