“You’re Too Emotional”
How the Church Taught Us to Mistrust Ourselves—and How Jesus Leads Us Back to Healing
“You’re Too Emotional”
How the Church Taught Us to Mistrust Ourselves—and How Jesus Leads Us Back to Healing
Growing up in church, I learned - sometimes through sermons, sometimes through silence - that emotions were suspect. Not directly evil, maybe, but not trustworthy either. And depending on your gender, or the roles people assumed you should inhabit, you were given very different instructions for what to do with your feelings.
For men, the message was simple: don’t show them. Be strong. Be the leader. Take control. Don’t cry, don’t crack, don’t confess too much. Emotions were framed as distractions, liabilities, or signs of weakness. Even tenderness, love itself, was to be expressed with restraint. Be like John Wayne—stoic, silent, strong.
For women, the message was no better: you feel too much. You’re unstable, too easily led astray by your heart. You’re too sensitive, too dramatic, too fragile to be a leader.
Anger? Inappropriate.
Grief? Distracting.
Desire? Dangerous.
Intuition? Unreliable.
And behind both messages? A quiet (and sometimes not-so-quiet) theological justification: that feelings are fleshly, and the Spirit wants nothing to do with them.
The Consequences of Emotional Mistrust
We now know, from both research and lived experience, that emotional suppression is deeply damaging. Psychologists tell us that ignoring or repressing our emotions doesn’t make them go away - it just forces them underground, where they manifest as anxiety, depression, chronic stress, disconnection, and shame. This is especially true for men, who are statistically less likely to seek help or name their internal pain.
And when women are told not to trust their emotional insight, they learn to silence their inner wisdom. They learn that leadership and strength require a kind of disembodied stoicism that was never meant to be the measure of spiritual maturity.
Some folks, like Joe Rigney in The Sin of Empathy, claim that women are just too emotional to lead well, that their compassion makes them unreliable when it comes to truth. But that’s not just wrong - it’s harmful. Jesus never said empathy was a weakness. In fact, He lived it. He wept. He touched the hurting. He drew close to those in pain. If anything, our problem isn’t too much empathy, it’s not enough. The idea that emotion and truth can’t go together? That’s not gospel. That’s patriarchy dressed up like theology.
This has left many people, across the gender spectrum, feeling disconnected not just from themselves, but from their sense of God’s nearness and love.
Because here’s the truth:
If you’ve been taught to mistrust your own heart, how can you recognize the gentle voice of the Spirit when it whispers from within?
A Whole-Person Faith
One of the most damaging consequences of Western thinking is the way it slices up our humanity into separate compartments: mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual - as if these were disconnected rooms in a house instead of one integrated life.
But in the Hebrew worldview, the world of Scripture, life was never meant to be divided like that.
The heart (lev in Hebrew) was not just the emotional center, it represented the whole person: thoughts, feelings, will, body, and spirit. Everything was connected. And everything was spiritual.
To be human was to be a living soul, body and breath, heart and mind, wound and wonder, all woven together by God.
So when we talk about emotions, we’re not discussing something outside our faith. We’re talking about one of the ways we experience and respond to the presence of God. Emotions aren’t separate from our minds. They’re not disconnected from our bodies. They are part of what it means to be alive, and to be fully human in the image of a deeply feeling God.
The problem with the Western tendency to compartmentalize is that it subtly trains us to keep our “spiritual life” in one corner and our real life everywhere else. It teaches us to pray about our sins but not our sadness, to confess our behaviors but not our burnout, to seek wisdom but not comfort.
But if we are spiritual beings, then everything we feel, everything we carry, everything we walk through - is spiritual.
Everything is spiritual.
Jesus Felt Everything
When we look at Jesus, we don’t see a detached, hyper-rational figure who floated above the mess. We see someone who:
Wept over death (John 11)
Got angry at injustice (Mark 3, John 2)
Felt compassion for the hurting (Matthew 9)
Sweated blood in anxiety (Luke 22)
Let women lead the resurrection story (John 20)
Jesus wasn’t afraid of emotion, he embraced it. He didn’t shut down grief, anger, or vulnerability. He walked straight into them. He allowed himself to feel fully so he could love fully.
And that’s the invitation for us.
Healing Looks Like Wholeness
What if emotions aren’t obstacles to our faith, but doorways? What if they’re not enemies to overcome, but invitations to be honest, human, and open to God’s healing?
Inner healing begins not with self-help, but with space, space for the Spirit to do what only God can do. And that space is often made when we stop performing and start telling the truth. It’s made through:
Honest prayer
Safe community
Therapy and spiritual direction
Pastoral care
Scripture read through the lens of Love
The church is at its best not when it tells people to “get over it,” but when it walks with them through it.
A Community of the Wounded
What would it look like for the church to become a place where men are free to weep, and women are trusted to lead? What would happen if we all stopped hiding behind spiritual platitudes and started sharing our real lives, our real wounds, our real hearts?
I believe the Spirit of Christ is still healing, and that healing happens when we become communities of honesty, vulnerability, and love.
You are allowed to feel deeply.
You are allowed to be fully human.
And you are already fully loved.
Jesus didn’t call us to be right,
He called us to be whole.
"Jesus didn’t call us to be right,
He called us to be whole."
This. This is what so many have forgotten — or never understood
Yes! I spent many years stuffing down my emotions because of church teachings warning against “sentimentality,” and let’s just say it didn’t end well.
I’ve since come to believe that when God said “Let US make man in OUR image,“ He was speaking to the Trinity, about the Trinity. We are three-in-one also – mind, body, and spirit. Western ideology has stripped us of that understanding, but without it, we cannot be whole.