Finding Integration: What to do with our emotions

God made man and said that he is “very good” (Genesis 1:31). God made us with brilliantly diverse faculties meant to work together in harmony. All systems in our world flourish when there is integration among diverse parts. Our internal system flourishes when there is integration between our emotions, our intellect, our will, and our spiritual life.1 However, we have all experienced the pain of disharmony and disintegration within ourselves. One faculty in particular often leaves us with the most confusion and questions as to how to find integration and harmony: the emotions.

What is an emotion?

According to Conrad Baars, an emotion is a “psychic reaction to stimuli from the world around us,” including reactions to our own thoughts, memories, and bodily sensations. He goes on to say that emotions are “a response to whatever information our senses provide concerning the goodness, lack of goodness, usefulness or harmfulness things and beings have for us.”2 Emotions are messengers communicating to us about what is happening in the world around us and in our internal world. Emotions provide important information, but we must learn what to do with this information because emotions are not made to provide factual data points. Emotions tell a story, but this story is a narrative based on our present and past experiences, not an academic textbook. This is why integrating our emotions with our other faculties is so paramount.

Baars uses the analogy of a sailor and a sailboat to describe the integration of the emotions with our other faculties: our intellect is akin to the sailor of the boat steering the ship and giving us direction. Our will is the rudder that propels the ship in a given direction. Our emotions are the wind in the sails of our sailboat. When we harness the power of these emotions, they provide the energy to propel us across the water. This emotional power becomes super charged when the Holy Spirit is invited to partner with our emotions to propel us even more quickly and efficiently in the direction of God’s will for our life.

However, just like in real life, learning to sail our sailboat is often no simple task. We can experience storms rolling across the sea that threaten to capsize our ship. Sometimes it seems there’s no wind at all which leaves us stuck, dead on the water. How do we learn to properly harness the wind and integrate our emotions?

What our emotions need

We can look to Jesus as our model of how to properly understand and integrate our emotions. In chapter 11 of John’s Gospel, Jesus puts his emotions on full display for us. After encountering the grief of Mary and Martha over the death of their brother Lazarus, we read, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). He allowed himself to vulnerably express his emotions. This is all the more profound taking into account what happens next. Jesus knows that Lazarus, Mary, and Martha are all about to experience the best day of their life. He knows their suffering will very swiftly turn into joy. Yet, he still finds it necessary to express these emotions and be moved by the world around him. Why?

In this Gospel passage, Jesus reveals to us a major need of our emotions: compassion. He tenderly enters the reality of his friends and is moved with compassion for their suffering. He doesn’t offer logic or reason. He simply shares in their sadness and honors their feelings by being radically present.
This is what our emotions need, too. Our emotions need compassion, tenderness, and radical presence. We meet these needs by firstly accepting that our emotions exist. Without the virtue of acceptance, we have no power. Once we acknowledge and accept our emotional experiences, we have the opportunity to receive what we truly need. And what we often need is to speak kindly to ourselves, treat ourselves with gentleness, and allow Jesus to weep with us in our places of pain.

We create a lot of emotional knots whenever we fail to recognize and accept our emotions. Avoiding or judging our emotions can lead to internal conflict, heightened emotional responses, and physical issues. If the sailor on our metaphorical sailboat simply ignores the wind or only shakes his fist at the weather patterns, he will more than likely end up in a worse fate than where he started. Facing our emotions directly with nonjudgment and curiosity is the first step to healing, wholeness, and integration.

Our emotions also need guidance. Our emotional faculty was made to be guided by our intellect and will. If we let the wind in our sails solely dictate our course, we have very little control over where we end up. We need our sailor to help guide the ship. A necessary part of integrating our faculties is a well-formed intellect. We don’t want just anyone sailing our sailboat; we need an intellect rooted in the truth and attune to the Holy Spirit to be our guide. St. Teresa of Calcutta provides us a stunning example of this integration. For most of her life, the emotional winds on her sea spoke the message of desolation and abandonment from God. Had she listened only to her emotions, we very likely would not have this great saint to inspire us. Rather, she allowed her emotions to be guided and rooted in what she knew to be true through her great faith and intellect: namely that God is real, and she can trust him. This constant guidance provided her the daily bread to keep going even in the face of very painful emotions.

We can look again to Jesus for an example of this same guidance of emotions. He allowed himself to embrace the humanity of his emotional experience again in the Garden of Gethsemane. He felt the weight of suffering so deeply to the point that these emotions manifested dramatically in his body. He accepted these emotions, and God met him there with compassion through the form of an angel (Luke 22:43), again displaying the fruit of bringing tenderness and compassion to our emotions. After expressing these emotions and receiving care, he allowed these emotions to be guided by his intellect and will. He knew the will of the Father, and he knew that he could trust his Father, even if his emotions did not align with this truth. Like Mother Teresa, he did not allow himself to be ruled by his emotions but instead grounded himself in the truth of his identity, his knowledge of the Father, and the conviction of his mission. In order to properly integrate our emotions, we, too, need a secure foundation of knowing the truth of who we are, of who our Father is, and to trust that He has a good plan for our life.

Our emotions tell us a story. When we acknowledge and explore this story with curiosity and compassion, we are able to move through our emotions with greater ease and without getting stuck in the storms. Our intellect is then able to guide us to our destination, and our will can be easily moved by the harmony between our emotions and intellect. Our sailboat is then free to race across the sea.