064: You're Not in Trouble with Becky Castle Miller

Is there a part of you that feels like you’re in trouble, or you're about to be? If so, this episode will help you understand what message those feelings might be telling you.

In my conversation with emotion coach and PhD student Becky Castle Miller, we discuss the differences between feelings, emotions, and trauma responses, as well as practical ways to regulate your body when you're having a flashback. If you’re thinking, "But wait, I can’t trust my emotions…isn't my heart deceitful?" Becky offers a different perspective by examining the life of Jesus that you don’t want to miss. 

Guest Spotlight ✨ 

Becky Castle Miller is a PhD student at Wheaton College researching a New Testament dissertation about emotions in the Gospel of Luke. She writes and speaks on emotional, mental, and spiritual health in the church and offers emotion coaching. She received her master's in New Testament from Northern Seminary where she wrote a master's thesis on Jesus's emotions. She, her husband, their five kids, and their cat returned to the US in 2020 after living in the Netherlands for eight years, where she served as discipleship director at an international church.

Website | Instagram | Substack

Links & Resources 🔗

• Episode 1: Navigating Toxic Systems and Maintaining Agency with Alison Cook
• Episode 8: Identity and Integrity After Pain and Loss with Steve Carter
• Episode 9: Exploring the Four Landscapes of Attachment with Geoff & Cyd Holsclaw
• Episode 39: Compassionate Awareness and Soft Words for Hard Days with Aundi Kolber
• 13 Steps for Managing Flashbacks from Pete Walker, MA, MFT
• Feelings Wheel
• How We Feel app

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Episode Transcript 📄

Becky Castle Miller
We actually need emotion to be part of our decision making process. Emotion is not the opposite of rationality. Logic and emotion are not opposites. We need emotion to be part of our decision making. So the idea that we could shut out our emotions and thereby become more holy is just not biblically or scientifically accurate. So the whole idea that we should guard our hearts and we should distrust our emotions is not the best interpretation of those passages.

Brian Lee
Hey, friends. Welcome back to the Broken to Beloved Podcast. If you're looking for practical resources for recovery from and safeguarding against spiritual abuse, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Brian Lee. As an ordained pastor and spiritual abuse survivor, I know what it feels like navigating life after spiritual abuse. I also know what it's like to want to prevent anything from happening to the people you know and love. It's why Broken to Beloved exists.

And we can't do it alone. We need your help. Support our work by becoming a donor to help make our podcast and programs possible. Just head to brokentobeloved.org/support or click the link to donate in the show notes.

Today, we're talking with Becky Castle Miller about feelings, emotions, and how trauma can mess up our perceptions of both. You may remember Becky from her session at the 2025 Annual Summit. Becky is a PhD student at Wheaton College, researching a New Testament dissertation about emotions in the Gospel of Luke. She writes and speaks on emotional, mental, and spiritual health in the church, and offers emotion coaching. She received her master's in New Testament from Northern Seminary, where she wrote a master's thesis on Jesus's emotions. She, her husband, their five kids, and their cat, returned to the US in 2020 after living in the Netherlands for eight years, where she served as discipleship director at an international church.

And now, here's my fascinating conversation with our friend, Becky. Becky, welcome to the podcast.

Becky Castle Miller
I'm so excited to be on, Brian.

Brian Lee
I'm excited for this conversation I reached out because you had that post on Instagram a while back now, but it was a short, spur of the moment video that you recorded after, I think you told me it was a client that you were meeting with that talked about feeling like they were in trouble. And you're like, "Oh, by the way, if you're a grown up, You can't be in trouble anymore." And that caused a whole thing, right?

Becky Castle Miller
I just recorded it in my car when I was driving, after I drove to the library to work one day, and I was like, Maybe other people would relate to this. And I got so much feedback. I got so many comments. Some people were arguing, Wait, but I have been in trouble at work or at church. And I started to say, Okay, well, let's talk about that some more. Does that mean you're in an unhealthy environment? And it just sparked so much conversation. So I'm looking forward to talking about this somewhere with you.

Brian Lee
Same. So what responses were you getting on both sides? You mentioned one of them, but...

Becky Castle Miller
Sure. Some people were saying, "This is incredibly validating, I do walk around all the time as an adult feeling like I'm a little kid who's constantly going to get in trouble, I am walking on eggshells, I am always trying to be perfect all the time so that no one will yell at me." But it is almost an indefinable fear because when you start asking questions like, who is going to be mad at you? Who is going to get you in trouble? What are they going to do? People can't always answer that. It's just this subconscious dread that's following them around. So for some people, it was really validating and helpful. It named something they had been feeling, but that they couldn't articulate. So it gave them words for that. But other people were saying, actually, as an adult, I have found myself in trouble, either in a relationship or in a church. And so then we had more conversations about maybe the environment you're in is unhealthy. If another adult is making you feel like you are in trouble, that's not a healthy interaction.

Brian Lee
Hello. Tell us more about that.

Becky Castle Miller
Right. So I think there's two main possibilities here. If you are constantly walking around feeling like, am I in trouble? I don't want to get in trouble. I need to do everything right. It is probably either a trauma response from things that happened in your past. So you are having essentially emotional flashbacks of fear. You're not in any danger right now, but you still feel like you might be. And so that's a thing that you can unburden within yourself, or it's a problem with your environment, and you're genuinely in an environment that is unhealthy and unsafe. And other adults are mistreating you because unless If you're committing crimes or flagrantly violating workplace policies, no other adult should be making you feel like you are in trouble.

Brian Lee
Yeah. Unpack that phrase "unburden" for some of us who may not be familiar with it, for people who maybe listen to like, I've heard it, but I'm not really sure what that means.

Becky Castle Miller
Absolutely. So I've been seeing a wonderful trauma therapist for seven years now, and his primary modality is Internal Family Systems (IFS) and I found it to be such a helpful modality that I went and got trained in it a couple of years ago. So that's the modality I use with my emotion coaching clients. And I'm reading every IFS book out there. I find it to be a really helpful modality for knowing myself, unburdening the things that I'm carrying that feel so heavy, and also healing trauma. So the idea of unburdening is that we have protective parts of us that take on burdens throughout our lives. Beliefs that don't really belong to us or that feel too heavy, like this belief that I I need to be perfect all the time, or I'm going to get in trouble, or someone's going to criticize me, so I need to criticize myself first so that no one else will criticize me, or I'm not good enough. That belief, that deep belief, I'm not good enough. That's a burden.

In IFS, the idea is that we are never really broken. So my therapist keeps reminding me, We're not talking about healing. You're not broken. There's nothing wrong with you. But you've taken on these burdens over time. They're interfering with your functioning. So let's name them and release them. So in IFS, the idea of an unburdening is you get to know these protective parts of you that are carrying these beliefs that are really outdated. You update those parts. I'm an adult. I'm 44 years old. I'm not 10 years old anymore, and I'm capable of handling things in my life, and I get to make my own decisions. I'm an adult. No one gets to tell me what to do anymore. No one should be yelling at me, criticizing me, getting me in trouble. And so I can name that burden that I'm carrying. I'm not good enough. I must be perfect to be loved. I have to do things perfectly right, or someone's going to get me in trouble. I can name those and then help those parts of me release that burden and invite in positive or helpful qualities instead in place of those burdens. So this idea of unburdening I found it really transformational to name the things I'm still carrying around that are outdated and letting them go.

Brian Lee
Yeah. I imagine there are some people whose brains are exploding because you said something along the lines of, you're not broken. You're carrying burdens. And that's our whole thing.

Becky Castle Miller
It is. Broken to beloved. That's the whole thing. Yeah.

Brian Lee
That's the whole point, because that's what I believed about myself for years, is that my identity was broken or that I was damaged goods. And I've heard from so many other people in our community who have felt or thought or talked the same way. I'm damaged goods, I'm broken, all these shattered pieces, this whole thing. And so this idea that no, you're actually not broken. You've just taken on all these burdens may be completely revolutionary.

Becky Castle Miller
It has been for me. Even after seven years of trauma therapy, my therapist has been reminding me the past few weeks, specifically, Stop saying healing, stop saying being broken. Stop saying next step of healing. You are not broken. You don't need to heal. You are okay. You have the ability to overcome this. You have infinite self-compassion. Let's just keep naming the burdens and keep releasing them.

Brian Lee
Is there a term they use instead of healing?

Becky Castle Miller
Well, Unburdening, specifically. Unburdening, yeah. Yeah, that's what my therapist prefers. So there it is. And so that's what I've been trying to shift my own speaking about myself. I am not broken. I am beloved.

Brian Lee
That's amazing. I can't even imagine what that will do for some of our listeners who have been carrying that around for so long. We're going to link to some of our previous episodes where we talk a little bit more in-depth about IFS because I know we could talk about that all night, but that's not why we're here. Because this idea of not being in trouble, and yes, if I'm in a workplace environment and I have a direct supervisor or I have a boss who I could technically be in trouble with if I do something flaglantly wrong, or against policy or not do my job or whatever. That's an instance. But really in the church environment, there really should be no reason for us to feel like we're in trouble. And yet so many of us walk around with that that burden of I'm going to be in trouble, or I'm not perfect enough, or good enough, or wholly enough, or what if I slip up, or what if, what if, what if, what if, right? What are the underlying emotions when I feel like I'm in trouble?

Becky Castle Miller
It's usually going to be fear. Fear is looking at the future with concern or apprehension. Worry is looking at the future with apprehension. Anxiety, not an anxiety disorder, but the emotion of anxiety can be looking toward the future with fear, with concern, with dread. And so I think that as we're looking to the future, we carry a lot of fear-based emotions that something bad will happen to us. As opposed to being able to look at the future with hope and faith and trust that good things will potentially be coming for me. So I think that the primary emotions under that That feeling that I'm in trouble is fear, but also beyond emotion, I think there's hypervigilance. There's a difference between the trauma response of hypervigilance and the emotion construction of fear.

Brian Lee
What is that difference?

Becky Castle Miller
An emotion is a construction. It's a meaning-making process. Emotion actually has a lot of steps. An emotion is so much more than a feeling. A feeling, those sensations you have in your body, is an ingredient of emotion, but emotion is much more than that. Emotion is, what is the situation right now? What is my appraisal of the situation? What emotion concepts have I learned in the past from the socializing figures who influenced me? What emotion concepts are allowed in my culture? How am I allowed to express them? And then your mind makes a match between the current situation and the best emotion concept. And then when it constructs that emotion concept, it prepares your body to take action toward a goal. So emotion is this whole meaning-making process that has to do with what's happening right now that I'm identifying and preparing for the future based on my knowledge I've gained throughout my life of these various emotion concepts. That's an emotion.

So if I'm constructing fear, maybe because I have walked down a path in the woods and I see something across the path that I think is a snake, and I construct fear, and then my body starts increasing adrenaline, so I'm able to run away, and then I realize it's just a stick, then I'll construct, oh, maybe I'll construct relief, a different emotion instead of fear. But it's about what's happening right now.

But a trauma response has to do with our autonomic nervous system. It's not conscious, and it happens really fast, and it's our body's way of keeping us safe. When something in the present moment reminds me of something dangerous I've been through before, it's going to act very quickly before my conscious mind, before my prefrontal cortex can make any analysis. It's just going to get my body prepared to move to safety. Even faster than an emotion does. So I might be constantly scanning my environment with the trauma response of hypervigilance, always looking around for something that's going to go wrong so I can keep myself safe, which makes sense. God designed our bodies to work that way.

So emotions are about something that's happening now, but a trauma response or an emotional flashback is about something that happened in the past that I think is happening to me now in the present. So there's the blurring of past and present when we're having a trauma response.

Brian Lee
Yeah. And I often talk about that idea that trauma doesn't know how to tell time.

Becky Castle Miller
Exactly.

Brian Lee
And so even though I'm in the present and being activated or triggered by something, it The trauma is pulling me all the way back to when that thing originally happened.

Becky Castle Miller
Absolutely.

Brian Lee
And now my body doesn't know what to make sense of.

Becky Castle Miller
Exactly.

Brian Lee
So I think if we were to get even more granular and nitty-gritty, that idea, the example of seeing a stick and thinking it's a snake constructs the emotion of fear, even if maybe I've never really actually run across a snake before. But I just happen to have a fear of snakes. So that's the fear response happening as an emotion versus maybe the trauma response of, actually, I have had experience with snakes and got a really bad bite, so that's the thing that I remember. And so now my body even more quickly creates this response that is a trauma response based on the hypervigilance of, Oh, this terrible thing happened to I do not want it to happen again. And now my body responds in a different way.

Becky Castle Miller
Exactly. So with the emotion of fear, your heart rate might increase, your body is going to pump more adrenaline, maybe start pumping cortisol, your fast twitch muscles are going to get ready to move. Your emotions do prepare you to take action toward a goal. But you'll be able to calm that down as soon as you realize you're not actually in danger. With a trauma response, there it is, your prefrontal cortex is going to go offline, your autonomic nervous system is going to completely take over, and And you might have a huge outsized reaction more than just fear. Your hands might start shaking. You might start sweating. You might start hyperventilating. Your thoughts might start racing. You might be constructing worst-case scenarios. And it will not be easy to get back under control because your body's safety system has completely taken over, which is, again, not broken. That is how God designed your body to work.

But it might take hours or days to come down from an actual trauma response. You might go into a full-blown panic attack. You might start screaming and run away. You might be on edge for, again, hours or days afterward. That's the difference between a trauma response and an emotion.

Brian Lee
I think that differentiation is going to be really helpful for people who aren't really sure. It's like, is this a feeling or is this a trauma response? Is that response of what happens after that thing, after the event? So take It's like, Oh, make us down two different paths. Like you're saying, if it's that emotion, I'll be able to come down off of it. Maybe I laugh it off. It's like, Oh, my gosh, it was just a dumb stick. If it's the trauma response, is there a path to regulating for ourselves or based on if we're with someone who can co-regulate with us or something, or maybe it is a full-blown panic attack and no one's around. I know it's an impossible thing to answer, hypothetically, but in case someone is experiencing that or having a memory even now, of, Oh, That was a trauma response. Where do they go from there?

Becky Castle Miller
Yeah. If it's an emotion, it's not likely to last longer than 60 to 90 seconds.

Brian Lee
Interesting.

Becky Castle Miller
Emotions are actually pretty short-lived. So if you can hold on through it and get comfortable with the discomfort of uncomfortable emotions, you'll actually be able to move through it pretty quickly. Now, if you're in a dangerous situation, if it is actually a snake, you're going to construct fear, but you're actually going to keep constructing fear as long as you're in danger. You might run away, you might get yourself safe. You might make sure that your kids or your dog are safe. When it's over, you might be exhausted and come down from the adrenaline. But the emotion will resolve fairly quickly once you're out of the dangerous situation. If you are having a panic attack, it might last much longer. With the emotion, you can usually tell yourself a different story about what's happening, or be able to understand what's happening, talk to yourself about the situation, and calm yourself down. Once a trauma response has started, it is much harder to do that. Basically, it can feel like you're out of control of your own mind and body, and it's really scary. Actually, then the scariness of being out of control of your body can generate more fear, which can make the trauma response even worse.

So if you are with someone who can understand what's happening and help you, you mentioned that wonderful word co-regulation. If you're able to articulate to someone, I am having a trauma right now, and they know how to help you, they can keep their body still and calm, not make any sudden movements, be as near you as you're comfortable with them, being maybe physical touch if you're okay with that. And if they can regulate their breathing, take slow deep breaths in through your nose, out through your mouth, belly breathing. If they can do that, your body will begin to regulate to theirs. Your breathing might be able to slow down. You can sometimes borrow from someone someone else's calm and regulated nervous system to calm yours, which is wonderful. Now, if you're with someone who is also panicking or is upset at you for having a trauma response and starts yelling at you, that's going to cause you to get more dysregulated.

So if you are on your own to calm down from a trauma response, sometimes the most helpful first step is to just recognize it. Oh, I think I'm having a trauma response right now. And then begin to name it. Am I having a flight response? Do I want to run away? Am I having a fight response? Do I want to move toward this person or object and instigate either physical or verbal aggression? Am I having a fawn response? Do I want to placate this person or make myself small so that they'll stop hurting me? Am I having a freeze response where I feel really activated inside, but I'm frozen and I can't do anything and I can't make decisions and I don't know what to do? Or am I having a flop response? Am I just completely shutting down and playing dead? Any one of those can be a trauma response. And the more you learn what each of those looks like for you, the earlier you can tell, Oh, I've got a fight response coming on. I want to move toward this person and instigate conflict. That's not going to help. I need to consciously walk the other direction. Or I'm having a flight response. I want to run away, but that's not safe right now. Is there a way I can go into another room instead of leaving the building?

So getting to know yourself, your own body, the trauma responses you're prone to and what they look like in your body can be really helpful to, as much as possible, direct your actions. But again, once your prefrontal cortex is not working and you're not making reasoned decisions, It is really hard and you can feel completely hijacked in your body. So in order to deal with the adrenaline, you can jump rope or run around the block, try to do some jumping jacks, physically get the adrenaline out of your body. You can try putting your face into ice water to stimulate your vagus nerve and get your parasympathetic nervous system to kick in. You can change temperature, either really hot or really cold. You can put pressure on your breastbone to try to stimulate your vagus nerve, or you can try to do belly breathing for five minutes, which again, stimulate your vagus nerve and starts to have that calm down response. But again, if you feel like you're out of control of your body, it's really hard to make yourself do those things even if you know what to do. I'm really well-educated in trauma and emotions, but as I've dealt with some really severe PTSD over the past year, there have been times when I could narrate what was happening and not stop it.

I could say, Oh, my body is going into tonic immobility. I can't move my arms. This makes sense as a trauma response, but I can't stop it. And so my brain was working, but I could not make my body do what it needed to do to calm down. And it's terrifying. So to some extent, just accepting this is a trauma response, I'm not in control of my body, I will eventually feel better, might be the best thing you can do.

Brian Lee
That is so helpful. I love the idea of just the noticing and naming, because I think when people are so primed to learn to ignore or dismiss their responses, whether they are emotions and feelings or whether they are trauma responses, we often respond to those feelings or trauma responses by heping more shame and condemnation on ourselves. It's like, I can't believe I'm doing that again. I'm so stupid, or why can't I just stop doing that thing? It's like you were saying at the beginning with your therapist, it's like, No, you're not broken. This is a normal response. What would it do for us to receive grace and compassion for ourselves? It's like, Oh, of course you're doing this thing. Don't you remember when that happened? Like you're saying, even as someone with years Years of experience and all the head knowledge of, Oh, I'm going into tonic immobility. I can't move my arms. To know that intellectually and still not be able to stop your body from doing it, but to recognize and have the awareness to say, Oh, I know what's happening. Let me just give it some time and not shame myself or dig myself a deeper hole, and we'll get out of this eventually, I think could be so helpful for people who experience this somewhat regularly.

Becky Castle Miller
It's been one of the most helpful things for me, and I've seen it be really helpful for my coaching clients. Some of the best advice I've read on dealing with emotional flashbacks, which is when you're having a flashback to a traumatic or overwhelming event without the visual, you're not replaying the movie in your head, you're just feeling the emotion. It can be confusing because you don't know why you're feeling this. It's disproportionate to the situation, but you don't know why. But it actually is an emotional flashback. You're feeling what you felt back then because something in your environment right now is triggering that memory, but you're only getting the emotion component. Anyway, Pete Walker has a wonderful book on complex PTSD, and on his website, he has 13 steps for dealing with an emotional flashback. And the first step, and if you don't remember any of the other ones, the most important one is just to say, I am having an emotional flashback. The moment you realize, Oh, my rage in this moment is not about what happened right now, but something that happened right now is reminding me of a time when I was trapped or a great injustice I am feeling that anger again, even though it's disproportionate to the situation.

I am having an emotional flashback, or I am terrified right now, but actually I'm completely safe, but my body is remembering a time that I wasn't safe. I am having an emotional flashback. It gives you that little bit of orientation in time and space. It says, Oh, I am aware that what I'm feeling is not attached to this present moment. And it just gives you that little bit of space between you and the emotional flashback, your conscious self and the emotion. And that can begin to help you deal with it. So with emotional flashbacks or with trauma responses, to just say, I'm having a trauma response. I'm having an emotional flashback. It really does make a big difference.

Brian Lee
Huge, huge. I would imagine just, again, having the ability to name the thing and to be aware of it happening instead of just constantly being caught up in the title wave of it, right, would be so helpful. Would you help us differentiate, because I think you mentioned something around the language of this earlier. Do you differentiate between feelings and emotions?

Becky Castle Miller
I do. I think they are two distinct words, though in English, we use them interchangeably. Yes. Scientifically speaking, a feeling would be your interoception or your affect, your mood, your affect, or your knowledge and sense of what's going on inside your body. So a feeling would I feel my heart rate getting faster. I feel fluttering in my stomach. I feel prickles on the back of my arms. Then that's an ingredient of emotion. Emotion is that whole meaning-making process that I described. So a feeling is an ingredient of emotion. It is the body sensation or somatic part of the emotion. But the emotion then also involves appraisal and language and concept construction and prediction function. And so it's all these pieces that your brain does to construct an emotion and then prepare your body to take action. So the feeling is just one ingredient of that.

Brian Lee
That's very validating. I also ask that question somewhat selfishly because I make that differentiation when I'm also doing coaching. I use a lot of Enneagram work as well. And there's this whole idea that we are three brain beings. There's body, our gut, our thinking, and our feeling or our heart. And so I often use the word feeling more interchangeably with sensations. What am I noticing in my body? Versus emotions and the heart words is a little bit more abstract. Like you're saying, you're assigning a word or assigning a meaning to what you're feeling. It's not just what the sensation is, but okay, so there's heat in your stomach. What does that mean? What do you do? Where is that coming from? Why are you having that feeling? I think even that can be helpful for people who recognize or who are so prone to being in their bodies When someone asks, Hey, what are you feeling right now? Or what emotion are you having? And instead, they give you a feeling word or a sensation. Or the other way around, they're so used to denying their bodies and ignoring them, they'll give you the emotional words but have no idea what's happening in their body.

Becky Castle Miller
Exactly. Connecting the somatic experience and the meaning-making process can actually be really helpful for people.

Brian Lee
Do you have tools for how to make those connections?

Becky Castle Miller
Practice. It is a learned skill. You can learn to begin to identify what's happening in your body and then gain more and more vocabulary for expressing it. Now, there are some people who struggle with alexithymia. It was I was reading the handbook on cognitive neuroscience today. I was at the library, and I read a whole article about alexithymia to remind me of my knowledge. But alexithymia is truly an impaired ability to notice bodily sensations, and then to put emotion meaning making words to them. So some people genuinely have an impairment in that. And if that is you, you are not broken. There is not something wrong with you. This is a known condition, and it's okay If you struggle with that, you can still, to some extent, learn the skill, but it's going to be harder. But alexithymia aside, this is a learned skill. You can learn more emotion concepts. You can get more grand regular in expressing your emotions. You can use a feelings wheel, for example, or there's a wonderful app called How We Feel. It's a free app that helps you name your emotions. A number of my students, after I taught God and Emotions this past semester, started using the app and learning new words for their emotions and practicing feeling them.

So the process of noticing your sensations and naming them is a skill that you can learn. One of my favorite IFS questions, if a client has a protective part that's starting to get reactive, I will say, okay, it sounds like a part of you, to use the example from earlier, feels like you're going to get in trouble. Where do you find that part in your body or around your body? Because some people will feel sensations almost outside or around their bodies, and other people will be inside. So I love that question. Where do you find that in your body, around your body? I've been working with a somatic experiencing coach, and she's been incredible. And so she's helped me learn not just where I find something in my body, but where it wants to move or where the sensation is moving as we're working or what it wants to do next in my body or with my body. So somatic experiencing is such a cool modality. If you are struggling to name the sensations in your body and understand what they mean, find a somatic experiencing practitioner. It's very cool, and it's very good for trauma healing.

So you can attune to your body, and you can ask those questions. Where is this in around my body? How is it moving? What does the sensation feel What does it want to do next? When I move my body, does the sensation move? If I slow down and I pay attention to it, am I noticing that there are parts of my body that are offline, or am I all connected as a complete hole? Just practicing that, tuning into your body for five minutes at a time, naming your sensations, and then trying to name the emotion concepts that you might be constructing, are all practices that you can get better at.

Brian Lee
Yeah, I love that. I've been doing a lot story work lately, and Adam Young is so good at it. And that's one of the questions he always invites you to do as you're doing the work is like, Hey, so what's happening in your body right now as you tell the story, after you've told the story, as we talk about this one thing? Then he just has two words that he uses over and over again, and it's just, Notice that. Then he just keeps making that imitation. Then later, Okay, where is it now in your body? Notice that. Is it the same? Has something changed? That, I think, process of helping people to practice attuning to their own bodies and the sensations or feelings that are happening there. And then whether it's with a feelings wheel, whether it's the How We Feel app, I like the eight feelings in Voice of the heart because because it's a much smaller list that's condensed. So if a feelings wheel is too overwhelming, just start with the inner circle and just limit yourself to a few words. And then once you feel comfortable with those, branch out to the next wheel or whatever it is.

And I think it is that process of when you have vocabulary for these emotions, of course, it's going to be overwhelming. So start small and start simple, right? And so whether you find a somatic practitioner, whether you look up or find work that does that process, I have also found it to be incredibly helpful to tune into my body and to pay attention to what's going on there. As we learn to notice, recognize, and name emotions, I love that you said that emotions will typically only last 60 to 90 seconds. I don't know that I've heard that before, and I feel like that's also really helpful because there can be times where it feels utterly overwhelming. But if we can sit with it for a minute and a minute and a half and let it pass, what do we do with those emotions once they pass? What are they telling us?

Becky Castle Miller
They usually have. There is usually a message. If we tune into our emotions and ask, what is this emotion telling me about what I value? What is this emotion telling me about my interpretation of the events that are happening? What is the story I'm telling myself about this emotion? Is it accurate? I believe that all emotions are valid and all the emotions make sense and all emotions are good. But sometimes we are constructing emotions based on incorrect information. So I think that the emotion isn't wrong, but the information behind it might be. If I am angry because I think that a friend has stood me up because they don't care about me and I'm telling myself a story about that, my anger Anger is valid because if my friend did stand me up, I would have every reason to be angry. But what if I find out they've been in a car accident and were unavoidably detained? Once I correct the information behind the emotion, the emotion can change. So So that's one thing, is to check the story that I'm telling myself about the emotion. And then sometimes journaling about the emotion, if we have a really big emotional reaction to something, journaling about it when we've calmed down can help us tune into, Okay, what was that emotion telling me?

I was really sad because someone promised to do this thing for me, and then they didn't follow through. Why was I sad? What is it telling me? Well, the sadness is telling me that people keeping their word and being able to rely on my friends is really important to me. And this friend didn't do that. Okay, do I need to examine whether this is a trustworthy friend? Is this something they do regularly? Was it just a one-time mistake? Do I need to process my sadness, talk to them about it, and ask them to not do it again? What is it telling me about my values? What is it telling me about my experience? What is it telling me about my appraisal and interpretation of this situation? And then what do I want to do next after this emotion? What action do I want to take? My brain has constructed this emotion really quickly, but now that I'm able to do some metacognition, I'm able to think about my thinking, how do I evaluate the situation? Am I happy with how I expressed it?

Am I okay with getting angry and yelling at my kids? No, I'm not. That's not the parent I want to be. Okay, the anger was telling me something valuable, but I don't like how I acted. The next time I'm angry, I want to try to shift how I respond. So a lot of that metacognitive processing afterwards. We really can learn new emotion concepts over time, and the emotion concepts that we dwell on will become easier to construct.

And this is what I call emotional discipleship, and this is what I'm working on in my dissertation, is I believe we can learn new emotions from Jesus. And as we meditate on them, we will more easily be able to construct those emotions. So we can learn from Jesus what it means to show compassion, to be moved with compassion and take action for people. We can learn what it means to feel enemy love. I think that's a real emotion. We can actually feel it. What does it mean to feel zeal for God's house? We can learn those new emotion concepts, and that can actually be part of our discipleship is to learn to construct these emotions that help us be more Christlike. So that's another piece we can think about is the way I acted as a result of this emotion in keeping with who I want to be as a follower of Jesus, or is it not? And then what do I want to change in my spiritual practice in my life to do that differently next time?

Brian Lee
I love it. I think there are so many people who are listening who have suffered the consequences of the abusive teaching of Jeremiah 17 that says that the heart is deceitful above all things. And so therefore, you should not pay any attention to what your feelings are telling you. Help us to untangle that and move towards, like you're saying with your dissertation work, of how do we move towards what Christ modeled or what he taught us?

Becky Castle Miller
I always want to have my friend Auburn Powell answer this question because she's in the PhD program with me, but she's doing a dissertation on Jeremiah. I feel like Auburn can always answer this better than I can. But what I understand from her and other Old Testament scholars is that the Hebrew word lev, lev, heart, there does not mean the center of emotion in the same way that heart does in American English. We have to remember that translating emotion words and translating body sensation words across time and space and culture is not easy because all cultures and languages have their own emotion concepts. They don't translate well. So this idea that saying the heart is deceitful above all things means that we can't trust our emotions is just a false equivalence. That's reading our American English translation and then making assumptions about what that verse says. I believe it means something more like humanity does have a tendency toward evil, and people keep hurting each other, and that is why God needs to intervene. But it does not mean that our emotions are not to be trusted and should be shut out. In fact, there have been scientific experiments that show that when people's emotion making parts of their brain are damaged, they actually make bad decisions.

We actually need emotion to be part of our decision making process. Emotion is not the opposite of rationality. Logic and emotion are not opposites. We need emotion to be part of our decision making. So the idea that we could shut out our emotions and thereby become more wholly is just not biblically or scientifically accurate. So the whole idea that we should guard our hearts and we should distrust our emotions is not the best interpretation of those passages.

Brian Lee
Yeah, that's really helpful. So as you're doing your work in your dissertation, research and studying, what's one of the things that you're learning that might help us?

Becky Castle Miller
Wow. I think it's seeing how emotional Jesus is. I mean, just contrary to the idea that emotions are not trustworthy and we should not have them, is so many passages in the Old Testament where God is depicted as emotional, and so many passages in the Gospels where Jesus is depicted as emotional, and then passages in the epistles and the rest of the New Testament literature, where these apostels and leaders of the early church who are good examples are very emotional. So emotion has an important and positive place in our lives, the Bible has many examples of that. So just seeing how emotional Jesus is and seeing that Jesus actually does pay attention to and shape the emotions of his followers. He makes it part of his discipleship process, and that's been really neglected in discipleship in the church. I think it's important. We can disciple our emotions.

Brian Lee
I think that's huge because I don't know that there are many people... I don't think I've ever heard those ideas before. I'm really excited to hear more about your work as you move towards completing the dissertation and doing all those things. I love keeping up with you and hearing what's going on. I think these conversations have been so helpful for me. I've heard lots of people and feedback from the summit that listened to your session that found it incredibly helpful. If people haven't heard it yet, I would tell you go get the All Access Pass and look for Becky's session. I'm guessing this is the work that you do with your emotion clients, correct, in coaching?

Becky Castle Miller
Yeah. Talking about bad things they've heard from the Bible. Okay, this is what you've been taught in church or in the Bible about your emotions. Let's talk about that. And let's just talk about your emotions. Let's practice naming them. Let's talk about how trauma might be impacting the emotions you're constructing. How can I support what you're doing? Do you constantly feel like you're in trouble? Okay, is that because there are burdens you're carrying from childhood that we can release today? Or let's analyze it. Are you in a bad situation where people are mistreating you and they're making you feel like you are a child, you are beholden to them, like they can tell you what to do? You get to change those relationships in those situations. You're not stuck in them.

So that question that we started with is a lot of the work that I do. What if this is coming from your burdens and what if this is coming from your environment? And maybe your emotions are not the problem. I don't think I've ever had a client. They come to me because they say my emotions are a problem. It has literally never been true. No one's emotions have ever been the problem.

Brian Lee
Yeah. Again, huge. There's so much potential for that unburdening process, if we don't want to call it healing process, right? There's so much more potential for integration of what we see as our broken parts to bring them back together as a whole. This is so helpful. Becky, if people want to work with you or find you online, where do they go?

Becky Castle Miller
I have a website, beckycastlemiller.com, which has links to my Instagram and my sub stack, both of which are called Whole Emotion.

Brian Lee
Thank you so much, and we'll have all of those in the show notes for everyone. Becky, thank you again. This is always so helpful talking to you. I appreciate you being with us today.

Becky Castle Miller
Love your work, Brian. Thanks so much.

Brian Lee
I feel like I learned so much. If you enjoyed this episode as much as I did, be sure to follow Becky and say thanks for being on the show. You can find links and all the things in the show notes.

Coming up on the show, we have Zach Lambert, Megan Febuary, Monica DiCristina, and more. Next time, we'll be talking with Erin Moniz about the importance of intimacy and how we may be thinking about it too narrowly. Subscribe or follow the show to get new episodes automatically. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review or share with your friends.

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This episode was hosted and executive-produced by me, Brian Lee. Editing by Heidi Critz and postproduction by Lisa Carnegis. Thanks for taking the time out of your day to listen. I hope it's been helpful. Moving toward healing and wholeness, together. I'll see you next time.