Would you rather fix than feel? Is your life too hectic to spend time feeling? Do you eat your emotions with a bowl of ice cream? Or do your emotions run away with you and drag you off into a ditch? Whatever relationship you have with your emotions, you need this book!

In Untangle Your Emotions, Jennie Allen makes a complex topic accessible, understandable and full of hope. She shares that this book came out of the work she did in Get Out of Your Head. In that earlier manuscript, Allen provided practical tools to short-circuit negative thought loops. We don’t have to be victims of run-away, toxic thoughts. We can CHOOSE what occupies our minds. But even as Allen was writing that book, she realized there is another tool in our God-given toolbelt – emotions.

In Untangle Your Emotions, Allen helps us see that ALL of our emotions are created by God to inform us and connect us to Him and one another. Unfortunately, most of us possess a limited emotional vocabulary.

“How are you?”

“Fine.” 

When members of my small group say they are fine, I frequently ask it if is a real ‘fine’ or a Sunday morning ‘fine.’ Nothing to see here, folks. I am fine.

Our emotions can be a foreign language. We don’t grasp what they’re telling us because we scarcely know the words. So, the first steps are notice and name our feelings. But then she encourages us to FEEL those emotions.

I confess I am a fix-it kind of person. I don’t want people to be sad or discouraged or suffering, so I work to fix the problem. This is my default setting.  I don’t like sitting with uncomfortable emotions, either so again I rush to resolve. I am so busy researching I don’t spend any time feeling. I am learning to feel the feelings and then choose.  Ah! Choose returns. We can choose to do this all with God. We can choose the unvarnished truth about what we feel.

Allen gives us simple but thoughtful steps to sort through the tangle of emotions. This can include making sure we are physically well. That we are drinking enough water, that our thyroid isn’t out of whack, that we are getting exercise and sleep. This is a terrific list, but I also appreciated Allen’s openness about her family’s own experiences with emotional health struggles. Sometimes we need counseling or even medication to find our way through the thick ropes of emotions that can truly bind us.

Much of our society is stuck in a mire of anxiety, depression, hopelessness. According to a recent CDC report, 3 in 5 teen-age girls felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021. Teenage boys scored an even higher percentage. And it isn’t just teen-agers feeling this way. I facilitate a support group for women who are struggling with many of those same emotions.

So why do YOU need this book? Do you have emotions?

The good news is that God intended us to feel all the feels. Just as He created the array of colors we enjoy, He created a whole range of emotions to enrich our lives with texture and meaning.

So feel free to feel. But maybe read Jennie Allen’s new book at the same time.