Feelings Matter

My PMADs have taught me that my feelings matter and need to be paid attention to.

Both of the mentors I ran to when I had severe PPD knew me well enough to tell me this was probably the first time I’d experienced big, wild emotions. My Elinor Dashwood personality was used to being able to hide what I was feeling until I’d processed it, or stuff it entirely. was I wasn’t used to big, wild emotions.

But my PMADs showed me that my feelings are important. They don’t always tell me what is true, but they do tell me something. They tell me what I love.
Sometimes they tell me what I need or what’s wrong.

Some of us need to learn to listen to our feelings less and ground ourselves in truth more (this is me with depression or anxiety).

Some of us need to listen to them more and learn from what they’re telling us (this is me most of the time).

“We should be eager, not indeed to eradicate our affections, “seeking after that inhuman apatheia commended by the Stoics,” but “to correct and subdue that obstinacy which pervades them, on account of the sin of Adam,” and to imitate Christ our Leader [in His varied emotions], — who is himself the rule of supreme perfection — in subduing all their excesses. For Christ, he adds for our encouragement, had this very thing in view, when he took our affections upon himself — “that through his power we might subdue everything in them that is sinful.'”

(B.B. Warfield, On the Emotional Life of Our Lord)