Jesus in the Gospels and the apostles in their writings emphasize the importance of Jesus followers loving one another. They provide us with a measure of guidance as to what loving our brothers and sisters in Christ means in practice. In this reflection, I am going to take a look at a particular area of loving one another—emotionally supporting one another, caring for each other’s emotional and mental well-being. In writing this reflection, I drew upon my experience and knowledge as a counselor working in a mental health center setting and a social case worker working with teenagers, children, and their families or other caretakers. I also reviewed the latest literature.
A local church, if we emulate Jesus’ character and following his teaching and example, should be a community of love and healing. It should not be a group of people who cause injury to each other or to those outside their group—a group which an undetermined number of local churches have become, based upon the reports of former members and attendees of the church and the reports of people living in the same area as the area from which the church’s members and attendees come.
How then do we give each other emotional support? The following ways of caring for each other’s emotional and mental wellbeing are in no particular order.
1. We pray for each other. I don’t mean telling someone, “I’ll pray for you.” We pray for them then and there. The prayer need not be a long one. We draw them to God’s attention and ask him to help, comfort, strengthen, or heal them. We may place a hand on their should or upper part of their arm as a gesture of good-will toward them. Before we touch them, we ask their permission first, “May I lay a hand on your shoulder or arm while I pray for you?”
2. We offer them genuine encouragement and positive affirmation. We not only do this vocally but also we do it by showing our confidence in them. We give them a task to do, a task which we might do ourselves but which we give them to show that we trust them. We show them we believe they are reliable and trustworthy.
3. We are free in our praise. When they make a genuine effort to do something no matter how well it is done, we commend them on what they have done. We go out of our way to look for things in them we can praise and affirm. We are liberal and sincere in giving what are called positive strokes, warm fuzzies. “What a pretty pink scrunchie! You wear such cute scrunchies!” We stroke them not only for what they do—conditional strokes—but for who they are—unconditional strokes. For strokes to register as fuzzies, they must be sincere. We avoid rubber-band strokes, backhanded compliments, which are cold pricklies in disguise. “Cute dress. I had one like that in the 90s.” Cold pricklies are negative strokes. “Wow! What an ugly dress!” They leave the person who receives them feeling bad about themselves. Fuzzies leave them feeling good about themselves.
There are four different kinds of strokes.
Verbal—a kind or friendly word, a genuine compliment. “Wow! That dress looks great on you!”
Touch—a hug or a pat on the back. A fist bump. Unless they are close family, we should ask someone their permission before we touch them and then we should make sure the type of touch is appropriate to whoever we are touching. For example, we would not give a full body frontal hug to someone with whom we are not in relationship. We would give them a side-hug.
Written—a thankyou note. A “Good job, well done” email or text. A positive comment on social media. Likes, loves, and cares on Facebook. Friends, those who like us, will copy us. They will like or love on Facebook what we like or love. They will comment on what we comment.
Time—Spending time with someone, taking time to listen to them, showing interest in what they are saying or doing are positive strokes. Just quietly sitting together.
We gravitate toward people who give a lot of positive strokes; we shy away from people who give a lot of negative strokes or do not give any strokes at all. Everyone has a stroke bank in which they store up positive strokes and good feelings. If they do not get enough positive strokes, they will settle for negative strokes and bad feelings.
People need strokes. They cannot survive without them. This is one of the reasons that they need other people in their lives. People who appear to be independent may be counterfeiting strokes. “Counterfeit strokes are created when people distort what is happening in their transactions with others. they are used to reinforce one's life position and to fill a stroke deficit.” A life position is how we see the world, ourselves, and other people. Someone may say something that is completely harmless. They hear it as a putdown, a sexual innuendo, or something else other than what it was. They use it to feel insulted, threatened, or prickly in some way. They turn it into a negative stroke, a cold prickly.
People collect negative feelings like people once collected S&H Green Stamps. At one time stores gave customers S&H Green Stamps as bonus when they made a purchase. Customers stuck the stamps in a book the store provided. When they had enough books filled with stamps, they took them to S&H Green Stamp redemption store and redeemed them for premiums in the S&H Green Stamp catalog. In Transactional Analysis (TA) the negative feelings people collect are called stamps. When people accumulate enough negative feelings, they cash them in. They may use the stamps to justify doing something hurtful to someone or themselves. Someone who collects anger stamps may use them to justify murdering a spouse or partner, dumping a friend or ending some other relationship, binging on alcohol, drugs, or sex, watching porn videos, and so on. They may use their anger stamps to rebel against someone whom they perceive as a parental authority figure. Someone who collects sad stamps may use them to justify killing themselves.
The condition of not having enough strokes is known as stroke deprivation. Babies have died from stroke deprivation, having received insufficient physical contact and nurturing from those caring for them. They become listless and unresponsive and exhibit other symptoms of failure to thrive and then die. Due to severe depression, psychosis, intellectual impairment, physical disability, or immaturity a mother may not be able to meet a baby’s needs.
Even if the baby survives, stroke deprivation in infancy or early childhood can affect the child for the remainder of their lives. For example, a woman who received very little positive strokes from her mother in infancy or early childhood may go through life seeking positive strokes from women. She may become passive, having learned in infancy or early childhood that she received more maternal attention when she was passive than she did when she fussed or cried. Passivity in adulthood may result in her exploitation in adulthood by others. She will do anything to please them. She may have difficulty in expressing anger because when she was an infant or a small child, she was ignored or punished when she expressed anger. Her mother may have ignored her as a punishment. When she is angry with someone, she may snub them, ignoring them as her mother ignored her. She may give expression to her angry feelings in other ways. She may be catty with other people, being deliberately hurtful in her remarks. How we were treated when we were young will often show in the way that we treat others when we are adults.
Some women, when they give birth to a child, suffer from post-partum depression. Other women may be overwhelmed by their circumstances. They may have fled a situation in which they were the victims of domestic violence. They may have other small children to care for. They may have not been prepared for an additional child. They may have a spouse who has a catastrophic illness or who is terminally ill. They are faced with caring for a family on their own.
One way we as Jesus followers can show our love for others is to support expectant and new mothers, identify their needs, and help them to meet them.
Some people give plastic, or marshmallow, strokes. They are big and fluffy, but they are fake. Whoever gives them is not sincere. They do not really mean what they are saying. “That’s a cute dress you are wearing.” (“She has such awful taste in clothes! I wonder where she found that rag!!”)
A good rule of thumb in giving compliments is “If you don’t mean it, don’t say it.” I will compliment a friend on her dress because I believe she looks great in it. Otherwise, I will look for something else to compliment her on. If I like someone, it is not too difficult to find something else. I am basically saying, “I like you and everything about you!!”
A simplistic explanation of why Christians are not attracting people to their churches and why they are loosing their young people when they grow old enough to leave is that they do not emulate Jesus’ character or follow his teaching and example and they hand lots of cold pricklies to other people. In fact, they have come to associate being a Christian with giving negative strokes.
4. We show compassion to each other. Compassion is “a feeling that arises when you are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to relieve that suffering.” Researchers have found that “when we feel compassion, our heart rate slows down, we secrete the ‘bonding hormone’ oxytocin, and regions of the brain linked to empathy, caregiving, and feelings of pleasure light up, which often results in our wanting to approach and care for other people.”
Compassion and empathy enable us to show kindness and love toward others. They can not only improve our academic performance and raise our self-esteem, but they can also enable us to live longer. Compassion fosters connections among adults and children. It strengthens bonds, reduces aggression and anxiety, and makes us happier.
5. We offer each other care, sympathy, and comfort when they are needed. We show them physical gestures of affection such as a hug with their consent. Physical touch can be reassuring but it also can be a violation of someone’s boundaries if we do not have their permission to touch them. It may cause them emotional distress. They may also misinterpret our motives for touching them.
To identify how we might be emotionally supportive to a brother or sister in Christ, we ask them opened-ended questions like “what’s been happening in your life lately?
6. We work at empathizing with each other. We do our best to put ourselves in each other’s shoes. We do our best to feel what each other is feeling. We do our best to see things from each other’s perspective.
7. We actively listen to what each other is saying. We give them our full attention. We do not look at our cell phone, act disinterested, or fidget. We do not turn our body away from them, cross our arms, or cross our legs but use non-verbal cues to convey that we are listening and interested in what they are saying.
We may take the Adult listening position, feet resting flat on the floor or ground, legs uncrossed and apart, hands at our side if standing, palms down on our knees if sitting. We maintain eye contact. We do not look down or away. I have used the Adult listening position when talking with agitated, angry, or anxious clients. It can have a calming effect on them.
When we allow someone’s agitation, anger, or anxiety to affect us, we may exacerbate their agitation, anger, or anxiety. On the other hand, our own calmness may help them to reduce the intensity of their feelings and may defuse a potentially violent situation.
When someone speaks to us, we reflect back what they said, “I heard you say….” We make sure that we understand what they are saying. If we do not understand what they said, we ask for clarification. We try not read into what they are saying something other than what they are saying. We summarize what they said to show that we grasp what they are saying.
We offer them validation. “It sounds like you are going through a difficult time.” We do not make judgments.
We keep our opinions on what they should have done or where they went wrong to ourselves. We avoid asking questions which they might interpret as blaming them or judging them. “How did you make her mad at you?”
We watch our tone of voice. We do not allow disapproval or disgust to creep into our voice. We focus on feelings like compassion and sympathy when we speak.
8. We can emotionally support each other with our presence. The presence of someone whom we know loves and cares for us can be very reassuring. Their presence can help us in times of doubt or fear.
I do not believe I would be wrong in saying this is one of the reasons Jesus and the apostles stress the importance of reconciliation. If we are estranged from each other, our presence will not provide the emotional support that it should. If something comes between us and a brother or sister in Christ, we should do all that we can to put things right with each other. We should let go of any anger or resentment that we may feel toward them.
9. We are emotionally available to each other. I grew up in a church tradition in which members of its churches were frequently described as cold, distant, and reserved, not only to outsiders but to each other. To be emotionally supportive to each other, we need to be emotionally available to each other. This more difficult for some people than it is for others.
We may not be comfortable with meeting other people’s emotional needs. It may be a new or unfamiliar experience for us.
We may have come to question our ability to meet the emotional needs of others. Early in life we have been around a parent who was emotionally demanding. Their unreasonable expectations and our inability to meet these expectations may have led us to doubt our ability to meet anyone’s emotional needs.
We may be emotionally needy ourselves, having emotional needs that went unmet in the past—a need for love, caring, acceptance, and affection.
We may be afraid of our own feelings or other people’s feelings. We may fear where our emotions may lead us. We may fear that someone else’s feelings may overwhelm us, drowning our self-identity, and swallowing up our independence.
We may be accustomed to keeping an emotional distance between ourselves and other people. We may have difficulty in forming emotional attachments due to our past experiences.
We may have less flexible emotional boundaries than do other people.
These are just a few of the reasons we may shy away from being more open with our own feelings and more receptive toward other people’s feelings.
Being emotionally available to each other can enhance the quality of our relationships with each other and our level of emotional support for each other.
Human beings are not entirely unemotional. We may learn to hide or repress unwanted or unwelcome feelings which other people in our environment discourage us from showing for a variety of reasons. They may not actively show disapproval of these feelings. They may simply not respond to them. A depressed parent may not react to a child’s displays of affection toward them or show much affection themselves toward the child. Children will often exhibit affection toward a parent in hopes that they will return the affection. The child, in turn, may learn not to show affection or may have difficulty in exhibiting affection. On the other hand, they may become indiscriminate in showing affection.
Some families, while their members may feel affection for each other, are not physically demonstrative in showing their affection. I grew up in such a family. They show their affection in other ways. My grandfather showed his affection for my grandmother by growing her favorite roses. I am apt to show my affection for someone by surprising them with gifts of things that I believe they might like or which they can use to obtain things that they like.
Different families have different ways of showing affection. A friend of mine in college was very physically demonstrative in showing affection for friends. She came from a family where being physical demonstrative was the normal way of showing affection. On the other hand, my grandmother and my mother would show their affection by fixing foods whole family liked to eat. I showed my affection for my mother and my nieces by taking them to their favorite restaurants and on outings to places they wanted to go—the zoo, the aquarium, the botanical gardens, the mall, and the like. Every family has its own ways of showing love. When we take a friend to their favorite pizza restaurant and buy them their favorite pizza and beverage and then take them to a movie they want to see, we are not only doing fun activities with them, but we are also heaping them with warm fuzzies. We are showing our fondness or liking for them too.
10. We need to recognize and avoid saying or doing things that others will perceive or experience as rejection of them. If our aim to give each other emotional support, to care for each other’s emotional mental wellbeing, we will not want to say or do things which do not do that, things that do the opposite.
We all are sensitive to rejection, or lack of acceptance. We sense how others are reacting to us before we consciously become aware of what they are doing. Rejection actives the same part of the brain where we feel physical pain. All rejection hurts—literally. The pain from being rejected is not much different from the pain of being physically injured.
We can misread a situation and believe that someone is deliberately rejecting us or showing unfriendliness toward us when they may not be. This can cause feelings of deep anxiety and dread. In the different ways we react to what we perceive as rejection, we can actually trigger the rejection that we fear. Believing we are being rejected can lead to rejection.
This can occur easily when we are communicating by text and email. We do not have the cues such as facial expression, body language and tone of voice which help us in interpreting what is going on when we talk to someone in person or even by video chat or on the phone. Consequently, we may use our imaginations to interpret what is happening, which may lead us to believe the worst. Anxiety arising from the thought that we may confirm what we fear may prevent us from using these other means of communication or circumstance may not permit their use.
Rejection can affect us emotionally, cognitively, and even physically. We have a fundamental need to belong, to have relationships that are positive and which are lasting. Rejection increases our feelings of anger, anxiety, depression, jealousy and sadness. It can decrease our ability to perform difficult intellectual tasks. It can result in aggressive and impulsive behavior. Rejection can affect our sleeping pattern and weaken our immune systems.
One study found that the participants’ brains were more active in areas associated with motivation, reward, craving, addiction, physical pain, and distress when they looked at the photo of a romantic partner who had rejected them than when they looked at the photo of a neutral person. All the participants reported that they were still in love with this partner. The researchers concluded that the participants had become addicted to the romantic partner who rejected them.
A second conclusion can be drawn from this study. The romantic partner who rejected them was a source of motivation and reward for the participants. In non-romantic but significant relationships this suggests that those with whom we involved in some kind of relationship such as friendship can also be a source of motivation and reward for us. We can become addicted to something or someone because they affect us positively. We ourselves can stimulate the production of chemicals in the brains of others, which affect them positively.
I have noticed a shift in my mood and an increase in my productivity when a friend gives me attention. This has further convinced me that God does put specific people in our lives not only for our good but for their good too.
When someone rejects us, our self-esteem is damaged. We may react by damaging it even further. We become intensely critical of ourselves. We engage in all kinds of negative self-talk, which elicits feelings of disgust with ourselves. We beat ourselves up!
Imagine the hell through which someone who perceives themselves as being rejected put themselves and the emotional, cognitive, and physical toll it takes on them. They may experience anxiety, depression, bouts of sadness, mental anguish, and worse.
Researchers have found that being rejected by someone who chooses someone else over us hurts worse than someone who rejects us hands-down. We feel far more hurt when we are rejected in favor of someone else. We may go to a party with someone only to have them ignore us throughout the evening and leave the party with someone else. We may discover our friend who has recently dumped us has a new friend. They dumped us for the new friend. Such rejections damage our sense of belonging as well as leave us feeling unaccepted and unwanted.
When we are rejected, we often do not have any idea of why were rejected. When this happens, we experience the rejection far worser than we would if we knew the exact reason for our rejection. Researchers found that not knowing why we were rejected can be just as bad as knowing someone else was chosen over us. It may inspire the same feelings as knowing we were rejected for someone else. This can cause us to look for reasons why we were rejected, further making us to feel bad about ourselves.
11. We support the ministries in which each other is involved. We offer our help if they needed it. If they are raising funds for a ministry or community service project, we make generous contributions. If we are involved in a joint ministry project, we give them full recognition for their contribution to the project. We do not take all the credit for ourselves. If they made the larger contribution, we draw attention to that and downplay our own role.
This list of ways that we can emotionally support our brothers and sisters in Christ, how we can care for each other’s emotional and mental well-being is not exhaustive. You may think of other ways.
