Untangle Your Emotions is a book I wish I had when I began my own journey of navigating emotional turmoil. Like Jennie, I realized I had the emotional vocabulary of a toddler and I did not know how to differentiate between emotional states. I voraciously read anything and everything to teach me all I needed to know about emotions. Like Jennie, I too am a fixer and my coping strategy of choice is getting thoroughly educated on the problem needing solving. This book does not offer a doctorate level dissertation on navigating your emotions, but it is so approachable and compassionate its message sinks in deeply and touches the tender places needing healing. Additionally, it does so from a Christian framework which is something I desperately longed for but had a hard time finding.
I also appreciated her nuanced approach to mental wellbeing. She opens the book by pointing out that in some cases, untangling emotional baggage will require the need of a professional; she then easily and casually shares that she has engaged the help of a counselor and encourages friends and family to do the same. This message is so needed. Counselors and therapists are incredible heroes, but employing the help of one is such a stigmatized topic in Christian circles that it makes it hard to be vulnerable and open to needing a therapist. She approaches brain health in the way that I’ve come learn to approach it- as a part of the body that can be both injured and healed from trauma which is a message of hope that can sometimes be hard to find. Accepting that injuries are real is necessary for some to begin the hard work of finding the right provider to treat the problem. Finding professional care for trauma was out of the scope of this book, but I appreciated the time and attention she gave to de stigmatizing the need of a therapist.
Her framework for learning how to feel is elementary, but this is such a young topic to explore within the church, that elementary education may be exactly what the church needs right now. She mentions briefly looking for other similar resources and coming up blank. I have also looked and while I am pleased that there are more Christian based options for mental health healing today than when she started writing this book, she is correct. This topic has been largely left alone by theologians past. She mentions this book was written for all people, but I am not convinced men will relate to it quite as well as a woman might given that many of her stories are told from a woman’s POV. That’s not to say there’s nothing valuable for a man to glean from this book, I just am not sure that it will speak to men as effectively as to women.
She ended the book with a section on the kinds of ways we can support our mental health physically to resource your brains healing and processing capacity: drinking water, getting proper nutrition, moving your body, feeling connected to your people (feeling emotions in connection), sleeping, etc. I am glad she had this section included because it is so important to resource your brain when so much healing can sometimes be necessary. I wish this chapter was placed before the emotional processing section because knowing there IS something tangible we can do to care for ourselves well would have been an encouragement before embarking on the sometimes scary, sometimes confusing - sometimes it even feels downright imaginary - process of learning emotions.
I’d like to thank Waterbrook & Multnomah and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.