Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Emotionally Healthy Leader podcast. I'm Pete Scuzeiro.

I'm Jerry Skazaro.

And our title today is, Why Bottling Up Our Emotions Kills Spiritual Growth?

Yep.

And so, Jerry, I would just start with it. Why does bottling up our emotions kill spiritual growth or depth or development?

Well, actually, when you say the word bottling up, it almost sounds like a person knows

they're doing it.

But in reality, most of us aren't even aware of the fact that we're suppressing our emotions.

It's just the way we've always done life.

We don't pay attention to them.

But, so that's number one.

But bottling up our emotions, why it's dangerous to spiritual health and maturity is because, in a word, you're really limited in your ability to love others well if you are not aware of your feelings.

Let's hold on to that because this is a life and death issue, how we handle our emotions integrated with our spirituality.

And so why don't we just start, because this is such a vast topic. There's so much to it.

Let's just start with a bit of our own story, how I know we came to Christ at 19. Both of us,

we had 17 years in Christ, in discipleship, et cetera, before we actually began to integrate our emotions into our walk with Jesus.

And so why don't we talk how our families did it, how it began. Why don't we tell a bit of

our story as background, and then we'll dive into our skill, explore the iceberg today.

Okay. Yeah. Why don't you start? Yeah, sure. So I, you know, I, you know, came to Christ at 19.

So when I came to Jesus, I had already come out of a family where we did not do certain emotions. We did anger.

Again, as I shared a couple of weeks ago, there was a lot of abuse in my family.

And so as a child growing up, there was no way I could be vulnerable, sad, even angry, because there was no room for it.

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