One thing I know to be true: God loves you. Yes, you. Just as you are.
Take a moment to let that soak in. Spread your arms wide and feel the warmth of God’s love, from the bottom of your toes to the tips of your fingers. It never gets old.
“I don’t think our center is a good fit for you,” my boss told me. I was being let go from my first position as a therapist. After months of feeling like I didn’t fit in, he confirmed my worst fears. “Somehow, your client numbers are just too low. I’ve been praying about it, and I believe that God has a better place for you.” My boss looked at me compassionately. I felt a moment of choice inside. I could believe my worst fears: that I had failed, that I didn’t have what it takes to become a therapist, and that my boss’s words were just a tactful way to let me go. Or I could believe the substance of his words (whether he believed them or not): that God really did have a better place for me somewhere else.
I’m not sure why, but my heart decided to choose the latter. For the next two months, as I closed out my client cases, I felt invincible–like I had touched one of those Super Stars in a Super Mario video game and could now plow through obstacles without fear. Ironically, for the first time, I felt I belonged at the counseling center, because I finally knew that I had the power to choose to belong. I took the opportunity to finish well, without shame, leaving notes of affirmation for each of my colleagues. In retrospect, this was one of my most powerful experiences of exercising emotional boundaries.
What are Emotional Boundaries?
Your emotional boundary is your right to decide what to let inside your heart. Like a strong fence, healthy emotional boundaries protect a person emotionally by letting in what’s true and blocking out what’s not. They also help you contain your thoughts and emotions so that you can choose wisely how to act upon your inner experience without lashing out inappropriately.
We feel hurt emotionally when we receive a negative message about us that we fear to be true. It is hard to feel hurt by something you know to be untrue. For example, when I was little, a kid at school tried to tease me by calling me “Joy, Joy, the big fat boy.” I remember feeling puzzled and not hurt at all, because I was small and skinny and identified as a girl. If, on the other hand, the kid had called me “Joy, Joy the ugly little girl that no one likes,” I would have felt very hurt because I was afraid those things were true.
According to therapist and author Terrence Real, when you exercise your protective emotional boundary, you slow down the negative messages and evaluate them before you decide what to let into your heart. You ask yourself, “Is this message true? Is it a message that’s distorted?” Then you allow yourself to reject the distortions and not take them to heart.
Emotional Boundaries and the Armor of God
In Ephesians 6:10-17, the apostle Paul describes the Armor of God, which empowers believers to stand against the devil’s schemes. The Armor of God refers of course to spiritual protection, but it also is a great description of the ultimate emotional protection:
Stand therefore,
Ephesians 6:14-17 WEB [Emphases mine]
having the utility belt of truth buckled around your waist,
and having put on the breastplate of righteousness,
and having fitted your feet with the preparation of the Good News of peace;
above all, taking up the shield of faith,
with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the evil one.
And take the helmet of salvation,
and the sword of the Spirit,
which is the word of God;
In other words, the apostle Paul exhorts believers to protect themselves with the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Scriptures proclaim that Jesus is the Truth (John 14:6), our righteousness (1 Corinthians 1:30-31), the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6), the author and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2), the source of our salvation (1 Thessalonians 5:7-11), and the Word of God incarnate (John 1:1). Our strongest emotional protection is to test all messages against the gospel of Christ–the unshakable Truth which can extinguish all the deceitful barbs of the devil.
The Truth about You
What does the gospel say about you? We all need a reminder sometimes! Here are a few truths that I’ve needed to hear again and again in my own life.
Truth #1 – You are deeply loved, just as you are.
You are made for love. The Bible proclaims that God is love, and He created you to love you. The Bible teaches that God does not just love you at your best moments. In fact, it was at your worst moment when God looked down upon you with love and chose to die for you (Romans 5:6-8).
Dr. David Eckman, one of my seminary professors, shared an image many years ago that has made a lasting impression. He explained that God is our ultimate intended Father. Sometimes, we may have the mistaken impression that God looked at all human relationships and chose to describe Himself as Father because it’s the closest approximation to who He is. Dr. Eckman argued that the opposite is true. As our Creator, God already intended to be our ultimate Father, and He chose to create human parents as a picture to point us to Him. Even though our earthly parents may fail us because of sin, God will not. His is the ultimate love that we all were created to know.
Truth #2 – You don’t have to live in shame and fear any longer.
Shame is the lie that there’s something wrong with you: that you’re broken, damaged, or not good enough. It traps you in secrecy and whispers that no one would ever accept you if they knew the truth about you. However, according to the Bible, Jesus has taken all your sin on the cross (Isaiah 53:4-6). Now nothing can separate you from His love (Romans 8:31-39). When shame tries to scare you into hiding, you have the right to step into the light.
As a young child growing up in a Christian home, I was taught that Jesus’s blood washes away my sins. I imagined myself in white robes that were stained by black spots of sin and washed clean whenever I prayed a prayer of confession. However, because I could sin faster than I could confess, in practicality I believed I was almost always wearing dirty, tattered spiritual robes.
The truth is, Christ’s righteousness is much more robust than that! Jesus doesn’t clothe me with His righteousness because I deserve it–He covers me because I need it. God reassures us that His grace is sufficient for us and abounds all the more in our weakness (1 Corinthians 12:9). When a person undergoes an organ transplant, his/her body must receive the new organ as his/her own. If the person’s body rejects the organ as foreign, he/she does not survive. Similarly, Christ has given us Himself and His righteousness, which we must claim as our own by grace. We no longer separate ourselves from Christ’s accomplishments because we are not meant to ever live apart from Him again (John 15). When the deceiver tries to whisper that you’re not good enough, remember that you have been grafted into the Body of Christ. You are worthy because He is worthy!
Truth #3 – It’s not your job to fix yourself.
If you’re like me, you might sometimes get stuck in the endless loop of focusing on your own faults, trying to fix yourself and to make yourself blameless. Christian writer Leanne Payne calls this “the disease of introspection,” which can lead to depression. But God doesn’t expect us to fix ourselves. That’s why we need Jesus!
In the Twelve Step recovery tradition, the third step is to surrender our lives to God. This is your true job (Luke 10:38-42)–to keep turning your eyes to Jesus and surrendering your will and life to His care so that He can grow you. You are not God’s repair man. You are His workmanship (Ephesians 2:10). He is the Creator, and He gets to decide how to form you. As His creation, you need only stay in His hands and allow Him to do His good work.
Letting in God’s Truth
It takes practice for the truth of God to sink into our hearts. Here are two tools that have helped me in my own spiritual walk.
Imagination
God created our imaginations as a powerful tool to impact our hearts. He filled the Bible with visual metaphors and stories to speak to our souls. One powerful way to receive God’s truths is by actively using our imaginations to visualize Biblical truths as we meditate on Scripture and pray. You can read more about Biblical meditation in my earlier post Let Love In.
Two Christian books that describe the power of visualization include The Healing Presence by Leanne Payne and Becoming Who God Intended by my seminary professor Dr. David Eckman. I highly recommend both!
Community
God’s love has always been meant to be experienced not only in individual communion but also in community. In fact, the most powerful way to challenge the lies of shame is to share your shameful secret with a safe person. It takes practice to discern who are the safe people in your life and to learn to be a safe person for others in turn. I’ve written a longer post about shame, which you can read here. You can also check out the books Boundaries and Safe People by Christian therapists Henry Cloud and John Townsend.
You are not alone. While some people were given the opportunity to experience healthy emotional boundaries growing up, many people did not. Emotional boundaries, like any skill, takes practice. For more support, I encourage you to reach out to find a therapist to coach you through the process. When I first sought therapy for myself many years ago, I remember feeling terrified as well as desperate. I am forever grateful to the brave friends who gave me referrals and shared from their own therapy experiences to make the step seem less scary. I trust you will find what you need as you continue to reach out.
May you live deeply and love deeply, friend!
Related Posts
If you’d like to learn more, check out my posts on Biblical meditation, secrets and shame, boundaries in marriage, and the four promises we all long to hear. If you’re a visual learner, I also created The Needs Deck Scripture Cards as a tool for personal Biblical meditation and Christian group therapy.