When we are angry, frustrated, sorrowful, happy, or filled with remorse, where do our feelings come from? Sometimes the emotions we experience seem totally authentic to the situation. Often, whether we are feeling joy or remorse, we experience those emotions in very unselfconscious ways. We are, in those times, being ourselves, feeling emotions in the situation that the honest in heart feel. However, there are other emotions that, when we are beset by them, seem to have a life and a direction of their own. The very having of some emotions is accompanied by feelings of helplessness in having them. Considering how different these emotions seem to be, are we talking about two distinct types, and not just degrees, of feelings?

        The scriptures describe people who experience different qualities of emotion. When people approach life with a hard heart, they are generally suspicious or defensive. When their view of life is more soft or broken-hearted, their emotions are characterized more by compassion, sorrow, or interest in the welfare of others. They feel to do good continually. In the moments of their broken-heartedness, they do not hold hostile feelings. When people feel hostile, their emotions seem to be beyond their control.

        Hostile resentments are also more associated with hard-heartedness. Thus we can describe two distinct qualities of emotions. One set is characterized by personal frustrations and feelings of helplessness; the other set by deep concern for others. When people are emotionally miserable, it doesn't matter how the emotion is expressed, in words or in other ways. The quality of the emotion is of concern.

        People with anger, hate, and resentment are miserable. The very emotions that contribute to their suffering seem inescapable to them. Their hostilities seem justified in the face of what has been done to them by others or by the world or by their circumstances. To them, their hates are always defensible in light of what has been done to them by hateful people.

        If their view of their being helpless victims of such feelings is correct, then there is little you or I or they can do to ease their suffering. Perhaps counseling them to wait until the feelings pass or helping them channel their feelings into activities that will not harm themselves or others is the best we can do.

        But the gospel of Jesus Christ does not propose that the solution to emotional problems is simply to grit our teeth and wait. Evidently, we can actually tee free of negative emotions. But this requires living, and not just learning, gospel principles: "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." (Galatians 5:22-23.) Whether or not we are dealt with justly by others or face pressures and demands, the gospel can be our salvation if we will but turn to it.

        The gospel suggests that the kind of emotional suffering experienced by those full of hate and hostility can be given up, and not just coped with. How is such emotional peace possible?

        When we turn our hearts to the Savior and begin to see one another with his eyes, the very quality of the emotions we experience changes. These feelings are fundamentally different from what we experience when we turn our back on the Savior's invitation. I am not talking here about living perfectly, but of living in a way that helps free us from irritability, impatience, anger, and resentment.

        Consider a typical circumstance. A Relief Society teacher has been hurt by the responses of sisters to her lesson. She goes to a leader and tearfully asks to be released, explaining that she is inadequate, that she does not have what it takes, that she has never liked being a teacher anyway; and besides, the people she is trying to teach are being critical of her.

        In explaining the challenges and difficulties that this teaching assignment has meant, including teeing humiliated by her own friends, she breaks down in tears and discloses that from time to time she will sob like this, especially after giving a lesson. Then later she realizes that she doesn't know whether she has done any good, whether she has touched any lives or not.

        She also reports that when preparing her lessons, she feels an uncontrollable fear that she will fail. The fear is so strong that she cannot even concentrate on her preparation.

        So, not only is her lesson preparation marked by fear, but after the lesson is over she is overwhelmed by feelings of low self-esteem and despair. In fact, only when she is actually delivering the lesson is she free from such feelings. In describing her delivery of the lessons the woman says, "I find that I am so concerned about explaining the ideas, and that I see from my own experience the meaning of the gospel in that lesson, that neither fear nor despair engulf me. But after the lesson is over, and even though some sisters are kind and polite with their compliments, the nagging fears and depression return."

        The emotions she feels in her church calling seem detrimental to her well-being. And it seems as if the church calling, or at least the audience she teaches, is responsible for both her fear and despair. Some would suggest it is the sisters' criticism that "causes" her feelings, or that the woman herself, in her insecurity, is the cause. Some might even speculate that, had she not been thrust before her peers as a teacher in the first place, she would not have had to undergo the demeaning comments she later heard in the halls. None of these explanations acknowledge the Savior's promise of comfort.

        Consider a more extreme example. A young bishop was reporting to his stake president a visit he had with a woman who had attempted suicide. He had listened to her explain how difficult it was for her to manage in her marriage. Even little things like her requests to have family prayer were met by her husband with refusals or ridicule. Finally the only way she saw to escape her difficult circumstances was to take her own life.

        The stake president said to the bishop, "What we have here is a refusal to love. " The bishop, thinking that his leader was referring to the husband, said, "Yes, President, but as I talk with the husband about that, he seems so resentful and defensive." The president responded, "That he is resentful and defensive may be true, but when I spoke of a refusal to love, I wasn't talking about the husband. I was talking about the wife." The bishop was stunned. "What?" he said. "You criticize a woman who is so driven that she tried to take her own life? You make it sound as if she were responsible for her problem." The president responded, "I am saying that her refusal to love has produced her problem. By insisting that her husband has made her life not worth living, she has run away from gospel truths that would help her. We need to help her understand and live by those principles. If we are to help her, we must focus on her attitudes, on her discouragements. If we can help the husband see his unrighteousness, fine. But the immediate challenge is to help this woman see that the gospel is her rod and her salvation. Until she sees that gospel principles are more powerful than her husband's unrighteousness, she will feel trapped."

        Consider the following questions. If perfect love casts out fear, how can trying to take one's life be considered in any way an expression of love? How does this woman's act represent a positive example of commitment to her husband? Does it represent her forgiveness for his hostile attitude? Does it in any way invite him to turn his heart to God? Has she, through this act, demonstrated the truth of the gospel she claims to believe? Is she demonstrating by her behavior that her yoke is easy and her burden is light?

        Such an act is a deep accusation against another human being. And in a certain sense her behavior will be used by her husband to justify his own rejection of her and the gospel. He could say, for example, "Skim is the Christian, she is the one that always wants me to have prayer. A lot of good prayer does her if she is so crazy that she tries to commit suicide. What do you do with a woman like that?"

        Now, the man is as wrong in his assessment of his wife as she is in her assessment of him, but this is a perverse collaboration. Both, by refusing to abide by the compassionate light that they could have, instead show how the other is to blame for their difficulties.

        It is true that this woman's husband is guilty of wrongs against her. But her response to those wrongs is not innocent. To insist that she cannot go on or that life is not worth living, simply because of the sins against her by someone else, is a denial of the very gospel principles she claims to believe. It may also represent an abandonment of her own moral responsibility, her personal capability. Her attempted suicide and her attitude are powerful ways of placing responsibility on her husband for her inability to meet life. They represent an insistence that her yoke is not easy, that her burden is more than she can bear. (This analysis does not mean that her discouragement is not real, only that it is unnecessary.)

        Her view of emotions presupposes that people are acted upon by emotions in a way they cannot help. Seen this way, emotions are simply beyond us; they have a life independent of our will. How is this view to be reconciled with what the scriptures teach about human beings being free, through the atonement, to act for themselves and not to be acted upon? (2 Nephi 2:26-27.)

        In Mosiah chapter 3, we learn of people who had hardened their hearts and who were therefore blind to the truth. A hard heart is the result of rejecting the light of the gospel. Emotions such as hostility, resentment, anger, and often even depression can be generated by hardness of heart. It is our own resistance to light that produces such emotions. We cannot blame other people for our refusal to live by the light, yet that is what hard-hearted people do. They shift responsibility for their feelings onto someone or something else, and they feel both helpless and justified in having such feelings.

        It is our task as counselors to invite them to become softhearted. We can understand their feelings without accepting those feelings as uncontrollable or inevitable. We can teach them that to be free of their misery requires neither that they control their feelings nor that they express them, but rather that they give them up. The soft-hearted person gives up his insistence that his emotions are externally controlled. Such feelings are given up when the principles of repentance and forgiveness and compassion (love unfeigned) are present in their hearts. When they are willing, in their hearts as well as in their deeds, to do good to those that despitefully use them, they not only will experience the peace the Savior promises regarding yokes and burdens, but they will see what they can do to help solve their problem. Instead of being angry or "sensitive" or hostile or depressed, they will be taking responsibility to do whatever they believe will help.

        Giving up a hard heart is no guarantee that other people will change. That is, this discouraged woman, were she to do good to her husband (who she claims has despitefully used her), has no guarantee that he will change his behavior. But by striving for Christlike living, by adopting softhearted attitudes, she will issue the most powerful invitation imaginable for him to change. Moreover, she will be free of the kinds of feelings that are associated with suicide attempts.

        You can help a couple understand that the world of helpless emotion in which they seem trapped is usually created by their own behavior. Once they establish a negative cycle of behavior, each uses the insensitivities, the wrongs, and the self-righteousness of the other to justify his own resistance or irritability or discouragement. But, in justifying such attitudes, each must insist that his own behavior and attitudes are due to having been a helpless victim of the other. Such insistences are a way of proving they are each being acted upon. Even your reminder to either one of them that they could feel differently might be met with incredulity. They really think they are victims. Until they abandon their self-justifying attitudes, they will not think it possible to feel differently than they do.

        When we put off the natural man, we yield to the Spirit, and those feelings that are expressions of our resistance to light and truth disappear. We have "no more disposition to do evil." (Mosiah 5:2.) Whatever our emotions, they are of a different quality than the counterfeit ones we had while in the condition of "natural man." Those feelings do not now need to be constantly controlled or appropriately channeled and expressed. They have been given up, they have been abandoned. They are not a part of the experience of someone who is, in that moment, living correct principles.

        The question of how to help people with these principles is not so much a question of whether the principles work, but whether people are willing to work. Your example and genuineness with God is your most enticing invitation to emotionally troubled people. But their emotional peace is actually in their hands, not yours. If they reject the gospel promises, you will be limited to helping them just cope with symptoms instead of finding real-life solutions.

        Your task with the emotionally troubled is not just to love them. It is not just to understand their feelings. It is to teach them the Savior's invitation to give up those emotions associated with "natural man." You may communicate this invitation more powerfully by actions than by words, for "if ye know these things, happy are ye [and they] if ye do them." (John 13:17.) Anything you do to show the possibility that their fears can be cast out by yielding to the enticings of the Spirit is a legitimate attempt to help them find permanent psychological and emotional peace.

Suggested Readings

Chidester, C. Richard. "A change of heart: Key to harmonious relationships." Ensign, February 1984, pp. 6-11.

Kelly, Burton C. "The case against anger." Ensign, February 1980, pp. 9-12.

Olson, Terrance D. "The compassionate marriage partner." Ensign, August 1982, pp. 14-17.

About the Author

Dr. Terrance D. Olson, professor of family sciences at Brigham Young University, received his bachelor's degree from BYU and his Ph.D. from Florida State University. As a family life educator he has produced materials designed to strengthen families and to promote self-reliance. He has been project director of a multistate project that teaches moral meaning in the public schools.

He has served as a bishop, as bishop's counselor, in district and stake presidencies, and on Church writing committees.

He and his wife, Karen, are rearing six children.