by Elizabeth

Today I’m over at Velvet Ashes, sharing a story of emotional healing. In case you haven’t heard of Velvet Ashes, it’s a website that provides encouragement, inspiration, and online community for women serving overseas, and it has blessed me tremendously in the last year.

Before my husband and I moved overseas, we met with a pastor who specializes in counseling ministers and overseas workers. At the very first session, he launched into ideas like pain, connection, and empathy. I was both unfamiliar and uncomfortable with much of the emotional language he spoke, but I was too embarrassed to admit I didn’t know what in the world he was talking about. So I just sat there, nodding my head silently.

As we continued with the counseling sessions, however, I realized that the reason I didn’t understand the language of the heart was because I had shut off my own emotions. I didn’t know how to deal with emotional pain, so I simply turned off my ability to feel — thereby avoiding the pain altogether. Our counselor described this phenomenon as an “intellectually-locked heart” or a “head-heart-disconnect.”

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