How to respond in healthy ways vs reacting in unhealthy ways

Soul wholeness involves recognizing your emotions, reading what they say before you react, and then responding to the world around you in a healthy + intentional way— one in alignment with the Spirit.

Let’s discuss this briefly, as it will help you in real life situations. 

✅ Something happens. It might be new information we gather, a phone call or text that is received, or something someone does. 

✅ The experience is felt. The data then enters our brain (via the spinal cord) and the experience is first felt (via the limbic system).

✅ We respond. Finally, after we feel the experience (yes, this happens before we logically think about how to respond!), we have two choices… 

♥️ Option 1: Healthy = we can work through the Emotional Wholeness Checklist (recognize what you’re feeling, read what it’s communicating, then respond in a healthy way).

💔 Option 2: Unhealthy = react immediately from raw emotion.

Remember, our emotions are one of the “parts” of us (they’re part of our soul). But we’re not required to react from them. 

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Many times we “live from our emotions” without considering the best response for the moment. When that happens, we refer to it— in everyday language— as “getting triggered.” 

To get triggered means you suddenly find yourself firing off— from the soul— in a certain direction based on some perceived threat from which you need to protect yourself. 

You can’t live triggered and live from the Spirit at the same time. It’s impossible. 

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The solution is to allow your feelings (and emotions) to serve you rather than to live enslaved to them. The Emotional Wholeness Checklist is a tool you can use to do this…

Here’s how it works.

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Step 1 of 3…

Recognize the feelings you experience. Even the ones you aren’t comfortable “owning,” the ones you’ve labeled in the past as “bad” (i.e., anger, sadness, depression, rejection, etc.). 

Feeling something isn’t a sin. And, there aren’t good emotions or bad emotions— just emotions. The more of them we recognize, the better we can read the temperature around us.

The book Emotional Intelligence 2.0 reminds us, “Emotions always serve a purpose.” 

Recognizing them is vital to understanding their purpose. And recognizing requires that we spend some time learning what some of those emotions actually are, so that we can read them properly when we encounter them.

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Step 2 of 3…

Read what your emotions are telling you— without reacting to them.  Many feelings trigger an auto-response. That is, we react without processing what’s happening around us— without hearing what the emotion is trying to communicate about the condition of our soul in that moment. 

Perhaps these two analogies will help: 

Emotions are to the soul what physical sensations are to the body. 

In the same way physical sensations of pain and pleasure alert us to what’s happening in our body, emotional joy and pain— and everything else— tell us the climate of our soul.

Emotions are like thermometers. 

They don’t control us; they simply provide us with valuable information (thermostats set the temperature; thermometers simply read the temperature).

If you learn to recognize the emotion and then read what it’s saying without first reacting, you’ll  find you are light years ahead of 99% of the people in the world around you. And, you’ll benefit from a growing EQ.

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Step 3 of 3…

Respond in a healthy way. After taking in what you sense, and after getting clarity on how you should respond (with intentionality, whatever that response happens to be), then move forward with clarity and humility, living from the Spirit when you respond.

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Links = 

Listen to the complete audiobook of Freedom Recovery = https://www.freedomrecovery.online/podcasts/freedom-recovery

Watch the video, Emotional Wholeness Checklist = https://www.jenkins.tv/blog/checklist 

Watch the video, denoting the difference between the soul and the spirit = https://www.jenkins.tv/freedom  

Tell us where to ship your free paperback book, Purpose: How to Find & Fulfill God’s Plan for Your Life: www.Jenkins.tv/purpose