Embracing Emotions for Spiritual Growth: A Practical Guide by Dr. Conrad Baars

Key Insights:

- Emotions, being gifts from God, contribute to self-understanding and understanding others.

- A healthy emotional life is paramount for a thriving spiritual life.

- Many individuals suffer from emotional deprivation, stemming from lack of unconditional love during childhood, leading to low self-esteem, insecurity, anxiety, and depression.

-Baars gives an incredibly well-developed and helpful visual metaphor to illustrated this point

- Emotional deprivation can be remedied through affirmation from God, self and others, and honest, appropriate expression of emotions.

- Maintaining emotional health requires a balance between reason and emotion, coupled with respect for free will and conscience.

Healing Emotions and Fostering Closeness to God

Feeling and Healing Your Emotions by Dr. Conrad Baars offers invaluable insights into understanding the nature and purpose of emotions, how they intersect with spiritual life, and the steps to recover from emotional wounds while nurturing emotional maturity.

The book's user-friendly question-and-answer format tackles issues like guilt, repression, and will-training. It's a crucial tool not just for individuals seeking to understand their emotions, but also mental health professionals, pastoral counselors, and teachers.

Key lessons from this book include:

- Recognizing and addressing emotional deprivation and its effects on self-perception, behavior, and relationships

- Learning how to receive and give affirmation, the essence of unconditional love and acceptance

- Adopting healthy emotional expression techniques that respect oneself and others

- Balancing reason and emotion in decision-making

- Utilizing emotions to enrich prayer life and connection with God

VISUAL METAPHOR: Being Properly Guided in how to Relate to Emotions

Dr. Baars gives a great metaphor for how authentic affirmation, as well as having an emotional coach or mentor (whether it's a parent or otherwise), is vital to emotional development. He uses the image of a horse to represent the emotional life. Imagine giving a child a horse. There are two contrasting ways to help the child develop a relationship with the horse, just as there are two ways to approach one’s emotions.

In the first approach, the child is instructed to control the horse rigidly, demanding obedience through force and fear. While this may yield temporary compliance, it leads to anxiety, frustration, and a lack of true connection. Likewise, trying to control or suppress emotions without understanding them can result in emotional dysfunction and alienation from oneself.

In the second approach, which Baars advocates, the mentor helps the child build a relationship with the horse through patience, understanding, and affirmation. The child is encouraged to respect the horse’s nature, learning to guide it gently and with trust. This nurturing approach fosters emotional intelligence, self-confidence, and a sense of security. Similarly, developing a healthy emotional life requires a guide who offers encouragement and affirmation, allowing emotions to be understood and integrated rather than suppressed.

This is where working with someone like Bernhard Streisselberger, who offers Affirmation Coaching based on the work of Conrad Baars, can be transformative. Bernhard helps individuals cultivate this nurturing relationship with their emotional life, guiding them to affirm and integrate their emotions in a way that fosters both emotional and spiritual growth.

Practical Advice from the Book

Guilt

Guilt arises from perceived wrongdoings or failures. Healthy guilt facilitates mistake recognition and prompts amends. Unhealthy guilt induces feelings of unworthiness or hopelessness even without wrongdoing or after forgiveness. Dr. Baars recommends:

- Differentiating between guilt based on moral standards and guilt based on feelings.

- Sincerely confessing sins and receiving God's mercy.

- Accepting ourselves as fallible but loved individuals.

- Balancing concern for sin with avoidance of excessive fear.

- Practicing virtue and shunning vice.

Sin

Sin, a disobedience act against God's will, damages relationships with Him, self, and others. Dealing with sin healthily involves recognizing sin's reality and consequences, repenting and turning back to God, and fostering a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Scrupulosity

Scrupulosity refers to excessive fear of sin or falsely identifying non-sinful actions as sins. It could interfere with mental health, spiritual life, and social relationships. Dr. Baars advises professional help if necessary, following trusted spiritual guidance, understanding true Church teachings and moral principles, and fostering a joyful and positive attitude.

Repression

Repression is an avoidance mechanism for unpleasant emotions. Chronic or excessive repression inhibits emotional healing. To deal with repression healthily, Dr. Baars suggests becoming aware of repressed emotions, safely expressing them, seeking supportive individuals, and resolving triggering conflicts.

Will-training

Dr. Baars' method, will-training, enables emotional healing by training the will to affirm self and others. Key steps include understanding, accepting, and loving oneself, followed by generous service to others. Practicing will-training involves cultivating a positive self-image, receiving and giving affirmation, and living according to God's will.