What Are You Really Feeling?
For the faith-filled woman who is ready to stop surviving her emotions and start understanding them.
I had to write one thousand words of my story for a weekend intensive. Five specific instances of harm. From ages zero to thirty. Due at 11:59pm.
I started at 11:15.
Not because I forgot.
Because I was that afraid to look at it. To name it. To let it exist on a page outside of me where I would have to see it.
I cried for an hour after I finished writing. I arrived at that intensive shaking — fearful in a way that lived in my chest and my hands and the back of my throat felt like it was closing up.
Because here is what I know now that I did not know then:
it is easier to stay in a familiar hell than to step into an unfamiliar heaven.
Not because you do not want to heal. Because your nervous system knows the hell. It has learned to function inside it, even when it is costing you everything.
What I eventually found on the other side of looking was not perfection. Not the end of hard days. But I found language, tools, and safe people in my life whose faces did not turn away.
This workbook is the beginning of finding language for, naming what your emotions are, and what is going on underneath them.
You might recognize yourself in one of these:
Tonya
"Having no language for what I am carrying is almost worse than the wound itself. I have a gaping wound and I have to go around engaging in small talk and pretending it is not there."
Janna
"I know in my head that I am not too much, that I am not unlovable, that I do not have to stay small. But it does not make it feel less true."
Laura
"I have detached myself from my grief and my pain just to function and survive. But it is lying deep inside of me like a dormant volcano."
What's inside:
What Are You Really Feeling? is a free guided workbook that walks you through the four emotions most often found underneath grief, spiritual disorientation, and pain.
Anger. Shame. Anxiety. Sadness.
Not to fix them. Not to resolve them by the last page. But to finally name them, understand where they came from, and bring them honestly to a God who was present for every moment of the story that formed them.
Each section moves slowly. There are reflection questions, space to write, and a liturgy at the close of each emotion—not a formula, but a real conversation with the Lord about what you are carrying.
There is also a Nuanced Emotions Chart, a Body Sensations list, and a 22 Relational Needs inventory in the appendix. These exist because sometimes the right entry point is not a thought. It is a sensation. A tightness. A bracing you felt before you knew what you were bracing for.
What is unprocessed does not disappear. It settles.
This is where it begins to move.
GET THE FREE WORKBOOKBefore you download this, I want to say one honest thing.
This is not a feel-good resource. It is not inspiration for a hard week. It is not a devotional to read and set aside.
It will ask you to slow down and look at what you have been avoiding. At what your emotions have been protecting. At the harm that was done to you, and possibly the harm you have done to others out of pain you never knew how to name.
That is not comfortable work. It is not a breakthrough moment.
Those who do this work find something real on the other side. Not in totality. Not all at once. But the kind of change that gives you language, and tools, and safe people whose faces do not turn away.
If that is what you are actually looking for—this is for you. And it is free.
I am a trauma-informed spiritual director, a single mother of six, and a woman who spent years staying in motion and calling it healing.
I did not want to look at what was underneath. There were things I had to admit to—harm done to me, and harm I caused others out of coping mechanisms I had never learned to name. I had to look at people I had covered up for and made excuses for, because as a child I did not know how else to survive the fact that they were not there the way they should have been.
That is not easy work. I will not tell you it is.
But I can tell you what is on the other side: language, and tools, and people in my life whose faces do not turn away.
I built this workbook from that place. From my own story. I am pulling up a chair along side you.
I'm Ready to Stop Surviving This and Start Understanding It
Send me the free workbook.
Your email is safe with me. I will never spam you or share your information. After you sign up, you will receive your workbook and a short series of emails to walk alongside you as you move through it. You can unsubscribe at any time.
