Hello and welcome back to the podcast where you are invited for lighthearted conversations about things that matter as you seek to live your most meaningful, beautiful, and joyful life.

I'm your host, Dr. Edie Wadsworth, and I hope you enjoy your stay here at the House of Joy.

Everybody, welcome back to the podcast. I am so happy to be here. I am Dr. Eadie, your host.

This is the House of Joy podcast, the go-to podcast for Christian women who want to build mental and emotional resilience so that they can live with more joy and freedom and purpose.

Today is an exciting day because we are starting what likely will be

a six or seven part series on unlocking emotional freedom. I for the past couple of years have

been obsessed with studying how our brains work, how our emotions work, the wisdom they carry.

And today what we're going to be talking about is emotional avoidance, which is, I think,

for most women, their strategy with their emotions.

And we're going to talk about the high cost of emotional avoidance, why we do it, some of the

ways in which we do it, and how we can begin to really

embrace emotions in our lives, open up to them, live way more open-hearted.

So that's what we're in for today.

So today, all about emotional avoidance and the high cost of ignoring your life because that's what happens when we

avoid our emotions. So let's dive in. Emotions color our lives with so much richness and depthness.

They drive our actions. They contain so much wisdom. They contain lessons for us to learn, they provide contrast for

us, and they're actually the primary, primary way that we experience our own lives. So for women over

40 especially, we have kind of, most of us have come to believe that emotions are not

to be trusted or to avoid them at all cost. Maybe even we've been stigmatized for how much more

maybe emotional we are than other people. We've even been told we should rise above them. They don't matter.

And I firmly believe, after studying this for years, that nothing could be further from the truth.

I have actually come to believe that almost every problem we have in our lives is because we are

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