“If you’re really trusting God, you wouldn’t feel this way.”
I’ve heard this sentence in various forms my entire Christian life. And for years, I believed it. I thought being a good Christian meant being nice and peaceful all the time—never having a bad day, never expressing frustration, and absolutely never having a negative emotion about anything, especially not toward God.
I became the perfect “nice Christian girl.” I smiled when people hurt me. I said “yes” when I wanted to say “no.” I stuffed every negative emotion so far down that I didn’t even realize I was doing it until they eventually boiled over. I truly believed that negative emotions were “un-Christian,” so you can imagine my turmoil when I developed depression.
I was stuck in an exhausting cycle: feel something negative, then feel guilty about feeling it.
But I’ve realized something revolutionary that’s changing everything: negative emotions aren’t inherently bad. In fact, they can be biblical.
What if I’ve been apologizing for appropriate emotional responses this whole time? What if some of my “negative” emotions were actually exactly what the situation called for?
The “Good Christian” Emotion Police
I wasn’t the only one caught in this trap. Turns out, there’s an entire unspoken culture in Christianity that can be called the “Good Christian Emotion Police.”
Growing up, I thought joy, peace, and gratitude were the “spiritual” emotions. All the positive emotions were the “spiritual” ones, while all the negative emotions were the “flesh” emotions, like anger, disappointment, and grief. I thought having real faith produced consistent positive feelings. And it was implied that if you were struggling emotionally, you just needed more faith or prayer.
People quoted verses like “All things work together for the good of those who love God” (Romans 8:28). Spiritual bypassing, like “just trust in God’s plan”, oversimplified people’s struggles and almost made it feel shameful to have any negative emotions at all. Emotion policing like “you shouldn’t feel that way”, and guilt cycles like “If I really believed, I’d be peaceful about this” only reinforce the shame and emotional suppression.
This toxic culture trained me to become a professional emotion suppressor. I learned to smile when people crossed my boundaries, to say “I’m fine” when I was falling apart, and to apologize for inconveniencing anyone with my needs or feelings. I thought this was what godliness looked like.
The result? I became a doormat. People walked all over me because I genuinely believed that having any negative response to mistreatment was “un-Christian.” When someone hurt me, instead of acknowledging the appropriate anger or disappointment, I’d immediately start questioning my own spiritual maturity. “A real Christian would forgive instantly and feel peaceful about this,” I’d tell myself.
When depression hit, this internal conflict became unbearable. Here I was, struggling with a mental health condition that by definition involves negative emotions, while believing that those very emotions disqualified my faith. I was stuck in a cycle of feeling depressed, then feeling guilty about being depressed, then feeling depressed about feeling guilty. It was spiritual and emotional torture.
The Toxic Result
The devastating thing is, I know I’m far from alone in this experience.
And in turn, suppressing negative emotions creates a ripple effect that leads to hiding authentic emotions from God and community.
We develop spiritual imposter syndrome and think that “Everyone else seems so happy and peaceful” when in reality, others may be facing similar struggles. We then get emotional dishonesty confused with spiritual maturity. And then feeling bad seems to equal being bad.
God Made You to Feel All of This
But here’s where everything I believed started to fall apart in the best possible way. As I began studying Scripture more deeply, I discovered something that shook my entire understanding of emotions and faith:
God designed me to feel all of this.
In reality, there are plenty of biblical examples of “negative” emotions.
Righteous Anger
Jesus flipped tables at the temple market, angry that the merchants made a Holy place a place of dishonesty and greed (Matthew 21:12-13). He wasn’t just having a “bad day”. God had plenty of righteous anger at injustice throughout the whole Old Testament, and Paul has lots to say to false teachers in Galatians 1:8-9.
Holy Grief
Jesus Himself wept when Lazarus died, even though He knew Lazarus would be raised from the dead (John 11:35). Jesus experienced immense sorrow when praying in Gethsemane before He was arrested and subsequently crucified (Matthew 26:38). And God experienced grief over humanity in Genesis after the fall of man.
Sacred Disappointment
Poor Job had many raw complaints and cries out to God during his trials (Job 3:1-26), and Jesus cried out from the cross to God (Matthew 27:46).
The key here is that these emotions weren’t character flaws or spiritual failures—they were appropriate responses to broken situations by people bearing God’s image.
The Emotions God Actually Has
If we’re made in God’s image, then our emotions reflect His.
God experiences anger at injustice, oppression of the vulnerable, and at broken covenant relationships (marriage). He experiences grief over human suffering, broken relationships, and rejected love. And God experiences disappointment when people turn away from Him, justice is perverted, and when His heart is misrepresented.
Your capacity for righteous anger, holy grief, and sacred disappointment isn’t spiritual immaturity—it’s evidence that you bear God’s image.
Biblical Negative Emotions vs. Toxic Positivity
This revelation completely flipped my understanding of what healthy faith should look like. But it also made me realize just how far off track we’ve gotten as a Christian culture. If God Himself experiences these emotions, why have we created a faith environment where they’re forbidden?
This is when I found there were crucial differences between biblical emotional honesty and two toxic extremes that plague modern Christianity.
Biblical Negative Emotions
Having biblical negative emotions isn’t a free pass to wallow in sadness or take your anger out on other people. There’s a difference between processing an emotion and wallowing in it. Processing negative emotions allows you to feel the emotion fully whereas wallowing causes you to stay stuck in the emotion.
We should also bring the emotions to God rather than hiding them from ourselves and from God. Biblical negative emotions are more of a temporary emotional response, not a permanent character state.
Healthy biblical emotions might look like channeling anger over injustice toward action and prayer. Deep grief might be expressed by honoring and remembering what was precious. Disappointment can be expressed honestly without losing your faith foundation—it’s not one or the other. And you can acknowledge a betrayal while still trying to choose trust (check out my post about trust for more insight).
Unhealthy emotions do not give you license to stay bitter indefinitely. This also doesn’t give you permission to sin in your anger or justify hurting others with your emotions. And this also isn’t an excuse to abandon your faith or community.
Toxic Positivity
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s toxic positivity.
“Both my dogs got hit by a car and my own car broke down, and then I had a heart attack, but oh well, praise God!”
When the Bible tells us to “rejoice always”, it doesn’t mean “feel happy always”. This only creates pressure to have a neat and tidy testimony complete with a bow on top – where every struggle must end with “but God worked it all out for good!” It’s no wonder people end up leaving the faith; they can’t keep up with the emotional performance.
There seems to be an unspoken rule that good Christians will always be victorious. Then, if you’re facing a struggle, it makes you feel less than or not Christian enough. This also creates spiritual trauma around vulnerability, especially when your struggles are met with blanket platitudes like “God won’t give you more than you can handle” or “Praise through the pain”.
But what if the goal isn’t to perform constant joy? What if some situations actually call for appropriate negative emotions?
The Difference Between Feeling and Choosing
The core truth is this. Emotions don’t have to drive decisions. As I wrote previously, actions don’t require matching emotions. This can look like, “I’m angry at You, but I’m still here.”
Mature faith isn’t perfect emotions, but surrendered imperfect ones.
Internal conflict should be viewed as spiritual growth, not spiritual failure. We can be honest about our struggles while still choosing obedience. And we can bring anger to God instead of hiding it from God.
What This Means for Your Spiritual Life
So if negative emotions can be biblical, and if God Himself experiences them, what does this mean for how we actually live? How do we move from emotional suppression to emotional honesty without losing our faith?
We first need to give ourselves permission to feel.
“It’s okay to be angry about what happened to you.” “Your disappointment with God makes sense.” “Grief is love with nowhere to go; it’s hard and sad but holy.” Your emotional response might be exactly what the situation calls for.
We need to reframe common struggles too. If you’re a people-pleaser like I was, getting walked all over because you think “nice” equals “Christian”—recognize that you might need some healthy anger. That frustration you feel when someone crosses your boundaries? That might not be sinful flesh; that might be God-given wisdom telling you something’s wrong. Jesus wasn’t always “nice.” He told hard truths, held people accountable, and sometimes made people very uncomfortable.
Love doesn’t always look like keeping the peace.
If you feel guilty for being disappointed, understand that sometimes disappointment is appropriate. If you’re suppressing frustration with injustice, realize that the frustration might very well be God’s heart in you.
The goal here isn’t emotional perfection.
We need to stop apologizing for appropriate emotional responses. If someone hurts you, don’t feel guilty for being angry, sad, or anything in between! We can bring these difficult emotions right to God. Some feelings, even negative ones, honor God more than forced gratitude or feigned happiness. Emotional struggle can coexist with faith, and it really helps us grow spiritually and emotionally.
Practical Strategies for Honoring Your Emotions
Learning to honor your emotions instead of suppressing them is a journey, not a destination. Here are some practical strategies that have helped me move from performance to authenticity:
To God
Acknowledge the conflict honestly in prayer. I don’t know how many times I’ve prayed, “God, I will never understand why you took Maddy home so soon, and I will never be okay with it. I am still so heartbroken and angry. But I do thank you for using it to help me help others who may go through a similar situation in their own lives.”
“God, I know I should feel one way, but I actually feel this way.” Be honest – you will not be shamed for having honest emotions. Bring your emotion to the relationship, not away from it. God is big enough to hear about your struggles. He’s not going to strike you down for feeling a negative emotion. As Psalm 62:8 tells us, we can “pour out our hearts to Him” – and that includes the messy, angry, confused parts of our hearts too.
In Community
Try to find safe people who can handle your real emotions. And if you aren’t able to, at least write them down. We need to stop performing emotional “wellness” that we don’t feel. This just leads to suppression and dysregulation. We can practice saying “I’m struggling” instead of “I’m good” when someone asks how we are. And if someone tries to police your emotions, maybe it’s best to distance yourself from them or just be honest. Say, “This is how I feel and having emotions isn’t inherently sinful.”
With Yourself
Stop judging your emotional responses as spiritual failures.
You are allowed to feel. You should never apologize for your emotions.
But we do need to focus on being obedient while processing our emotions. We can give ourselves permission to feel without a timeline. But this doesn’t mean we can lash out in our anger or use our emotions to hurt others. Feeling bad doesn’t make you bad, unless you act out in negative ways.
Moving Forward: Living with Honest Emotions
Here’s what I want you to know as you begin or continue this journey toward emotional honesty:
You don’t have to hide your real emotions from God. He already knows them anyway, and this just hinders you instead of helps you. We can view difficult emotions as information, not condemnation. Remember, we are human. We are allowed to be human while still being faithful. God is big enough for our anger, disappointment, and grief.
Your emotional response to trauma, loss, injustice, betrayal, whatever it might be, might be more biblically sound than the forced positivity we’ve been taught to perform.
What if the goal isn’t to stop feeling difficult emotions but to feel them honestly in relationship with a God who experiences them too?
