If Feelings Matter So Much — Why Do We Avoid Them?

In our last conversation, Christine Sneeringer and I made the case that feelings aren’t the enemy — that emotions are a God-given pathway to healing, not a threat to faith. But that raises an honest follow-up question, one I hear from clients all the time: If feelings are so important, why is it so hard to actually feel them?

In this episode — part two of our conversation on emotional life and faith — Christine and I go deeper. And Christine brings something rare to this discussion: not just clinical insight, but her own unguarded story.

She shares what it was like to grow up learning that emotions weren’t safe. She talks about the exhausting cycle of self-rejection, the inner critic that drove her perfectionism, and the surprising moment in therapy — involving a teddy bear — that cracked something open. It’s the kind of honest that makes people feel less alone.

Together we explore why so many of us, especially those shaped by trauma or high-achieving environments, developed a survival strategy of emotional suppression that worked for a season — and then quietly began to work against us. We talk about what it actually means to process a feeling instead of escaping it, and why that distinction matters so much for lasting change.

Some of the ground we cover:

• Why emotions can feel genuinely unsafe, and where that learned response comes from
• The “colander” analogy — why love and connection didn’t seem to stick, no matter how much was offered
• What emotional regulation actually is (it’s not suppression, and it’s not explosion)
• How the inner critic develops as a protection — and becomes a prison
• What it looks like to move from “What does God want from me?” to also asking “What do I actually feel?”

The framework I keep coming back to at Kainos is feeling and dealing — and this episode gets into the heart of why the first part is so much harder than it sounds. Healing doesn’t begin when we finally get our emotions under control. It begins when we stop fighting ourselves and start offering a little compassion to the part of us that’s been carrying the weight.

If the last episode resonated with you, this one goes further.

👉 Watch on YouTube