The ONE Emotion I Was Trained to Value in Christianity

The only emotion I was taught to value in my religion was being on fire for God. Now technically, that’s not even really an emotion, but if you know, you know. You know?!

Being of fire meant this glowing state you were supposed to live in at all times. It was full of certainty, devotion, passion, and spiritual fervor. It was the marker of you doing things correctly. It meant your heart was aligned and that God was pleased.

And if you weren’t feeling that way? Something must be wrong. Everything else was viewed as a red flag.

🚩 Anger? → “You are being ruled by your sinful nature.”
🚩 Sadness? → “You are not trusting God enough.”
🚩 Jealousy? → “You are letting the world corrupt you.”
🚩 Desire? → “Your flesh is leading you astray.” 

Looking back, I realize I wasn’t actually taught how to feel. I was taught how to manage my emotions so they didn’t cause spiritual concern. I became very skilled at fixing my feelings. I learned how to perform the “right” ones and how to pray away the rest. There was no room for emotional range, only a simple equation: if I wasn’t “on fire,” I must be “backsliding.”

There was no space to be tired or unsure, no space to grieve or wrestle with what I was feeling. Plain and simple, my religion gave me no room to simply be human.

So when I left my faith, I had to do something that sounds incredibly basic but was actually completely foreign to me. I had to learn how to be a human being. One of the biggest things I had to unlearn was the idea that healthy people feel the same way all the time. They don’t. (And don’t even get me started on this idea of “healthy,” either…)

Expecting emotional consistency at all times isn’t a human trait. It’s what you would expect from a machine. And the more I played around with this idea of what it actually means to be human, the more I began to see that humans are much more like nature. We cycle, shift, and respond to what’s happening around us and inside us.

Nature isn’t always in full bloom. Sometimes it rests. Sometimes it sheds. Sometimes it regenerates. The more distance I get from the emotional expectations I was raised with, the more I see just how unnatural those expectations really were.

There is more expansion and freedom when you begin to view yourself through the lens of nature, seasons, and cycles. It softens the pressure to always be “doing well” or “making progress.” Instead of assuming something is wrong every time a difficult emotion appears, you start to see that movement, change, and fluctuation are part of being alive.

Nature isn’t in constant bloom, and it isn’t trying to be. Some seasons are about growth and energy, while others are about rest, shedding, or gathering strength for what comes next. When you begin to see yourself this way, your emotions stop feeling like problems to solve and start looking more like signals about what season you might be moving through.

That shift alone can change the way you talk to yourself. Instead of asking, “Why am I still struggling with this?!” every time a normal human emotion shows up, you can pause and ask a different question.

“What season am I in right now?” 

Because you're not doing something wrong to feel the way you are feeling. Maybe you’re just in a winter phase that is asking you to slow down and conserve energy. Or maybe you’re in a quiet early spring where things are beginning to stir beneath the surface but haven’t fully bloomed yet (check out our quiz post, What Post-Deconstruction Season Are You In? here)

When you see yourself this way, the goal stops being emotional perfection. The goal becomes learning how to tend to yourself within whatever season you are in, with curiosity and gentleness instead of judgment. And when you start seeing yourself that way, something begins to shift (pinky swear!). You can begin tending to it, gently and patiently, like you would a living thing.

Because that’s what you are.