What’s Your Metamood?

What’s Your Metamood?

Even if we feel guilty, God is greater than our feelings, and he knows everything.

1 John 3:20

Scientists call it “metamood”: an awareness of one’s own mood, or the ability to pull back and recognize what one is feeling as anger, sorrow, shame, or whatever emotion is foremost. It’s a difficult skill because our emotions so often appear in disguise. A person in mourning may know she is sad, but she may not recognize that she is also angry at the person for dying—because this seems somehow inappropriate. A parent who yells at the child who ran into the street is expressing anger at disobedience, but the degree of anger may owe more to the fear the parent feels at what could have happened. The boss who feels attacked by an employee’s question about a new policy may be completely unaware that the innocent question seems aggressive to him only because his father used to ask the same kinds of things to point out his shortcomings.

Not recognizing how we really feel is one of the most troubling blind spots we have as human beings and one of the most common causes of interpersonal conflict. When we don’t see how we really feel, our emotions start to manage us rather than the other way around. We begin to mask our emotions, and that simply puts off solving one problem and usually creates another one. For example, you may be ticked off at your spouse, who is late to meet you at an appointed time, and that’s one problem. But if anger is too threatening for some reason, you simply smile and ignore your churning stomach. Later that evening, you find yourself snapping at your spouse for no good reason at all. Where did that come from? you both wonder. And that may develop into a new problem.

When we don’t acknowledge our true emotions, we give up our ability to control them. They bleed into other areas of our lives where they have no right to be. The next time you experience an unusually strong emotion, take a moment to reflect and try to recognize any emotional undercurrents that may be contributing to it. Allow this deeper awareness to bring insight, and ask God for help sorting through your emotions, especially where your spouse is concerned. After all, as today’s verse says, he knows exactly what they are, and he is greater than them.

You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.

—Pearl S. Buck