What's Happening In Me? Grace, Curiosity, and Inner Healing

Episode 4 | May 12, 2026

Episode Summary Have you ever snapped at someone you love and immediately asked yourself, "What is wrong with me?" In this episode, Valerie explores why that question carries shame, and why shame keeps us stuck. Drawing from neuroscience, Romans 8, and the story of Elijah in 1 Kings 19, Valerie introduces a better question, “What's happening in me?” and walks through what it looks like to approach your inner life with grace and curiosity instead of criticism and condemnation. This is where real healing begins.

In This Episode:

• Why "What's wrong with me?" is the wrong question and what to ask instead.
• What misalignment is, how it differs from disagreement, and why your body responds to it before your brain catches up.
• How chronic stress activates fight, flight, freeze, and fawn — and why many of the things we call personality traits are actually coping strategies.
• How God's response to Elijah in 1 Kings 19 is one of the most tender pictures of grace in all of Scripture.
• How grace and truth work together to create space for transformation and why you need both.
• A simple three-part framework for healthy inner work: Notice, Get Curious, Respond with wisdom.
• What self-compassion actually looks like for Christian women and why it’s important.

Featured Quote: "When your inner world is well-tended, things start changing around you. You show up differently. You lead differently. You love differently."

Scripture Referenced: Romans 8:1 | 1 Kings 19:1–18

Resources Mentioned

• The Body Keeps Score by Bessel van der Kolk: Grab It Here.
• Hazel + Hunt (yes, the t-shirt from the opening story): Shop Hazel + Hunt

Going Deeper

1 Kings 19:1–18 | Romans 8:1–17 | Psalm 139:23–24 | Matthew 11:28–30

Connect with Valerie 

• Website: thepurposeproject.us
• Instagram: @purposeprojectcoach

About the Podcast The Purpose Project Podcast is for Christian women leaders navigating the messy middle, the space where expectations and reality don't line up, but God is still present. Host Valerie Jones creates thoughtful, faith-rooted conversations where biblical truth, emotional health, and spiritual growth belong together for life and leadership.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey friend, welcome to the Purpose Project Podcast, where we talk about what it really looks like to live, love, and lead with purpose and authenticity in the messy middle, that space between where you are and where you want to be. I'm Valerie Jones, a Christian life and leadership coach, and around here, we don't do hustle culture, perfectionism, people pleasing, or self-help band-aids. Instead, we're all about biblical truth, brain-based tools, and emotional health so you can walk out your calling with courage without burning out or sacrificing what matters most. Each episode will dive into real life stories, engaging conversations, and relatable teaching moments to help you get out of your head and into the life God's calling you to live. Whether you're navigating change, feeling overwhelmed, craving clarity, or just trying to feel like yourself again, take a breath and lean in. You're in the right place. Let's dive in. Well, hey friend, welcome back to the podcast. I'm really glad you're here. You know, one morning not too long ago, the alarm went off, and somehow before my feet even hit the floor, I was falling behind. Have you ever had a morning like that? It was the kind of morning where you're not out of bed yet, but you know, as soon as you get up, there are a million and one things demanding your attention. And what you really want to do is hit the snooze button, pull the cover back over your head, and just try again tomorrow. But you know that's not an option. Well, that was me on this particular Saturday morning. And so, with all the courage I could muster, I rolled out of my bed, I put on my leggings with the same favorite t-shirt that I'd been wearing for six days in a row. I washed my face, I brushed my teeth, and I used the last little bit of my dry shampoo to get myself ready for the day. I looked in the mirror, I gave myself a half-hearted pep talk, and then I headed downstairs to get some coffee. And when I got downstairs, it felt like immediate chaos. Everybody was already up. There were kids who hadn't eaten. My husband who wanted to know all the plans for the day. There was a cat who was jumping up on the table where he was not supposed to be, a golden doodle that decided this was the day she absolutely could not leave my side. And then some random fellow ringing the doorbell, trying to sell us a security system that we didn't need. Yeah, I made a beeline for the kitchen and the coffee because this was just way too much for a Saturday morning. I was picking up messes left over from the day before on my way to the kitchen, answering questions I felt like I'd answered 20 times already, and having a conversation with one kiddo who decided that last minute plans were the best kind of plans. And then out of nowhere, coffee finally in hand, my eyes filled with tears. It was really nothing, but it was also everything. I tripped over the dog for a third time, I shooed the cat off the table for the fifth time, and everything just seemed to unravel from there. I started snapping at my people. I threatened to ground my youngest for life if she asked me one more time about this thing that she wanted to do. I reminded my oldest not so gently that the dishwasher is a great place to put dirty dishes. And then I grumbled to my sweet husband that it'd be really nice to have some help around the house. I turned to storm out of the room, but not before reminding everyone that could hear me, including the cat and the dog, that this was supposed to be a perfectly delightful, easy Saturday morning at home. And I just wanted to drink my coffee. It was not my best moment. Maybe you've had a morning exactly like that, or maybe your version of this looks a little bit different. Maybe it's not a chaotic Saturday morning. Maybe it's a chaotic Monday morning and you're trying to get everyone off to school or to work and you're dreading showing up at the office or opening your laptop. Or maybe it's a Sunday morning and you're trying to get everyone dressed and out the door for church, wondering if you have it in you to show up and serve with a smile after the week you've had. Or maybe it's a Thursday night and you're trying to get everything buttoned up from the day before and get everyone fed and settled into bed so that you can just have a minute to breathe. And it could be that it's more than just a moment here and there. Maybe you find these kinds of days or evenings happening more often than you want to admit. And it's turned into somewhat of a season where everything just feels like it's fraying at the edges, and you can't quite put your finger on why. Situations like this, seasons like this, moments like this leave us asking ourselves this question What is wrong with me? When I stormed out of the kitchen that morning, I did not go upstairs and enjoy my coffee. I went upstairs in tears, beating myself up and asking that question. I couldn't believe what I just did. What is wrong with me? And while I reacted poorly to what was happening around me that morning with my family, I'll be the first to admit that. That was the wrong question to be asking because I was simultaneously overwhelmed with shame. Now I learned along the way that there's a much better question in situations like this, and I eventually came around to it on this particular day. And the question is, what is happening in me? Where is this coming from? There's a clear difference between those questions. One question, what's wrong with me? It carries judgment and shame. The other makes space for curiosity and for grace and for awareness. I am not saying that it's okay to ignore unhealthy patterns or hurtful behavior. I had to go back and apologize. I'm not saying that it's okay to make excuses for our outbursts or our overreactions. But I'm saying that we need to be able to recognize and process those things with an honest awareness without the shame. And I think for women, that's particularly difficult. That's why it's so important to learn to ask better questions and to understand what's happening in our bodies and in our brains in these kinds of situations. So here's the truth we're talking about today. What we see and what we're experiencing on the surface is often coming from something underneath the surface. Underneath that outburst, there's often something else going on, and those things are signals trying to alert us that something in our life needs attention. It's our body and our brain responding the way that God designed it to respond. I think we so often miscalculate and underestimate the mind, body, brain, spirit connection. We are whole beings. And so I want to remind you today that what's happening in your inner life matters deeply to God, and what's happening in your inner life affects everything else. I've said it so often that God cares first and foremost about who you are. But he also cares about every other part of you and every part of your life. He cares about your body, your physical health, he cares about your mind, your mental health, your emotional health. He cares about your spirit and your soul, of course. And again, what affects one part of you often ripples through every part of you. Nothing happens in isolation, and we're not meant to live compartmentalized lives. And we don't have the luxury of pretending that we can do that, even though we've gotten really good at trying. So that Saturday morning in my kitchen was a symptom of something bigger. It was actually a really difficult season of life and leadership. I was working as a nonprofit executive leader, and I knew for quite some time that something was wrong, long before I really had language for what was happening. And so my outburst and my overreaction to my family that morning and to my situation had nothing to do with the kids or the dog or the cat or my husband or the dishes. It had everything to do with what I was carrying under the surface. The signs were there. I just didn't recognize them for what they were. I wasn't sleeping well. I was exhausted all the time. I was overthinking and second-guessing everything, highly anxious. And normally I'm a decisive and confident person, but I couldn't get my thoughts together. I could not make a decision to save my life. I felt tense and stressed and confused. My mind was just full of noise and my spirit was burdened. There was such a heaviness spiritually speaking. And I didn't understand at the time that it was all related until it caught up with me that Saturday morning in the kitchen. I knew that I wasn't feeling this way because I'd stopped loving Jesus or trusting God. This wasn't a faith issue. I wasn't lacking faith. It was a job issue. But it eventually affected every part of me and every part of my life. Every day I was bumping up against things in my job that were directly competing with my values and with what mattered most to me as a believer and as a woman, as a wife and a mom, as a human. It was creating constant friction and tension. And that was taking its toll. It was an alignment issue. Friend, misalignment can be a big deal. Misalignment is not the same as disagreement. You can disagree with people around you and still be in alignment with them. Misalignment is more like suddenly recognizing that the people you've surrounded yourself with have an entirely different playbook. That is different. It means constantly wrestling because what you're doing and what people are asking of you or expecting of you, or the place that you find yourself spending the most time and investing the most energy, which are limited resources, by the way, are working against or contradicting the very thing that God's called you to do. It works against your purpose, your convictions, your values. And when there's that kind of constant strain or pressure, your body takes note, even if your mind hasn't fully caught up. Now I have to say here that it's unrealistic to think that we can eliminate every bit of stress from our lives. That is not what this is about, and that's not what I'm saying. Some stress in our lives is actually normal and even healthy. We need healthy stress. It sharpens us, it motivates us, it helps us to rise to the challenge, it fosters resilience. But there is a difference between healthy stress and chronic stress. Your body needs time and space to recover from stress. And when that's missing, all kinds of things can start to go wrong. That's what was happening to me in this season. It was chronic. The pressure and the stress, my body didn't have the time or the space to recover in the way that it needed to. You guys have heard me talk about this before. That looked like being physically ill, gaining a lot of weight. My hair was actually falling out. I could go on and on. But the point that I'm making is that your body knows. It's called The Body Keeps the Score. And it talks about how we carry these things in our bodies, unresolved pain, disappointment, grief, and trauma, and how it will show up in your life. It becomes a situation where anxiety or overwhelm can't be explained away by saying, well, that's just how it is. It's just a normal part of life, or that's just the cost of doing something important and doing what matters. In reality, in these kinds of situations, it's a nervous system telling you that something needs to change. Sometimes the nervous system comes online long before we're ready to acknowledge or admit that something's wrong. It's a little bit like a fever. A fever gets your attention, it lets you know that your body's trying to fight something off, that there's an underlying issue, and you can take some Tylenol, but that doesn't mean that you're well. The fever isn't causing the illness, it's a symptom of the illness. And our inner life works the same way. What is your body actually doing and why? Well, I've already said it, it's doing what God designed it to do. He designed your nervous system to protect you. When your brain perceives a threat, a physical threat or an emotional threat, it's all the same to your brain. Your nervous system immediately goes to work to help you survive and to keep you safe. So when there's chronic stress, your brain is constantly perceiving a threat. And your stress response is constantly activated without room for recovery. This is what we call the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. You could get defensive or irritable, short-tempered. You feel controlling or frustrated. You might avoid or stay busy or overwork or overthink or get restless or withdraw and isolate. You might shut down. Or you might people please over-accommodate, try to manage everyone else's emotions or have this overdeveloped sense of responsibility for other people. You might have a hard time saying no. And you may work really hard to keep peace with everyone around you, all the while making compromises you shouldn't make and losing sight of what matters in the process. Friend, listen carefully. Some of us are quick to say, well, that's just how I am. This is just how it has to be. But a lot of these things that we're calling personality traits are actually coping strategies. They're patterns of protection or self-preservation that we've developed over time to survive. But your body isn't meant to exist with your stress response constantly activated. Prolonged stress impacts you cognitively, physically, emotionally, spiritually. It affects how you show up in the world, how you feel in your skin, and how you engage the people around you. And understanding all of this helps us respond to ourselves with self-compassion, with grace, and with curiosity instead of criticism and judgment. And listen, self-compassion is not weakness and it's not selfish. For a lot of us, especially women, we feel like we have to hold it all together. And on top of that, we feel like we have to hold everything together for everyone else. And so self-compassion doesn't come naturally to us. We're often really hard on ourselves. But self-compassion is something that we can learn and that we need to learn. It's a necessary part of thriving in our lives and in our leadership. A lot of times we busy ourselves managing all of these symptoms, the anxiety, the overthinking, the overworking, the tension and stress, the exhaustion without asking what those symptoms might be trying to tell us. We avoid that question. We avoid taking a deeper look because that's hard, because it takes courage, because it feels vulnerable and risky. It requires a level of surrender and honesty and trust in the Holy Spirit to help us discern what's happening and to help us to know what to do about it. Friend, I want to make sure you understand you have to invite the Holy Spirit into the process. You have to ask Him to search your heart, to lead and guide you, to show you what needs attention. Self-reflection and honest inner work without the Holy Spirit's active participation is just self-help. And self-help is not what we're after. Self-help doesn't work long term. It doesn't often create lasting transformation. But when the Holy Spirit gets involved, when he's actively working, it's spiritual formation. And it's formation that's rooted in relationship with Jesus. It's actually because of our relationship with Jesus that we have access to this kind of transformation and healing and grace in the first place. Grace is not an optional part of the process. It's not something that's just nice to have. It's necessary. When you understand what your body is actually doing under chronic stress, you realize that shame and self-criticism and judgment are the last things that will help you. Grace is where healing can begin. Without grace, awareness has a way of turning into accusation, and that's where shame comes in. And it happens faster than we realize. We desperately need grace. We also need truth. Truth without grace leads to condemnation, to striving, to hiding, to perfectionism, sometimes to hopelessness. Grace without truth leads to us staying stuck in unhealthy patterns and unchanged because we're not addressing what really needs healing. But grace and truth together, that is where transformation begins. We need both grace and truth. Scripture gives us a foundation for exactly this in Romans chapter 8. It says, There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Condemnation says, hide, run, avoid. Grace says, Come to the Father. Talk to your trusted people. Confess. Bring this to the light. Condemnation says, try harder, do better, figure it out. Grace says surrender. It's not up to you to figure it all out on your own. Condemnation says, you're failing. Give up. Quit. Grace says there's something here that needs tending. You're growing. You're a work in progress, and this is a process. Keep going. The posture is entirely different. And that grace-filled posture means that you can speak to yourself with kindness, not excusing what needs to be addressed, not pretending that you've got it all figured out and everything is fine, but extending yourself with the same grace you would offer someone you love. Extending yourself with the same compassion that you would offer someone you love. It's the only posture that creates room for true deep healing and change. Scripture gives us one of the most beautiful pictures of exactly this. A man with a dysregulated nervous system and a God who knew exactly what he needed. We find the prophet Elijah in 1 Kings chapter 19, and he's just come off one of the greatest spiritual victories of his life. And afterward, he runs away and he crashes, and he crashes really hard. He's exhausted, he's overwhelmed, he's emotionally depleted. He feels isolated and misunderstood. He's afraid for his life. He's in a classic spiral. And he's telling God that he's just had it up to his eyeballs and he's done with all of it. He wants to give up and he wants to give up completely and permanently. I encourage you to go back and read this story. God doesn't rebuke Elijah. He doesn't hand him a checklist. He doesn't say, hey man, pull yourself together and get back at it. He doesn't say, What in the world's the matter with you? God doesn't say any of those things in response to Elijah's spiral or outburst. Instead, God lets him sleep. He lets him rest. And he sends an angel to feed him, not once but twice. Elijah was a man who was completely depleted, with a nervous system on high alert, and God tends to his physical needs first. It was only after Elijah had rested and eaten and been cared for in that way that God addressed the deeper things and sent him on his way. That is not an accident. God doesn't do anything accidentally. He's very intentional in everything that he does. And so what that shows us is that you cannot do this deep inner work. You can't address these things internally that need healing from a dysregulated nervous system. That is not the time to try and figure it all out and fix what needs fixing.

unknown 21:59

God knows.

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That because he created Elijah just like he created you. He knows that about you too. He knew that about me. So sometimes the first invitation isn't to fix the thing that needs fixing. Sometimes God's first invitation is to rest, to receive, to let him tend to you before you go any further. Emotionally, physically, spiritually. That is what it looks like when God meets you right where you are with grace and kindness and tends to you as a whole person. That's what it looks like for God to be concerned with your whole life. So, what does this mean for us in our everyday? Well, there are three things that we have to learn to do. They're simple things, but they're not always easy things. We have to notice, get curious, and respond with wisdom and grace. And we always do these things prayerfully. We have to notice what's happening, that's first. And the key here is noticing without judgment. That is crucial. We're paying attention. We're doing our best not to go through life on autopilot, but to keep our eyes up. We're asking questions like what am I feeling right now? Is it fear, grief, exhaustion? Is it frustration? Where do I feel into my body? What's happening in me? What's the story I'm telling myself? Then we get curious. As we notice what's happening, we lean in with curiosity. Curiosity is an important part of the process. Curiosity replaces judgment and it guards against shame. We're asking questions like, what might be underneath all of this? Where might this be coming from? Is this an alignment issue? Is this unprocessed disappointment or grief or pain or unmet expectation? Is this a physical issue? Is it spiritual? Is it relational? What needs tending to? And then you respond with wisdom and with grace. That's the third thing. You ask questions like, is there something I need to be doing more of right now? Is there something I need to be doing less of right now? Are there things that need reordering in my life? What truth do I need to be reminded of right now? And then you take the next step. You do that thing, even if it's a small thing. Because here's what I want you to remember: awareness that doesn't lead anywhere isn't enough. Awareness alone isn't the goal. Healthy awareness always leads to action. Too much awareness without any action is just another version of overthinking. But action, especially wise action, leads to change and to growth, and that is actually the goal. Formation. That means responding to what the Holy Spirit may be showing us and telling us. And that is very difficult to do when you feel overwhelmed with shame and condemnation. Those are things that you are not meant to carry. But taking wise action is possible when you're making space for truth and grace, when you're practicing self-compassion. That is the invitation today to receive God's grace and then to give yourself grace. Maybe this was the morning that you found yourself in your kitchen or in your car or at your desk asking yourself that question: what is wrong with me? I want you to remember there's a better question. It's what's happening in me. Because here's the thing: when your inner world is well tended, things start changing around you. You show up differently, you lead differently, you live differently, you love differently, you make decisions differently. And friend, God is not standing far off waiting for you to figure it all out. He's in it with you. There is something that is uniquely yours to do in this world, something that God wants to do in and through your life so that people can know Jesus. But it is important that we show up well and whole. No matter where you find yourself today, friend, know that there is a way forward, free of shame and condemnation. Be honest with yourself. Pay attention, be curious, and be full of grace and eyes on Jesus. Hey friend, thanks for tuning in to the Purpose Project podcast. I hope today's conversation helped you feel seen and a little less alone in the messy middle of life. If this episode encouraged you, would you take a second to share it with a friend or leave a quick review? That will help other women who need hope and encouragement find this space. And it truly means the world to me. You can always find free resources or upcoming events or join the email list by visiting my website, thepurposeproject.us. Remember, friend, you were created on purpose and for a purpose. Until next time, be brave and eyes on Jesus.