The Other 167 Hours

Want to feel loved?

In a previous post The Tragic Tale of Christmas and Summer, the resolution involved finding a way to feel the love that was known to be there. So, how important is the feeling part of being loved? Is it OK to want that feeling?

Of course we can’t even ask this question unless we admit something:

Humans are capable of being deeply loved and, all the while, not feel it or even believe it.

I have not doubt that that statement is true and yet I have never put it in words and looked at in on a page until a few years ago. But, it’s so important to know because it makes us aware of one of the most tragic mistakes that humans can make – walking around, going through life as if they are not loved when in reality they are, and deeply so, by their creator, and often in addition, one or two people on the planet. How sad a story that makes. It’s like the old story of the woman who dies destitute, penniless, cold, and alone, not knowing that she is an heiress to a million-dollar pile of cash in the bank a few blocks from the alley where she dies.

I’m aware that some reading this are starting to bristle because they do not value very highly the seeking after certain feelings. You are not sure we should try to feel a certain emotion. You may even think of it as somehow not compatible with spiritual maturity. Certain Eastern Mystical traditions also tell us not to seek certain feelings. The next section is for you, though I doubt it is enough to persuade the strongly entrenched. But here goes…

My Brief Argument for Seeking to Feel Something

What does the Bible say about feelings? Consider Romans 1:12. In the King James Version of the Bible, the phrase is translated, ” that I may be comforted together with you”. The author, St. Paul, wanted that. His goal was for both he and the recipients of his letter to feel something – comfort. Comfort is certainly a feeling. Later in Romans 12 we are asked to be cheerful and to give encouragement to others. As far as I know it is not possible for someone to go from discouraged to encouraged without a feeling changing. We are asked to try to make that happen in other people. I will admit there are better and worse ways to try to change our emotions, even wrong dangerous ways. There are wrong ways to breathe, something I learned in voice lessons, but that’s not going to convince me that I shouldn’t breathe. If someone has convinced you not to seek to feel a certain way, please don’t tell them there is a wrong way to breathe. I’d hate to consider the advice that might lead them to give you.

So, if everyone is on board now with the idea that it is OK to want to feel loved…

How could we not feel loved, when we are loved, and how do we fix this?

The answer to this question is often a central part of the work we do in counseling. Sometimes it’s complicated and takes a while. All I can do here is give a lightly printed outline of some important parts to the answer. Some of these I may be able to unpack a little more in another post. Especially the “How do we fix it?” is so involved that I can only hint at it here.

Other feelings have overshadowed love. Anger in particular can be such a strong emotion that it overshadows other emotions. A very angry person simply does not have the attention to spend on noticing a feeling of being loved. It’s all being spent on anger. Fear also is powerful enough to overshadow the feeling of being loved. It’s hard to feel loved when we don’t feel safe.

We are numb. Our ability to be aware of our emotions – to feel them – can be damaged in a number of ways. Here are a couple of ways.

1. There are specific brain injuries that lead to an experience explained to me as “I open up the valve of feeling and nothing comes out. I know I should be feeling something but I just don’t.”
2. Numbing of our emotions can be part of a trauma reaction. We have experienced a trauma that overwhelmed us, maybe even a long time ago and haven’t fully recovered. It’s as if our brain has decided we’ve had more than enough feelings to last us a while, painful feelings, so our brain turns our” feeling volume knob” way down to where we can’t even hear it. It seems to our brain that it’s in our best interest. And it probably is for a while, during and after a trauma, but the volume just never gets turned up again.

Our belief system is filtering it out. Again I will mention a few ways this happens.

1. Depression is a strong filter and influences our interpretations of things around us. If we interpret events around us as proof that we are not loved, the feeling gets filtered out. How could a loved person have to experience X, Y, or Z? Right?
2. Through our life experiences or the influence of strategic people in our lives, or out of a sense of guilt, we see ourselves as damaged. We feel so damaged without the possibility of repair, that we are unlovable. Any feeling we may get about being loved must be a mistake. That’s our conclusion and our feeling. We filter out, or discount as mistaken, any feeling of being loved.

If you think any of these reasons mentioned above apply to you, you are not strange or weird, or crazy. You make sense and there are plenty of others like you. And many of them have found a way past it. God has guided them out in various ways. Sometimes you can work on this on your own, sometimes with the help of those close to you, sometimes with the help of a mental health professional.

But the truth is you are deeply loved.