Emotions

Vets & Emotions


Imagine going into a nuclear power plant with all their enormous transformers and high voltage equipment and attempting to read the output with a tiny little Radio Shack voltage meter. What would happen? In the same way, imagine a nuclear technician lugging his heavy-duty equipment and big rubber gloves in to see what was wrong with your CD player.


Some veterans feel as if they have no emotions. They are sometimes called "cold-blooded" by friends and relatives. Nothing seems to affect them. Yet at other times they may explode over what seems like practically nothing. Other times, they may get misty-eyed and sentimental over things that even they don't understand.


When people use different gauges to measure the same voltage, each scale looks different. Imagine measuring 9.5 volts on a 10 volt scale. It will come pretty close to pegging the meter.


Now imagine reading those same 9.5 volts on a scale of 1,000 volts. It will barely even register on the meter.


People who have not experienced severe trauma are observing life on a mucher narrower scale. Their daily experiences will make the needle on their emotional meter to fluctuate dramatically when they have "routine" life experiences.


"Trauma" has been defined as "experiences that are outside the realm of normal life experiences." On a "normal" life scale, these traumatic experiences peg the needle to the point of rendering it useless.


A much larger scale must be used to measure traumatic life experience. Living a life on such a large emotional scale means that the routine events that would show significant readings on other people's scale would barely register on the traumatic scale.


Consequently, these people appear to show no reaction to the things that cause others to react. They are simply functioning on a differet scale.


To a traumatized individual, ordinary life events can trigger extreme responses because they are reminders of the traumatic events.


If we are unable to understand why we react the way we do, perhaps it is time to look at life using a larger scale. Image what our problems would look like if viewed from God's perspective! If God in fact is who He says He is, then He has something to say about our lives and how we are to live them. When something goes wrong, the Bible offers a unique perspective, as observed from God's point of view, using God's scale. Talk about getting the BIG PICTURE!


Most intense life experiences (trauma) carry with them an emotional charge that must be taken into account when trying to understand and process the event. These emotional charges distort our perception of what actually took place and leave us unable to process the meaning of the event in order to go on with life. The result is an "emotional loop" that causes continual recycling until the event can be understood or resolved. Viewing things from God's perspective helps break the emotional loop. It brings a spiritual dimension into the equation to help understand and process it. Life can go on to have meaning and significance if we understand this, but we can forever be stuck in the past if we fail to understand the event and process it.


Life must have meaning, purpose and design. Consider the human body. When it experiences overwhelming physical pain (pain so intense, it is "off the scale"), it is designed to automatically slip into a state called "shock." All nonessential body functions shut down so that the body can focus on and cope with the magnitude of the physical pain.


There is an almost identical parallel designed into humans to deal with "off the scale" emotional or mental stress. The mind can go into a "catatonic" state. The body is awake, but all nonessential mental functions shut down, allowing it to shift to a higher scale in an attempt to process the otherwise off-the-scale mental or emotional difficulty.


The same could be said about the spirit of man. God has designed man in such a way that if he has ignored the spiritual part of his existence, he feels empty, void, lacking meaning, purpose and without direction or hope. These feelings were designed into man as a warning sign to begin looking into spiritual matters in order to restore life and balance back into man's existence.


God offers new life, hope, and a reason for living for those who would put their trust in Him. It is from His perspective (using His scale to measure life's difficulties) that life begins to make sense. It is only from God's perspective that the existence of all the pain and suffering in the world can even begin to make sense.


How can we "switch scales" to see things from God's perspective? We can't! The things of God are spiritually discerned, so we must use a tool (the Bible) to see His perspective. God says that this whole world is in a terrible mess, and He has a desire to fix it. He tells us that everyone in the world has made serious moral errors in judgment (commonly called sin), but He has made a provision to remove the penalty for that error.


In boot camp, recruits practice throwing live hand grenades. There was a case once in which a recruit made a serious error and dropped a grenade rather than throwing it. The trainer, realizing that the recruit had no idea of what to do next, fell on the grenade, saving the recruit's life while giving up his own in the recruit's place.


That is what God did. He Himself absorbed the full impact of all we have done wrong. He sent His Son, who was perfect and had no reason to die, to die in our place. He suffered incredible trauma to pay the price of our sins. That is salvation, and it is offered freely to anyone who would accept it.


Wouldn't you like to receive forgiveness for all your wrongs and begin to see life from a different perspective? God's love for you is off-the-scale and as incomprehensible as our feelings are to others who have not been through what we have experienced.


Why don't you ask God to help you with those emotions which seem to be off scale and unmanageable. They are not off His scale. The trauma He suffered for us assures us that He understands!