No, You Aren’t Perfect—And That’s Okay

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In a culture that prizes productivity and performance, perfectionism can seem like a virtue. We praise people for their “high standards” and “drive to succeed.” Some of us even wear the label of “perfectionist” like a badge of honor.

But as pastoral counselor Rachael Isaac of the Pastoral Solutions Institute warns, perfectionism isn’t a superpower. It’s a trap, one that leads to stress, restlessness, and strained relationships with others…even God.

“Perfectionism can manifest in a variety of different ways and different areas of our life,” Isaac explains. “But at the bottom, it’s about feeling like we might not be good enough, and that we need to work really hard to control both how we present to the world and our environment so that things are okay.”

The Hidden Ways Perfectionism Shows Up

The word “perfectionist” might conjure up the image of someone who insists everything has to be “just so.”

But often, Isaac says, it takes other forms: manifesting as the need to do everything yourself, for instance, or filtering what you say to make sure you say things the “right” way. Even procrastination can be a form of perfectionism, she says—a stress response to the fear of doing something imperfectly.

At its core, perfectionism is about comparison and fear. We compare ourselves to others, afraid that if we don’t measure up, we’ll be judged or rejected. Sometimes, that comparison flips, and we hold others to the impossible standards we set for ourselves, fueling criticism and resentment. Regardless of how it presents, the underlying dynamic remains the same: an attempt to manage deep-seated insecurity through external control.

That’s not the way God wants us to live, Isaac says. God wants us to know, deep in our bones, that our worth comes not from what we do, but from who we are as children of God.

At the deepest level, then, overcoming perfectionism is about learning to live from a place of deep, God-given confidence—the kind that frees us to love, serve, and rest without fear.

Breaking Free from Perfectionism: Three Strategies

In her work helping people develop this God-given confidence, Isaac has come up with a suite of strategies for addressing perfectionism. Here are three you can try on your own today:

1. Exchange “What-If” Questions for “Even-If” Statements

Perfectionism fuels anxiety with endless “what if” questions: What if my house isn’t clean enough when guests arrive? What if I make a mistake during my presentation? What if my spouse doesn’t do the laundry the way I do it?

These what-if questions leave open a whole range of possible worst case scenarios, Isaac says; this uncertainty can leave us feeling like we’ve lost control. We try to resolve that uncertainty by answering the question, usually focusing on the worst-case scenario.

To break that cycle, Isaac recommends swapping “what if” questions for “even if” statements, completing those sentences with realistic, hopeful outcomes:

  • Even if my house isn’t completely clean, we’ll still have a good time together.
  • Even if I stumble during my presentation, people will still understand my message.
  • Even if my spouse ‘messes up’ the laundry, it’s still getting done
  • .—and the important thing is that we’re working together as a team.

“As soon as I make an ‘even if’ statement, I can be more solution-focused and find that peace and control—even if everything’s not perfect,” Isaac says.

2. Set Realistic Expectations

Perfectionists often set impossible expectations for themselves and others.

Isaac gives the example of someone who is anxious to get the house cleaned up before dinner guests arrive. Someone grounded in their God-given identity might pick up the main spaces and set out flowers to be hospitable to their guests.

But the person trapped in a perfectionist mindset takes that impulse to an extreme, trying to clean the whole house—and nagging everyone else to pitch in with that Herculean task.

That is not a helpful or realistic expectation, Isaac points out.

A better approach is to ask: What’s truly necessary? Adjust your expectations for yourself and others accordingly, resting in the knowledge that whatever your guests may think, your identity comes from God, not the state of your house.

3. Recognize the Good You Already Do

Perfectionism tempts us to dismiss the moments that really matter—the everyday acts of love, service, and connection that reflect our God-given strengths. To combat perfectionism, Isaac recommends taking time to reflect on those moments.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to tick off items on your to-do list when your kid starts melting down. You set aside your agenda, sitting down on the floor to hold and comfort them.

Someone trapped in a perfectionist mindset might overlook this action because it’s not “productive.”

“But recognizing how good that moment was…and that I had strengths in that moment to be present, patient, compassionate—that really shifts the mindset from performance to recognizing my God-given strengths,” Isaac says.

And when we learn to see the good in ourselves, we’re freer to see—and celebrate—the good in others, too.

The Gift of Living in Freedom

Isaac has seen this shift transform people’s lives. She shares the story of a client who struggled to ask her husband for help. Perfectionism made her feel that if she wasn’t doing everything herself, she was failing. But as she practiced communicating her needs, the dynamic in their marriage changed.

“She was able to recognize that having it all on her wasn’t what defined her worth or her success,” Isaac says. “She could really be effective—maybe even more so—when she communicated her needs and worked together with her husband.”

The journey out of perfectionism is really a journey into freedom.

“You’re moving from a place of constant pressure to a place of greater peace,” Isaac says. “It impacts your relationship with yourself, with others, and with God. You begin to realize you don’t have to earn your worth—you’re already enough.”

For more one-on-one help with perfectionism and confidence, reach out to Rachael Isaac or another pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.

Or join Rachael Isaac on Thursday July 31st at 8pm EST for a power-packed, one hour, live webinar: Empowered–Overcoming Perfectionism and Achieving Your Goals

Fixing Relationship Troubles Isn’t All On You

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Hurt feelings over wedding invitations seemed to have ended Ruth’s 30-year friendship with another woman. Meanwhile, a simple misunderstanding had blown up Patricia’s relationship with a friend from church.

Both women desperately wanted to make their relationships whole again. But when they called in to the More2Life radio show, hosts Dr. Greg Popcak and Lisa Popcak gave them some surprising advice: restoring the relationship isn’t all on you.

‘How Can I Convince Her?’

Ruth’s situation was particularly complex. For three decades, her family and her friend’s family had gathered every summer, always including the friend’s daughter who was in a same-sex relationship. Ruth’s family had made it a priority to show love and acceptance to her friend’s daughter.

But when Ruth’s son planned his wedding, tight budget constraints meant no plus-ones for anyone—not just the friend’s daughter, but close family members, too. Despite this being clearly a financial decision affecting multiple people, Ruth’s friend interpreted it as discrimination against her daughter’s lifestyle and cut off all contact.

After a year of painful silence, Ruth’s friend had finally agreed to meet, but Ruth was anxious about the upcoming conversation. “I want to know exactly how I convince her that it had nothing to do with her daughter’s lifestyle choices,” Ruth told the Popcaks. “I’ve got family members who are in the same type of situation.”

Patricia’s story was different but equally frustrating. She had told people at church that a fellow parishioner’s uncle had died—but as it turned out, he hadn’t. Despite Patricia’s attempts to apologize and clarify the honest mistake, her friend had been angry with Patricia ever since.

“I don’t know if there’s anything that I can do to remedy this situation,” Patricia wrote in an email to More2Life. “I’ve tried to talk to her, but nothing’s changed.”

The Trap of Working Too Hard

The stories of both callers illustrate a common trap that we can fall into when misunderstandings lead to broken relationships.

“We have this tendency to think that just because someone’s angry at us, we must have done something wrong, and it’s our job to make them not be angry at us,” Dr. Popcak explained.

We often assume we need to convince the other person, justify every decision, work harder to prove our good intentions, and take responsibility for managing the other person’s emotions.

But when it comes to honest misunderstandings, we don’t have to work that hard.

“God doesn’t ask us to make every relationship in our lives work just on our own,” Dr. Popcak reminded Ruth. “We want to be around people who can be healthy around us and be healthy for us.”

Even God Deals with Rejection

Even God, who is perfect love, doesn’t force people into relationship with him, Lisa Popcak pointed out. After all, the Word became flesh, lived among us, and even died for us, and people still rejected him. God allows us our free will because he wants real, authentic relationships—not forced compliance.

We’re called to follow his example: extend the invitation to relationship and let others choose to accept it or not. We can’t expect to control every relationship outcome, no matter how perfectly we behave or how clearly we explain ourselves.

Offer Relationship, Respect Freedom

The Popcaks recommended that both Ruth and Patricia simply state the facts clearly and let the other person choose their response.

For Ruth, this meant saying something straightforward: “Look, we don’t have unlimited amounts of money, so we restricted the wedding to those people that we were closest to. Nobody got to bring a plus one. It was purely a monetary decision. I care about you and want to be your friend. If you’re open to that, wonderful—we can build our friendship. If not, it saddens me, but I’ll accept your decision.”

In Patricia’s situation, the Popcaks pointed out that her fellow parishioner failed to practice the Christian obligation of charitable interpretation. When someone hurts us, our first response should be to assume good intentions and seek clarification. That doesn’t mean ignoring offenses or bad behavior; it simply means giving the other person the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t deliberately trying to cause hurt or offense.

Patricia’s friend should have come to her and asked what was up, Dr. Popcak said. When Patricia clarified that it was all a misunderstanding, her friend should have accepted that explanation.

Patricia had fulfilled her Christian obligation by acknowledging her mistake and clarifying her intentions. Her friend’s continued anger was her friend’s choice—not Patricia’s responsibility to fix.

The Freedom of Doing Your Part

Both Ruth and Patricia had already fulfilled their Christian obligations to love and seek peace. The rest was up to their friends.

Realizing that maintaining relationships isn’t our sole responsibility brings tremendous freedom—the freedom to love without condition while maintaining healthy boundaries, to seek peace without compromising truth, and to trust God with outcomes beyond our control.

For more help with relationship problems, check out Dr. Popcak’s book, God Help Me! These People Are Driving Me Nuts! Making Peace With Difficult People. And for more one-on-one guidance, reach out to one of the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.

Loving Difficult People: A Catholic Approach to Annoying Behavior

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Take a moment to make a mental list of people who drive you nuts: the roommate who is always badgering you to do this or that but who never pitches in herself; the coworker who overshares about her personal life; the adult sibling who won’t stop inserting his politics into your relationship; or the parish administrator whose negative assessment of every proposal is a roadblock to needed change.

How do you deal with such people, especially if you count yourself a follower of Jesus?

St. Augustine advised that we “love the sinner, hate the sin,” but in practice, many people either hate the sinner and the sin—or they love the sin in the name of loving the sinner.

These responses might be attractive due to their simplicity—but they don’t fulfill our calling as Christians, says Dr. Greg Popcak in his book, God Help Me! These People Are Driving Me Nuts. The problem is, many Christians don’t know how to love the sinner while hating the sin.

If we want to change the way we interact with difficult people, Popcak suggests, we have to start by understanding them. That doesn’t mean ignoring bad behavior—it means digging deeper to uncover the intention behind it.

Looking through a Loving Lens

Every annoying behavior, Popcak writes, is an attempt—however flawed—to meet a legitimate need or pursue a positive goal. In psychological terms, it’s called “secondary gain”: a hidden benefit someone receives from their actions, even if those actions are unhealthy or counterproductive.

For example, maybe your demanding roommate is driven by anxiety and needs things to feel “just right” to calm her inner world. Maybe your co-worker is an extrovert who needs to process the drama in her life out loud in order to make sense of it. Maybe your brother’s attempts to get you to validate his political views is all about shoring up his sense of security. And maybe the parish administrator had a bad experience in the past that has left her super cautious about change.

When we pause to consider these possibilities, our reactions to the annoying or offensive behavior shifts. Instead of retaliating or shutting down, we can choose curiosity, compassion, and even love.

From Conflict to Connection

That shift definitely does not mean we excuse bad behavior. Popcak is clear: loving someone doesn’t mean letting hurtful patterns go unchallenged. But when we understand that a person’s action might be a clumsy way of pursuing something good—like connection, respect, or affirmation—we open the door to genuine change.

Take the story of Ralph, a father whose harsh parenting methods drove his children away. Ralph believed he was doing the right thing by “toughening them up,” “preparing them for the real world.” His intentions were rooted in love, but his methods were flawed and painful. Only when someone took the time to understand why he acted the way he did—and showed him a better way—did Ralph begin to see how things might have been different.

“Understanding is merely the starting point for respectful change,” Popcak writes. “We cannot hope to create change in our relationships if people experience us as their adversaries. So to build the rapport needed for respectful change to happen, we must challenge our initial inclinations to lash out and instead seek understanding of the true intention behind another’s offensive behavior. It helps us meet others not as adversaries, but as people trying—and often failing—to get something good in the only way they know how.”

A Practical Exercise: Rewriting the Script

Take a moment to try this shift yourself. Thinking about someone whose behavior irritates you, walk through these three simple but powerful steps:

1. Name your reaction: How do you feel? Angry? Hurt? Dismissed? Misunderstood? This step is important—acknowledge your emotional truth before trying to move into understanding. Denying your feelings won’t help you respond more lovingly; naming them will.

 

2. Imagine the intention: Ask yourself, “If this person had a good reason for acting this way—even if it’s not obvious to me—what might it be?” This step is where empathy begins. Could they be overwhelmed? Feeling disrespected? Trying to regain control? Needing comfort or connection? Try to identify at least one possible positive intention, even if their method of expressing it is deeply flawed.

 

3. Choose a new response: Now, imagine responding from a place of compassion. What might you say or do differently if you believed that the other person’s behavior was actually a cry for help, a bid for love, or an attempt to feel safe or heard? Maybe instead of snapping back, you ask a curious question. Maybe instead of withdrawing, you offer support or set a firm but kind boundary. You don’t have to excuse the behavior, but you can approach it in a way that creates connection instead of conflict.

Try practicing this with small situations first—a curt text, an impatient tone, a forgotten task—and work your way up to more challenging scenarios. The more you practice, the more natural it becomes to respond with grace, understanding, and love.

Doing the Hard Work of Love

At the heart of the Christian life is the call to love others—even when they’re difficult, Popcak says. That doesn’t mean being a doormat. It means doing the hard work of trying to understand the hearts behind the actions.

As Popcak points out, sin isn’t always about malicious intent—it’s often just a misguided way of reaching for something good. And when we can see that, we’re more likely to respond in a way that actually helps others grow into the people God created them to be.

Understanding the intent behind offensive behavior is just the beginning of the process. For more advice on dealing with annoying or offensive behavior in a loving way, pick up a copy of God Help Me! These People Are Driving Me Nuts! Or, for more one-on-one help, reach out to a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.

A Simple Ritual to End Your Workday Well

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John, the Catholic CEO of a small musical instrument company, remembers the moment he realized he needed to develop healthier boundaries between his work and his home life. His 10-year-old daughter was telling him about her day at school, but although he was looking at her and trying to listen, his mind was still preoccupied with a stressful problem at work.

Finally, his daughter called him on it. “Dad, are you even listening?” He said he was, but then couldn’t tell her what she’d just been saying.

“It was clear something had to change,” he said.

His experience isn’t uncommon. In today’s always-on culture, it’s easy to let work bleed into home life: the stress of the office lingers at the dinner table, emails pull us away from family time, and unfinished tasks whisper in the back of our minds, ruining our sleep.

Most importantly, poor work/home boundaries can impact our relationship with the people who matter most in our lives.

If these challenges are present in your own life, you might be interested in a simple yet powerful ritual developed by pastoral counselor, Grant Freeman.

The Last Hour of the Workday: Preparing for Tomorrow

One of the best ways to set yourself up for a strong start tomorrow is by finishing well today, Freeman says. He recalls an old saying from his days as a roofer: “The last five minutes takes an hour.” In other words, rushing out the door without wrapping things up properly only makes for a frustrating start the next day.

Instead, he recommends using the last hour of your workday to:

  • Clean your workspace: Put away tools, clear your inbox, organize your desk, and file papers where they belong. A tidy workspace means a smooth start in the morning.
  • Review your calendar: Take an honest look at your schedule and adjust as needed. Acknowledge where you are instead of where you wish you were.
  • Plan your first tasks for tomorrow: Identify the top priorities for the next morning. What emails need to be sent? What phone calls should be made? Writing these down now clears your mind for the evening ahead.
  • Count the wins: Even on difficult days, find something to celebrate. Did you complete a tough task? Help a coworker? Simply making it to the end of a hard day is a victory.

Ending the day in this calm, ordered way not only sets you up for a great start tomorrow, but will help you be a more peaceful presence with your family.

The Transition Home: Reclaiming Your Role

Once the workday is closed, it’s time to shift into a different mindset—one of presence, love, and service to your family. Freeman suggests several ways to make this transition intentional:

  • Change your clothes: Physically changing out of your work attire and into comfortable home clothes is a simple but effective way to signal a shift in roles.
  • Wash your hands and face: This small act can serve as a moment to pause, reset, and leave behind the stress of the day.
  • Say a short prayer: Taking a moment to center yourself spiritually can help you step into your home life with a heart ready to serve.

Your prayer can be from the heart; it doesn’t need to be complicated. However, Freeman suggests praying as you change your clothes and wash your face, using words similar to the following:

  1. As you wash your hands and face, pray: “Give strength and gentleness to my hands, Lord, to bear the responsibility of my family and bring Your loving touch to them. May I look upon them with love, so that they may see Your face.”
  2. As you change your shirt, pray: “Lord, shield my heart to fend off all the assaults of the devil. O Lord, You have said, ‘My yoke is sweet and My burden light.’ Grant that I may carry it in a way that gives You glory and brings the best out of my family.”
  3. As you change your pants and put on your shoes, pray: “Lord, let me remember that I stand created in Your image and likeness, in true righteousness and holiness. May I walk in spirit and in truth.”

By taking a few moments to close the workday with intention and prepare for family life with presence, you can bring greater peace, joy, and love into your home. Your work is important, but ultimately, it is for the good of those you love. This simple ritual helps you show up fully for them—ready to listen, engage, and lead with love.

If you’d like to explore this or other areas of stress in your life, reach out to Grant Freeman or any of the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.

Don’t Reject Your Anxiety; Nurture a Better Relationship With It Instead

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You think you want to get rid of your anxiety—after all, it takes over your brain and floods your body with stress hormones that don’t do much but make you miserable.

But do you really want to get rid of it? When push comes to shove, the idea of getting rid of your anxiety might just…well, make you anxious.

Jacob Flores-Popcak, a pastoral counselor with CatholicCounselors.com, often runs into this problem with new clients.

“Despite the fact that they are ostensibly coming to me for help decreasing their anxiety, they’ll often be very, very resistant to switching anything up,” Flores-Popcak said in a recent interview. The reason they often give? They can’t imagine how they could get along without their anxiety to keep them going.

“And so there becomes this horrible Catch-22 that people live with where they would really, really like to not be anxious anymore,” Flores-Popcak continued. “But when it comes right down to it, they don’t know how they’d get anything done, how they’d be in relationship with anybody, or how they’d keep themselves safe without anxiety to motivate them.”

When clients run into this roadblock, Flores-Popcak often invites them to reframe their thinking with a little help from the 2001 children’s movie Shrek.

Anxiety, the Overworked Sidekick

In the movie, an ogre named Shrek sets out on a quest, begrudgingly accompanied by an annoyingly talkative, overly helpful Donkey.

Anxiety, Jacob says, is like Donkey—or any number of other over-eager sidekicks from popular animated movies: “These sidekicks are always depicted as being very loving; they want what is best for the hero,” Flores-Popcak said. “But often, the ways that they attempt to help are kind of destructive. They mean well, but they are fallible and can get messy.”

On one hand, people suffering from constant anxiety may loathe this sidekick (much like Shrek trying to shake off Donkey in the early part of the movie). On the other hand, they rely on it for so much—getting out of bed in the morning, getting kids ready for school, managing household finances—that it can be difficult to imagine another mode for getting those things done. In this way, they can end up responding to their anxiety the way Shrek does later in the film, doing whatever Donkey tells him without questioning and suffering hijinks as a result.

“We often swing back and forth between treating anxiety as an antagonist in our story and then, on the other hand, doing whatever it tells us,” Flores-Popcak said. “But that attitude is really unfair to anxiety, poor little sidekick that he is, because guess what? He’s not a bad guy. He’s actually just like any of these other parts of me—another sidekick that’s trying to help me out. He has a job within me. For instance, if a bear is chasing me, anxiety can be a very helpful and effective survival mechanism. So anxiety certainly has its due place. But he can get overburdened.”

To put it in the language of faith, God gave us anxiety and all the physiological responses that come with it to help us out in certain situations. But habitually deploying anxiety to handle even the ordinary tasks of everyday life isn’t healthy, Flores-Popcak said.

The solution isn’t to fear and loathe our anxiety, he said, because when we do that, we’re really rejecting an essential, God-given part of ourselves. Rather, the better approach is to begin “re-assigning” the jobs that we habitually give to anxiety.

“To make progress in our experience of anxiety, we need to recognize that anxiety does not need to be my exclusive motivation for all those things,” he said. “I can wake up in the morning, and sure, I can feel anxious, and that can get me out of bed—or, I can wake up in the morning and I can challenge myself, ‘What would be a love-based reason for getting out of bed?’ And instead of just immediately giving into the kind of knee-jerk instinctual anxiety that hits me the second I open my eyes, let me take a deep breath and challenge myself to imagine a love-based reason to get out of bed in the morning.”

Similarly, when anxiety begins to assert its annoying self throughout the day (like Donkey’s constant chatter), consider pausing to take a deep breath, asking yourself: “Hey, what if I didn’t outsource this thing I’m worried about to my anxiety sidekick? What if I gave this concern to another part of me to handle? How would that feel different?”

Breaking the Habit of Anxiety

When people are reluctant to give up their anxiety because it’s the only way they know to get things done, reframing the situation in the way Flores-Popcak suggests can help overcome that mental roadblock.

But it’s no magic bullet, he said: “Just realizing, ‘Oh, huh, I can do all the things that I’m already doing, but for a love reason as opposed to a fear reason, and I won’t be anxious anymore’—no one’s going to hear that and just magically change.”

Instead, it takes time to build a new, healthier habit: slowing down enough to question the automatic anxiety response, then intentionally choosing a different response instead, and then actually carrying out that choice as an act of one’s will.

Someone has to make that choice over and over many times before it becomes habitual, Flores-Popcak said—a process that is often supported with other approaches during therapy.

But the effort is always worth it, he said, because it allows people to enter into a healthier relationship with themselves (including their “anxiety sidekick”) and with others. “It allows the actions that I take in regard to my co-workers, my friends, my kids, and my spouse to be more effective because they no longer feel that I’m coming at them with a giant fear gun,” he said. “Instead, I’m coming at them with a loving spirit.”

In the end, this allows us to arrive at the same point with our anxiety that Shrek arrives at in regards to Donkey: no longer resenting or repressing our “sidekick” as an unwanted intruder or antagonist, nor letting him control everything for us, but instead welcoming him as a well-intentioned sidekick who can be taken with a grain of salt.

For more about tackling anxiety, check out Unworried: A Life without Anxiety by Dr. Gregory Popcak. And for one-on-one pastoral counseling help from Jacob Flores-Popcak or another Catholic counselor, reach out at CatholicCounselors.com.

Paralyzed by Powerful Emotions? Here’s How to Break Free

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Have you ever been so overwhelmed by your emotions, it was next to impossible to take action to solve your problems?

If so, you’re not alone. This “emotional paralysis” is one of the most common problems that Judi Phillips, MS, LMHC, sees in her counseling practice.

“This is something I talk about with my clients all the time,” Phillips said. But she tells her clients that no matter how stuck or trapped they feel, “there is always something you can do; there is always a way forward.”

During a recent conversation, Phillips, a pastoral counselor with the Pastoral Solutions Institute, outlined exactly how she helps her clients get off the emotional treadmill so they can take practical steps to move forward.

 

Recognizing Emotional Paralysis

Anxiety is one of the most common ways that people get paralyzed by their emotions—in this case, fear and worry. But the problem can crop up in other contexts, too. College students might feel so overwhelmed by everything they have to do (especially at the end of the semester), they don’t even know where to begin.

Emotional paralysis shows up in relationships, too.

When Phillips does marriage counseling, for instance, her clients often want to begin by describing the problem they’re having with their spouse. But it is usually fruitless to address the surface-level conflict without first addressing what’s going on inside each person: guilt, anger, sadness, grief, and so on.

“I say to them, ‘Okay, I understand. But let’s go back to what’s going on within you. You know, what are you feeling?” she said. “What do you have to do to help yourself so that you can effectively communicate to the other person?  You know, if you’re angry or sad or overwhelmed or whatever it is, you have to first acknowledge that, because if you’re not able to acknowledge that, you’re going to continue to put the problem out there on (the other person). And you’re going to continue to spin around and feel powerless. And that’s not at all where God intends us to be.”

 

God Gave Us the Tools We Need to Move Forward

The fact that God doesn’t want us to get trapped by our emotions is revealed in Scripture, of course, but also in the Theology of the Body. (The Theology of the Body is based on a series of lectures given by Pope John Paul II that explored how God’s design of the human body reveals his purpose for us.)

Phillips said that the dual functionality of our brain—its emotional side and its reasoning side—demonstrates that while God intends for us to experience emotions, he doesn’t want us to be held hostage by them. The brain’s very design allows us to use our intellect, will, and reason to understand and manage our emotions.

Consciously naming what we are feeling enables us to begin addressing them, taking concrete steps that will move us toward the way we would prefer to feel.

People who are trapped by their emotional state often believe that once they feel differently, they will be able to take action to address their problems, Phillips said. “We say something like, ‘If I only felt…, then I would….’ But the truth is, we have to act first, and then the healthy feeling will follow.”

 

3 Steps for Breaking Free and Taking Action

Here are the three steps Phillips uses to guide clients from emotional turmoil to empowerment:

  1.       Identify your feelings. Ask yourself, “How am I feeling right now?” This step is crucial for acknowledging your current emotional state. At the same time, you can also name how you would prefer to be feeling.

“You’re honoring yourself in the way that God created you,” Phillips said. “And when you do that, you’re able to get more clarity about what is going on.”

To take the college student example, you might say, “I’m feeling overwhelmed and anxious because I have so much to do, I don’t know where to begin, and I am afraid I won’t get everything done on time.”

Bonus points if you write this down: the act of writing engages the brain more holistically.

  1.       Understand the cause. Ask, “What is it that’s causing this feeling?” Only by identifying the real-world cause(s) of your negative emotions can you begin to take steps to address those causes.

Continuing with our college student example, you might sit down and write out every single thing you have to do by the end of the semester.

  1.       Take action. This step has two parts:
  2.       First, figure out what you need to do to regulate your out-of-control emotions. There are many ways to do this, but one method Phillips likes involves listening to the rosary sung in Gregorian chant; the rhythm of the chant helps to re-tune our own internal rhythm, she said.
  3.       Make a plan, then act. Finally, ask, “What steps can I take to help me feel better?” Identify what specific actions you can take to move you toward your preferred emotional state. The college student, for example, might create a calendar or schedule that lists how she will tackle the tasks she needs to get done.

Phillips asks her clients who suffer from anxiety to write out all their worst-case scenarios. Then, she has them write down a plan naming how they would respond in each situation.

 

A Spiritual Practice to Boost Your Well-Being

Anyone who is familiar with the spiritual practice of the daily examen, also known as the Ignatian examen, might recognize some similarities between the method described by Phillips and the examen.

Like the examen, Phillips recommends checking in with yourself several times a day. As a spiritual practice, this works just as well with positive emotions.

“If I’ve been out in nature, walking, and it’s just a beautiful day, and I ask myself that question, ‘How am I feeling right now? I’m feeling really joyful.’ And what is it that’s causing that? The beauty of nature.

“Then: ‘What can I do to help myself?’ Well, there isn’t anything I really need to do to help myself, but I’m just going to acknowledge it, and by acknowledging it, I’m honoring myself in the way God created me to be.

“And then, thirdly, ‘What do I need to do about this?’ I don’t need to do anything other than offer a prayer of thanksgiving to God. I’m going to just acknowledge it, appreciate it, and thank God for the beauty of his creation.”

Incorporating this practice into your daily routine can significantly enhance your mental health and quality of life. Phillips notes that her clients who consistently apply these steps quickly gain self-awareness and change the way they tackle the problems life throws their way.

“It’s life changing,” Phillips said, “because you realize, first of all, I can always understand myself. Secondly, because of that, I can always find a way forward.”

If you would like more help with this or another mental health topics, reach out to Judi Phillips or another pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.