How to Help Your Daughter Make Sense of Her Emotions

Posted on Sep 16, 2021 Topic : Men's Christian Living, Women's Christian Living

This excerpt from The Power of a Praying® Girl by Stormie Omartian explains what emotions are, how they work, and most important, why they don't have to rule your child's life. Share this post with your daughter today.

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Do you ever have days when you feel down or anxious about something, and sometimes you are not even sure why?

Do you ever feel good one day, and the next day you wish you could just crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head?

We all have good days and not so good days. As a young girl, you especially can be having a good day in the morning, and then in the afternoon have a day filled with emotions that don’t feel good and you don’t know what just happened. This is not unusual at your age. And the reason for that is you are growing so fast, and in many different ways—mentally, emotionally, and physically.

It’s easy to understand that you are growing mentally because you are studying and learning new things every day. And you can see that you are growing physically because you grow out of your clothes, and people keep telling you how grown up you’re becoming. But it’s not as easy to understand the ways you are changing emotionally.

Emotions are the way you feel. You can have good feelings. For example, you can feel happy, excited, loving, hopeful, cheerful, or peaceful. You can feel like you are having a good day, as if something good is going to happen. Those are positive emotions, and they make you feel happy and energetic. On the other hand, you can have feelings that make you feel bad and can take away your energy and cause you to feel tired, like you don’t feel good enough to do what you need to do. For example, you can feel angry, insecure, nervous, lonely, or embarrassed—those are negative feelings. And some days you may feel them all within one day. Or you may feel very sad or stressed one day, and fine the next. You may have many different emotions, or perhaps you have one strong emotion that seems like it is trying to control your mind. Those emotions or feelings are especially uncomfortable if you don’t understand why you are feeling that way.

Your feelings don’t have to control your life. It’s important to see if you can figure out why you feel the way you do—if possible— because that will help you to try and do something to take care of the problem. But it’s important to know that your feelings can change, and you can learn how to change them.

If someone—like a bully or a rude and selfish person—is mean to you and hurts your feelings, tell God and your mom or dad, or whoever takes care of you, or someone you trust who can pray with you. Ask God to take those hurtful words or actions that are in your memory and replace them with His love, and also ask Him to help you remember who He made you to be. Don’t let those bad feelings play over and over in your mind. Those bad feelings aren’t who you are. You are a princess because your heavenly Father God is the King. Because of who He made you to be, you have a great purpose. God is calling you to do great things. Just know that you have control over your feelings. Maybe not at first when you find yourself feeling a certain way. But keep in mind that it is good to cry when your feelings hurt. Your tears can help to clean your mind and heart of bad feelings, so cry when you need to or want to. But remember that while you don’t have control over what someone says or does, or over many things that happen in your life, you do have control over how it continues to affect you.

Do you know you can have both negative and positive feelings at the same time? Often it helps to sort through the good and bad feelings you have and list them on opposite sides of a piece of paper, even if you just list one negative emotion and one positive emotion on each side. The point is, don’t ignore your feelings. Bring them to God and tell Him how you feel. Ask God to help you think about the positive and not the negative. You can do this. Then list the good things about God and thank Him for those things. Thank Him for the happy and positive feelings you have because of Him.