Feeling and Healing Your Emotions: A Christian psychiatrist shows you how to grow to wholeness

by Conrad W. Baars

Feeling and healing Your Emotions offers guidelines for emotional and spiritual wholeness. In simple question–and–answer format, readers learn that all emotions are positive aspects of our nature and that a fully developed emotional life can strengthen one's spiritual life

Genres: Psychology, Counselling, Self Help, Spirituality, Personal Growth, Christian

334 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1997

About the author

Conrad W. Baars, M.D., (January 2, 1919 – October 18, 1981) was a Catholic psychiatrist. His most prominent work is with Dr. Anna Terruwe in the study of the human emotional life. Their general idea is that many emotional disturbances in a human stem from a lack of experiencing unconditional love during his or her life. He and Terruwe are known for their model of Emotional Deprivation Disorder and a different approach to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Dr. Baars and Dr. Terruwe treated many priests and religious in their practices and presented important information to the bishops of the Catholic Church. The Role of the Church in the Causation, Treatment and Prevention of the Crisis in the Priesthood, was copyrighted and published by Franciscan Herald Press (Chicago, Illinois) in 1972 as part of their "Synthesis Series" as 'How to treat and prevent The Crisis in the Priesthood'. Dr. Baars wrote numerous other articles and monographs.

Reviews

[Allen Hornbuckle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book many years ago, but still can see its impact in my life. Dr. Baars has melded a Thomistic framework with a "modern" psychological view of the human person, and has uncovered important ideas about our emotions and how our emotional life has such a large impact in our relationships with people and the world. It has been very unfortunate that since the writing of this book, so many self-help affirmation style books have been written that misappropriate the underlining idea set out in this book and created 'over-affirmation-monsters'... wherein most all actions/feelings are affirmed simply on the basis that they are a form of participation in life. I digress, this book aided me greatly in my own life, but I feel it may be hindered today by the proliferation of so many popular self-help titles that use affirmation. Be sure to know... this book may help you have a better understanding on how to create a space for healing your emotional life, but it is not a Self-Help book at all. Dr. Baars clearly points out that healing cannot be done by yourself alone... read the book to find out why.

[Siobhain · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my family of origin, feelings were expressed - especially negative ones, but feelings were not discussed and no guidance was giving in dealing with feelings. Having grown up without an encouragement to understand my own feelings, I often buried them and denied them to myself. I knew how to be the queen of friendliness and a positive outlook on the outside without having a clue as to how I really felt or why I often felt a turmoil of mixed emotions. Feeling and Healing Your Emotions by Conrad W. Baars has been instrumental in helping me have a healthy understanding about feelings: why we have them, what it means to suppress them, how to respond to feelings rather than just reacting, how to be guided by reason and why this is not suppressing feelings. In addition this book continues to expain the difference between being affirmed and unaffirmed and explains why saying or doing affirming things does not make one an affirming person.

In mentioning the above points explained in this book, I am only scratching the surface. There is much in this book that I would need to read and reread many times to understand fully such as an understanding of what St. Thomas Aquinas taught about feelings and how it is commonly misunderstood, some elements related to feelings which Freud got wrong, how certain common understandings from the Bible and Catholic ideas (not formal dogmas) are unhealthy ways of understanding feelings, and much more. I feel sure that I will be cycling through Dr. Baars books over and over again for years to come so that his wisdom can continue to sink in.

A common condition which Dr. Baars explained and developed techniques for healing in conjunction with A. A. A. Terruwe, M. D. involves the problem of growing up unaffirmed, known in its extreme from as emotional deprivation disorder. This can develop when a person has been deprived of a parent's unconditional and unselfish love. This is also the subject of Dr. Baars book Born Only Once. Here are the basic symptoms:

1. As the "heart" of the unaffirmed person does not develop, he grows to adulthood feeling like a child.

2. As his childish ways of feeling makes the unaffirmed person unsuited for the adult life he must lead, he experiences deep-seated feelings of uncertainty and insecurity.

3. Because the unaffirmed person repeatedly fails in his relationship with others, he develops strong feelings of inferiority and inadequacy.

Each chapter is developed via a question and answer format so that the topic of each chapter is broken into digestible chunks supplied as thorough answers to a question or set of related questions. As I mentioned, some of the book is challenging to understand, but much is readily accessible. I read the following sample recently and found it to be perfectly suited to address a similar question posed by my son.

"Q: People often say that I always feel sorry for myself and that I should stop doing that. How do I get rid of my self-pity?"

"A: I don't think it wrong to feel sorry for yourself. If it were, it would also be wrong to feel sorry for others who are in trouble or miserable. yet, nobody ever reproaches a person for feeling sorry for others. The explanation for this is that we usually do something for the persons who are miserable and stir our pity; we give them alms or help them in some other ways that will make life more pleasant for them.

"But this is not always the case when we do not know what to do, or lack the courage to get ourselves out of the mess we are in, we feel sorry for ourselves without trying to change the situation. It is that lack of action which people reproach us for. They criticize our self-pity because it is not followed by activities aimed at alleviating our own misery. Perhaps we prefer to wait until others start to feel sorry for us, too. However, we cannot always count on that and should not compound that miscalculation by remaining stuck passively in our self-pity. The least we can do is to ask somebody else to help us, if we are unable to free ourselves from our pitiful situation."

I highly recommend this book to anyone who feels unaffirmed or lives with those who seem unaffirmed. I recommend it to everyone who needs guidance on dealing with their feelings. I recommend it for parents and teachers. In our dysfunctional world, this is truly a book for everyone. May it bring healing to others as it has brought healing, instruction, and inspiration to me.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! What a fantastic book, this man incorporates Thomism, catholic anthropology and psychology so well. It is in q and a format though, so perhaps an even better intro would be "psychic wholeness" Which I intend to read soon. SUPER recommend.

[Justin.Brouillette · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the structure is kind of rambly, Dr. Baars and his authentic Christian anthropology cuts through a lot of noise and misinformation regarding a healthy emotional life.

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good info but hard to understand. I’m glad I read it in a book club with a therapist leading it.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It is important, however, that I give credit where credit is due. My colleague, Dr. Anna Terruwe, and I would never have arrived at a more sensible psychology had it not been for some of the teachings of a member of the very same Church that I have shown contributed—unwittingly for sure—to so much confusion and unnecessary man-made emotional suffering. I am referring here to the anthropology (i.e., the study of man) of thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas, which enabled us to make certain clinical discoveries, in turn prompting some Dutch scholars to reexamine the writings of this genius and Doctor of the Church.

Much to their surprise these scholars learned that these writings about man, used by the Church for centuries as her official teachings, differed in some points from the original manuscripts. These manuscripts contained certain observations on human nature which were identical to or confirmed what we observed seven centuries later. We do not know why those observations were omitted but one could speculate that his secretaries or translators considered them so radical that they were fearful they might precipitate a social and moral revolution by changing people’s attitudes toward their emotions and feelings."
Dr. Conrad Baars