Reconnecting with Emotions: the Power of Curiosity

By Leslie Allan

On Wednesday 10 April, our Ex-Religious Support Network members met on Zoom for the final session in Caroline Winzenried's series exploring various aspects of religion and emotion.

Caroline started this series with her talk titled, 'The Emotional Landscape of Religion: Emotions as "Good" or "Bad"', in which she examined how various religions categorize emotions and encourage us to embrace some while disowning others.

In her second session on 'Spiritual Bypassing: The Dangers of Disconnecting from Emotions', she explored how spiritual ideas and practices are sometimes used to avoid or suppress emotions and the damage this can cause.

In this final session, Caroline considered how we can begin the meaningful journey of reconnecting with our emotions. We found her talk very informative as she explained how our emotions, such as anxiety, are linked with our beliefs, physiological responses, such as clenched stomach, and behavioural reactions, such as avoidance.

She taught us the importance of tapping into our emotions and listening to what they are telling us about ourselves. This is contrary to those religions that require us to suppress our emotions.

What was also of great value in Caroline's talk was her highlighting particular strategies that the ex-religious (and all of us) can use in dealing with our emotions.

Of particular interest to me was the three-layered wheel that helps us identify particular emotions that we may feel. Using this will help us contextualize each emotion so that we can better integrate it with our thoughts and actions. Caroline also spoke about how to turn the volume up and down on a particular emotion so that we can better learn from it and manage it.

There was much more to Caroline's talk that I can't fit in here! I thank Caroline and all of the participants for making this a thoroughly useful and engaging session.

We hope you can join us for our next ESN get-together. Future events are posted on our ESN Meetup page.