Can I Trust My Feelings?

A note to our Christian family before we start. Glenn and Phyllis Hill, who started Connection Codes and have been married more than forty years, have lived what this piece is about. Phyllis grew up believing that emotion was the thing that wrecks you. For years, when she told Glenn she felt sad, he told her not to. We love the Church, and we believe the verses people quote to each other. We just want to talk about what to do with a feeling once it shows up.

"The joy of the Lord is your strength"

You mention at small group that you've been dreading Thursday. Your mother-in-law arrives for a week, and her last visit ended with you crying in the car outside the grocery store. A friend smiles and says, "Well, remember, the joy of the Lord is your strength. Just start declaring a good week over her visit." A couple of people nod, and the group moves on to the prayer list.

On the drive home, the dread is still sitting in the passenger seat. Now there's a second feeling next to it: the sense that a stronger Christian wouldn't feel this way at all. You came in carrying one thing, and you're leaving with two.

Your friend meant well, and she quoted a real Bible verse, Nehemiah 8:10. It's true: the joy of the Lord is our strength. But joy in God doesn't mean we stop listening to what we feel. You can have that joy and still be dreading Thursday, and the dread still has something to tell you. Underneath her advice is something a lot of us picked up at church: you can't trust your feelings, so swap the bad ones for better ones as fast as you can. There's some truth in that, too. A feeling isn't a fact. Fear can tell you a conversation is dangerous when it's only uncomfortable. Anger can tell you to send the text you'll regret. Nobody should let a feeling make the final call on what's true or what to do next.

But what are you supposed to do with the dread itself? Most of us were never taught, so we do the only thing we know. We push it down and hope it leaves. Has that ever worked for you? For most of us, it doesn't.

Your feelings are messengers

When people say "don't trust your feelings," the Bible verse they usually have in mind is Jeremiah 17:9: "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" (NIV). Jeremiah was a prophet writing about six hundred years before Jesus, to a nation that had drifted from God. In the Hebrew Bible, the word heart usually means the whole inner person: what you think, what you want and what you decide, as well as what you feel. So the warning covers all of it, your reasoning included. And nobody reads that verse and decides to stop thinking.

In the Connection Codes framework, we talk about how emotions serve a purpose. They're there to guide and protect you, and each one carries a message. Fear's message is "Danger — beware!" Sadness says "Something is missing or broken." Loneliness says "I feel unsupported." Guilt says "I missed something." None of those is a command. Each one is information about what's happening inside you, and it arrives fast, before you've had time to think it through.

We like to say emotions are messengers, not dictators. A dictator gives orders and expects you to obey. A messenger knocks on the door, gives you a message and waits while you decide what to do about it. If you obey every feeling, you've handed it the keys to the house. If you send the messenger away before you've heard the message, he usually comes back and knocks louder.

Glenn puts it this way: "You are not responsible for your emotion. You are responsible for the next action." You didn't ask for the dread about your mother-in-law. It showed up on its own. What you do with it on Thursday is up to you, and you'll choose a lot better once you've heard the message.

"Pour out your hearts to Him"

The Psalms are a collection of 150 prayers and songs in the middle of the Bible. Many were written by David, the shepherd who became Israel's king about a thousand years before Jesus. He wrote Psalm 62 while people were attacking his reputation and trying to bring him down. Partway through, he stops talking to himself and speaks to everyone listening:

"Trust in Him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts to Him, for God is our refuge." (Psalm 62:8, NIV)

Look at what that one sentence asks you to do. First it tells you where your trust goes, and it goes to God, so your friend at small group was right about that much. Then it tells you what to do with your heart, meaning everything going on inside you. David says to pour it out. You empty it in front of God, all of it, including the dread and the anger and the parts you're embarrassed by.

So what does this verse want you to do with your feelings? Bring them. And you can't pour out something you won't look at, so pouring out your heart starts with knowing what's in it. Most of us were never taught how to do that, and the research has a lot to say about it.

What happens in your body when you name a feeling

In 2007, a team of researchers at UCLA put people in a brain scanner and showed them photographs of faces that looked angry or afraid. Sometimes participants simply looked at the faces. Other times they picked a word to describe the emotion they were seeing. When they put the feeling into words, activity dropped in the amygdala, the brain's threat-detection system, and rose in a part of the front of the brain involved in calming things down (Lieberman et al., 2007). The researchers titled the paper "Putting Feelings Into Words."

A later study took the same idea out of the scanner. People who were afraid of spiders stood near a live tarantula. One group was asked to describe what they were feeling, in plain words like anxious and terrified. A week later, that group showed less physical stress when they faced the spider again, measured by how much they were sweating, than people who had distracted themselves, tried to talk themselves into seeing the spider as harmless, or simply stood there (Kircanski et al., 2012). Saying the fear out loud made a difference that lasted.

There is a related finding about precision. People who can tell their difficult feelings apart, who know the difference between hurt and lonely and embarrassed rather than lumping everything together as "stressed," are more likely to do something useful about them when the feelings run high (Barrett et al., 2001; Kashdan et al., 2015). Having more words for what you feel turns out to be a practical skill.

It matters who you tell

Naming a feeling helps, and naming it to someone who loves you helps even more. In one study, researchers at the University of Wisconsin put sixteen married women in a brain scanner and told them they might receive a mild electric shock. Sometimes they held their husband's hand, sometimes a stranger's hand, and sometimes no hand at all. Their husband's hand calmed the brain's threat response the most, and the effect was strongest for the women who were happiest in their marriages (Coan et al., 2006).

Another team asked college students to keep a diary of their conversations for two weeks, nearly four thousand conversations in all. Sharing facts about their day did little for how close people felt. Sharing what they were feeling made them feel closer, especially when the other person responded with understanding, acceptance and care (Laurenceau et al., 1998). Closeness grows when you tell someone what you feel and they respond well.

What pushing feelings down costs

The opposite of naming a feeling is hiding it, and researchers have studied that too. In one large set of studies, people who habitually hid their emotions reported less social support and fewer close relationships than people who didn't (Gross & John, 2003). That research is correlational, meaning it shows the two things travel together without proving one causes the other.

A lab study makes the cost more concrete. When 168 people were asked to hide their reactions while watching an upsetting film, their hearts and blood vessels worked harder, and they reported feeling the emotion just as strongly as people who didn't hide it (Roberts et al., 2008). Hiding a feeling didn't make it smaller. They still felt it, and their bodies paid extra for keeping it out of sight.

Hiding feelings costs the people you love, too. One study followed couples through two weeks of daily diaries and checked in again three months later. On days when people hid their emotions while making sacrifices for their partner, their own well-being dropped, and so did their partner's. Three months later, the people who had hidden more were less satisfied and thought more about ending the relationship (Impett et al., 2012).

Counselors have a name for the faith version of this: spiritual bypass. It means using spiritual language, prayer or Scripture to get around emotional work rather than going through it. Craig Cashwell and his colleagues titled their 2007 paper on it "The Only Way Out Is Through" (Cashwell et al., 2007). In one study, people who scored higher on a measure of spiritual bypass reported more depression, anxiety and stress (Fox & Picciotto, 2019). This research area is young and comes mostly from a small group of researchers, so treat it as an early finding.

It is also worth saying what the research does not show. A 2025 review of fifteen studies found no consistent link between being religious and hiding your emotions; some studies found more hiding among religious people and some found less (Brandão, 2025). Faith isn't the problem in any of this. The problem is using faith as a way around a feeling, when Psalm 62 asks you to bring it all the way through to God.

"Don't feel sad, babe"

In a marriage, "don't trust your feelings" rarely gets said out loud. It shows up in quieter forms, and usually from someone who loves you.

Glenn tells this story on himself. Phyllis would say, "I feel so sad about this," and he would answer, "What? No, babe, don't feel sad! Everything's going to be fine." In his words: "I walked away thinking: I nailed it. I just set her straight. But all I did was tell her: don't bring that to Glenn next time you feel sad."

Phyllis did her own version. When Glenn expressed self-doubt, she had a list ready of everything he had done well. According to Phyllis, "it never reassured him. Because I was wadding up his experience. I didn't want to sit with him in it."

Neither of them was being unkind. Both were trying to make a painful feeling go away quickly, which is what most of us were taught to do with feelings. The message the other person receives, though, is that the feeling was unwelcome, and so, a little, were they. Do that for enough years and two people can share a kitchen and a bed while each carries their real inner life alone.

Picture the other way it could go. Your wife comes in from a phone call with her sister and says, "I'm fine, it's just family stuff." You put down your phone and turn toward her. You don't fix it and you don't tell her how to feel. You make a small sound that says you're listening, something like "Oooo," and you wait. Connection Codes calls that sound an Oooo, and it is the opposite of a blank face. It tells the other person that what they feel is allowed in this room. Very often, that is the moment she tells you what actually happened.

One practice for this week: hear the message before you decide

The next time a strong feeling shows up, before you act on it or push it away, take three small steps. They take less than a minute.

Name it in one word. Pick the most precise word you can: sad, hurt, lonely, afraid, angry, guilty, ashamed, glad. "Stressed" and "fine" don't count, because they cover too much ground to tell you anything.
Ask what it's telling you. Fear is saying something might be dangerous. Sadness is saying something is missing or broken. Loneliness is saying you feel unsupported. You don't have to agree with the message yet. You only have to hear it.
Pour it out to God and to one person. Say it to God in a sentence, the way Psalm 62:8 invites you to. Then say it out loud to your husband, your wife, or a friend you trust: "I'm feeling lonely about the move, and I think it's because I feel unsupported." That's the whole sentence. They don't have to fix it.

Only after those three steps do you decide what to do next. Very often the next action becomes obvious once the feeling has been named and heard. Sometimes it becomes clear that no action is needed at all, and that what you needed was for someone to know.

So, can you trust your feelings?

Your trust belongs to God. Your feelings belong out in the open, in front of Him and in front of the people who love you, where they can be heard and then put in their proper place. That is what Psalm 62:8 has been asking of you all along: trust Him at all times, and pour out your heart to Him.

Start with the free Core Emotion Wheel. It is a single wheel with eight core emotions on it. It takes about four minutes to do, sitting next to your husband, your wife, or anybody you love, and it gives you words for things you may have been carrying for years without a name. Get the Core Emotion Wheel.

References

Barrett, L. F., Gross, J., Christensen, T. C., & Benvenuto, M. (2001). Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it: Mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation. Cognition and Emotion, 15(6), 713–724. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930143000239

Brandão, T. (2025). Religion and emotion regulation: A systematic review of quantitative studies. Journal of Religion and Health, 64(3), 2083–2100. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-024-02216-z

Cashwell, C. S., Bentley, P. B., & Yarborough, J. P. (2007). The only way out is through: The peril of spiritual bypass. Counseling and Values, 51(2), 139–148. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-007X.2007.tb00071.x

Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Lending a hand: Social regulation of the neural response to threat. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1032–1039. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01832.x

Fox, J., & Picciotto, G. (2019). The mediating effects of spiritual bypass on depression, anxiety, and stress. Counseling and Values, 64(2), 227–245. https://doi.org/10.1002/cvj.12116

Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348

Impett, E. A., Kogan, A., English, T., John, O., Oveis, C., Gordon, A. M., & Keltner, D. (2012). Suppression sours sacrifice: Emotional and relational costs of suppressing emotions in romantic relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(6), 707–720. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212437249

Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., & McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414550708

Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D., & Craske, M. G. (2012). Feelings into words: Contributions of language to exposure therapy. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086–1091. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612443830

Laurenceau, J.-P., Barrett, L. F., & Pietromonaco, P. R. (1998). Intimacy as an interpersonal process: The importance of self-disclosure, partner disclosure, and perceived partner responsiveness in interpersonal exchanges. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1238–1251. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1238

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x

Roberts, N. A., Levenson, R. W., & Gross, J. J. (2008). Cardiovascular costs of emotion suppression cross ethnic lines. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 70(1), 82–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2008.06.003

Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV).