Observing Your Emotions for Healing

This is something I learned in training to become a counsellor: to observe the felt state when a client pushes a button in their transference. When we are able to simply observe how we feel in the midst of being hurt, we are able to control our response, protecting others and ourselves in the process.

Obviously this takes some strength. But awareness is the key.

There may be no better way to arrange instantaneous healing within our interactions than being so self-aware that we remain, to ourselves, under constant monitoring.

When we can manage such a thing as to be so self-aware we protect others and ourselves, potentially dangerous emotional situations are cooled safely before they can explode.

Learning a Very Valuable Discipline

It’s actually a great blessing to have trained ourselves, with God’s help, to be self-aware in private and social situations. It’s like we are on guard, ready for trouble, so as to respond in wisdom.

In a one-on-one interaction, we never know what might crop up, or what might be said, or how it might be said. We can’t always protect ourselves in advance. But we can train ourselves to watch our emotions; even down to funny feelings in the gut, tension between the shoulder blades, the encroaching headache, or unusual muscular tension.

Much of this is unconscious anxiety playing out psychosomatically.

When we are watchful of how we are feeling, and are able to sense when something is wrong, we become more on guard for ourselves, and are readier for conflict of many different sorts.

This is a very valuable discipline that we engage in by increasing our emotional intelligence. God has to sponsor such a thing. We cannot really achieve a better self-awareness without God’s help, for we are not humble enough of our own.

Access to Healing

God heals us in practical ways by our constant and situational self-reflection.

When we engage in honest reflection, we worship in Spirit and in truth (John 4:24).

Self-reflection in the midst of interaction, when we have trained ourselves enough to engage in it, is access to healing—healing for the moment—and healing before damage takes place.

It’s healing before we need ‘healing’.

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Having the discipline to observe our emotions, including bodily warning signs of feeling, is the gift and benefit of healing. All we need to do—when we feel even remotely upset—is enquire within, “Why am I feeling this way?”

Exploring signs of emotion helps us deal with anger, fear and sadness before they get away from us.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.