Emotional Healthy Spirituality
You are going to love this guest if you've never heard of him. He wrote an incredible book called Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. You need to go get it right now because it has shaped my life. It's shaped a lot of people. Pete Scazzero is from New York, and he is a pastor there but also leads this incredible ministry called Emotionally Healthy Discipleship.
First I asked Pete to tell us a little bit about how that ministry came to be.
“It came in through a pain, which is probably how lots of truth comes to us. I mean, I was a Christian for 17 years, was pastoring a church here in Queens, New York city, had been through the best seminaries, best leadership conferences, and basically, it wasn't working well. I mean, on a number of levels. It was very obvious that the discipleship we were doing was shallow. People weren't changing very deeply. And then I was exhausted and tired, was not enjoying Jesus. I was working for Jesus but not enjoying Him. And then one of our congregations had a split, and I found myself very angry and furious. And again, I didn’t have any theology for emotions, what to do with my anger and rage and depression.
And then my marriage wasn't going well. And so here I was, I'm preaching the Bible, I'm teaching scripture, we're doing all night prayer meetings and went to the Holy Spirit's power. We're doing it all, but something's missing.
And so it got me on this journey of - something's really missing an evangelical discipleship. It got me going on a journey to look inside. Like maybe I got some problems, which is very obvious. I was kind of beginning to look at some things in my life, my family of origin. And then in that journey, like two years into it, January 2nd, 1996, my wife comes to me and says, ‘Pete, I'm quitting the church that you're leading. I'm going to another church.’
And I was like, ‘what?’
And she goes, ‘Your leadership basically stinks. You don't have the courage to confront the people that need to be confronted. And I just don't want to participate in this any longer’. And she said, ‘I'm just going to go to another church on Sundays with the kids. If you want to take the kids to church on Sunday, you can, but I'm going to go to this other church’. And so we were in full crisis at that point, and it was in that crucible of pain. We went away to a place for therapists, Christian therapists and us. And I was just like, ‘Fix my wife, straighten her out, get her back in the front row at church’. And you know, Geri would have none of that.
But anyway, in that week we went away, God met us. And that's when I realized I was an emotional infant leading a church. And that my discipleship had never addressed large portions of my inner life. And I was embarrassed. I was in shock. And that started the whole journey of how emotional health and spiritual maturity can't be separated and that it's not possible to be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. And I started with myself, and then our marriage. And that's how it all started. That's how I got into it. I call it a second conversion. It was like we were, we were born-again again, and we never turned back. I mean, once you cross into that realm, you can never go back to, I'll just call it, ‘traditional American shallow discipleship’. You just can't go back to it anymore because you've tasted something so rich and good.
So we've been doing research and development, working on this now for the last 24+ years. And it's been the best years of my life. As a person, as a husband, as a father, as a Christian, as a human being, it's just been amazing.”
Next, I talked with Pete about a biblical way to view emotions because God talks a lot about them. And also about some of the ways that we might be handling them unhealthily.
“So what's interesting is even 25 years ago, people were talking about the problem and mentioning emotions, but nobody was getting quite at how do you actually transform people? You know, how do we do real formation in people so it's actually changed? That, to me, was the big question.
What does that look like? On a very simple level, I will say that you can't separate emotional and spiritual maturity. They go together. So for example, when we think about how we're made in the image of God, there's different aspects of being a human being. We're intellectual beings, we're physical beings, we're social beings, we're spiritual beings, we're emotional beings because we're made in God's image. So when we do discipleship, we’ve got to touch all of that. Like the whole person. And so if a person is unapproachable, proud, defensive, angry, judgmental - it doesn't matter how much Bible you know or how much you pray or how active you are in church. You are a spiritual infant because you're not a loving, safe, approachable person. And Paul said that that's the criteria of maturity.
1 Corinthians 13, if you don't have love, it doesn't matter if you've got this huge ministry, it doesn't matter what people think of you and how you look on the outside. You're immature. You may not even be a Christian at all. And I think that was the stunning thing about it because I was just so focused on knowing scripture, building the church, leading people to Christ, but it wasn't about your love or humility or brokenness and vulnerability.
So the journey I went on, I'm a pastor, I'm not a therapist and I'm not a spiritual director. I'm a pastor. And so I want to bring this in discipleship. This is about following Jesus because if you're unloving, and my own wife didn't feel loved by me. I mean, here I was preaching about the love of God, but the person I made a vow to for the rest of my life to love was my wife, and she didn't feel it. I loved her, but she didn't feel it. So what am I doing leading a church when my first neighbor, I'm too busy to actually love her? I never got discipled in loving people. It was just kind of assumed that'll work out. Just follow Jesus. But no, it doesn't just work out.
So, as we got into this, it was like, okay, what are some aspects of discipling, the key to growing as an emotionally mature person? First of all, you need to learn to feel. Much like David in the Psalms. He pours out himself before God with abandonment. I was told that feelings are desperately wicked. Who can trust them? Feelings were bad, especially anger, sadness, fear. Those were considered sinful or at least bad. No, no, all emotions are just emotions. They may be more difficult emotions. So first it's just learning to feel, allowing yourself to feel before God.
That's, that's gigantic. And it's not that we follow our feelings, we follow Jesus, but what makes us a human being is we feel. When you're dead, you don't feel anymore. What's sad is that we've got all these folks in our churches where we're half human because we don't allow ourselves to feel sadness or anger or fear. We don't acknowledge it. Let's just take sadness. We have a book in the Bible called Lamentations. A whole book. Two-thirds of the Psalms are laments of sadness. You've got Jesus, man of sorrows. You've got Jeremiah, weeping prophet. And yet I didn't do sadness. ‘Everything's good. Let's go on. All things work together for good to those who love God.’ It's a bad theology. Feeling your feelings is even having a theology that it's okay, and I do it before God.”
This story is my husband’s story. This was probably one of the most difficult parts of our marriage in the first several years. He needed a theology of emotions. He needed to understand that it was okay to feel things. And I don't know that that's common with women, but I absolutely think it's common with men. Next, Pete and I talked about the role healthy emotions can play in a marriage.
“Absolutely. I think I needed permission. So how could I love my wife when I didn't do feelings? I prided myself on being this stable, solid guy. But how could I get close to Geri and be intimate with her and let her know me when I didn't even know myself? If I'm not feeling, I'm half alive. So it just took our marriage to a whole other place. But then it was a second thing we got into, which was how our family of origin impacted who we are today. And we began to do things called genograms and help people look at how their past history, the sinful parts of their past history in particular, impacted their present.
So for example, I had abuse in my background physically, emotionally - quite severe. And so I had just shut down emotionally as a kid. I was just trying to survive beatings. So those muscles were so weak, but I had to go back. And we would say this, ‘you have to go back to go forward’. You've got to look at your family of origin. And so we began to create tools to help people look at their past and how it's impacted their present because we're in the new family of Jesus. And so discipleship is learning to live and do life in the new family of Jesus.
So let's say, for example, you don't do sadness. Maybe that you suppress it or deny it or medicate yourself or go shopping or get high or whatever. Anytime you have Jesus, we don't do that. There's a biblical process. We feel it before the Lord, like David. We wait on the Lord with it, and we let Him birth something new. How'd your family of origin do success? Well, success is making a lot of money or becoming a professional or getting married and having children. But what is success in the new family of Jesus? Well, success in the new family of Jesus is becoming the person God called you to become and doing what God called you to do, period.
So everything now is, ‘I'm leaving the sinful parts of my family of origin and culture, and I'm learning to do life in the new family of Jesus’. That I relates to everything, from how I do marriage, how I do affection, how I do sex, how I do anger, how I do conflict. I mean, very few of us learn to do conflict well in our families growing up. We either ran away from it or we kind of take the blame and become doormats or maybe we yell and scream or hit. But in the new family of Jesus, we don't do dirty fighting. We call that dirty fighting. We teach clean fighting. How do you have a clean fight? How do you negotiate differences? But these became discipleship issues. They are as important as learning the gospel. Learning to be a loving person is, for Jesus, inseparable from loving God. And I somehow got those separate.”
We then discussed how we can love people better around us as they're processing and handling their emotions. Because a lot of people are leaning in and doing the work, but maybe their spouses or their girlfriends or their parents aren't. What does that look like to help other people process their emotions?
“You can only change yourself, right? I don't know if you know the great Hasidic tale, and I can't quote it exactly, but this Hasidic rabbi said, ‘I first set out to change the world, that didn’t work. And then I tried to change my country, that didn't work. And I tried to change my state, my town, and even my family. But none of that worked. And then I realized, I better just change myself. And if I started with myself, maybe I could have changed my family and the town and the country in the world’.
And I think there's a very important truth that you can't change your spouse or it's really not about your spouse or your family first or your church first or everyone around you. It's really first about you. Because if you change, it will change the system around you. So it's more than just feeling your feelings. That's an important first step. I would include a number of other things that are really critical in your own journey to mature emotionally. That would include things like to develop skills on how to actually love people. And we spent decades working on it. It actually started in a therapist office. My wife and I were married at that time seven or eight years, and like you, we'd had a very hard for seven or eight years because we were just doing our family of origin, right? We didn't know how to be married. We didn't know how to speak clearly and respectfully and honestly or how to listen or how to do conflict. We were very unaware.
I'll never forget, this therapist had us listen to each other and it was the first time we in eight years of marriage that we actually listened to each other. And we connected. We actually kind of fell in love all over again. And so it got us on this journey of developing some skills like - how do I speak clearly, respectfully, honestly and in a timely fashion? How do I listen like Jesus and see the beauty of people and actually enter their world? How do I go back to my family of origin and look at how it's impacting me right now?
I have four daughters who are in their twenties, two are married in their early thirties. And I'm learning to be a father of adult children who have their own families. So I'm not their parent in the way I was when they were 13. We're equals, in a sense. We’re peers and someday, they'll be taking care of me when I get older. And so there are all these discipleship issues, but we do it the way our families did it, generally. In everything, with the way we handle money or the way we do sex. And so my wife and I got on this journey developing some skills, like how do you do a genogram of your family of origin? How do you look at that stuff and how it's impacted me? How do I do conflict in a clean way with someone? How do I get at my values without blaming people? How do I not over-function and do for people what they can and should do for themselves? So these are all really important themes that people got to kind of go deeper into. It's a very difficult, it's painful. I mean, this is scary stuff for many folks because they're like, ‘Oh my gosh, if I open this door, who knows what's going to come out?’ And that was my fear. If I let myself feel and look at my interior life, it's a mess in there. And I was afraid that I would die. I may go into a hole and never come out.
But I found out that in that hole was Jesus waiting for me. My wife quitting the church was the best thing that ever happened to me. It was the most loving thing she could ever have done, and it saved my life. It saved my life and our marriage and our kids and the church and everything that has happened around the world through us. And she did it in a very loving way. She wasn't leaving me or the marriage, but she had enough self integrity to say, no, I'm not going to do this anymore and make believe and pretend everything is fine. We stopped lying, and that was big. That was big.”
Pete’s wife did some things that brought everything to the surface. Pete shared more for the wives that don’t want to be enablers but also feel helpless and don’t know how to get their husbands’ attention.
“You're never helpless. I think you need to find your integrity, and it's really not about your husband first. It's about you and how you're responding. So for Geri, she was mature enough to say to me, ‘I'm not going to do this anymore’. And she was trying to get my attention. I wasn't listening. She says, let's go to therapy. I would go to a therapist's office. We went a couple of times. For me, it was like I wasn't interested. He gave us a book to read, I gave it to her. I was your classic guy who was closed, but she had my full attention when she said, ‘I'm not going to the church anymore’. Like she finally called it out, and she wasn't going to pretend that everything was fine. I had to go to the elders and tell them. It was very embarrassing, but it was a very loving thing to do.
That's why I say her integrity saved our marriage. There were a number of things from her book, ‘The Emotionally Healthy Woman,’ that she quit:
She quit being afraid of what other people think. That was number one. She didn't want to rock the boat, but she got to a place of her integrity where she no longer was afraid of what people would think.
She quit lying and making believe something was true that wasn't true.
She quit blaming. She took responsibility for her life and said, ‘I'm not going to blame Pete for me being so unhappy. I'm going to take responsibility, and I'm going to make some changes.’
She quit overfunctioning. She quit doing for me what I could and should do for myself.
She quit living somebody else’s life. We had to learn to do power in our marriage that there was actually room for two people.
She quit faulty thinking.
I learned from Geri how to quit living somebody else's life, how to be not be afraid of what other people think, how to stop blaming. And I think some of you ladies are going to be further ahead than your husbands. And that's okay. You can't push them, but you can say you’re not going to participate in something that's just not helpful.
And so, yeah ladies, you need to lead the way. You're a human being made in the image of God, and God's given you insight and revelation, and you need to follow it in a loving, humble, broken way. Not a triggered way or defensive or blaming or angry way. Your anger, you’ve got to work through that yourself. That's your inner work to do before you go and launch out. And Geri did a lot of work before she said, ‘I quit’.”
At this point, you might be asking yourself, “am I emotionally healthy?” To close, I wanted Pete to share a few marks of what emotional health would look like.
“There's an assessment we created a number of years ago. It's: “Am I an Emotional Infant, Child, Adolescent, or Adult?” Just go to our website, emotionallyhealthy.org/mature and just take it for free. And I think that will be a great start.
So here's some questions that are asked:
I am willing to explore previously unknown or unacceptable parts of myself allowing Christ to transform me.
I'm able to experience anger in a way that leads to growth in others and myself.
I resolve conflict in a clear, direct, and respectful way, not what I might've learned growing up in my family.
I'm able to speak freely about my weaknesses, failures, and mistakes.
Others would easily describe me as approachable, gentle, open, and transparent.
I've never been accused of trying to do it all or biting off more than I could chew.
I openly admit my losses and disappointments.
I regularly enter into other people's world and feelings.
I spend sufficient time alone with God to sustain my work for God.
People close to me would describe me as a responsive listener.
It's a scale of 1-4.
We have some categories.
Look Beneath the Surface
Break the Power of the Past
Living in Brokenness and Vulnerability
Receiving the Gift of Limits
Embracing Grief and Loss
Loving Well - Seeing and Hearing People as Made in God's Image
Slowing Down to Live with Integrity
So those would be our primary qualities to unpack. It's a lot. It's a life work. I mean, I'm always in it and growing because again, you can't separate emotional maturity and spiritual maturity. The Bible holds them together. If you look at Jesus and his conflict with the Pharisees and Sadducees, it was always about how they weren't merciful, kind, loving people. They knew the Bible and they prayed and tithed, but they were arrogant, cold and judgmental. And Jesus just said, ‘you can't separate loving God and loving people’. And they had a very hard time with that. I think we're in a similar situation today. We've got lots of religious folks, and I was one of them, but we segment, we compartmentalize spirituality and loving people and being approachable and soft. And again, Paul says, if you don't have love, you've got nothing.”
