God Doesn’t Diagnose or Medicate Emotion—He Sits With It

Why our avoidance and discomfort with pain is harming more than helping and how Jesus heals what the world pathologizes.

For most of my life, my pain was treated like a punchline. In many ways, it still is. The difference now is that I am slowly growing thicker skin and I no longer let it define me. Let them mock. Let them gossip. Let them slander and falsely accuse. I'll keep on writing about my experiences regardless.

As a child, I carried unbearable grief...the kind no child should ever have to carry. I lost my father at age four and my brother in young adulthood. But heavier than the losses themselves was the suffocating silence that followed. There was no safe place for my sorrow. No one to say, "It’s okay to feel this deeply. I’ll sit with you in it." Instead, there was mockery, dismissal, and a message that feeling pain too much made me too much to be around...unstable...mentally ill, even.

As an adult, when I began to relive and process that grief with the tender heart of the little girl who was never allowed to mourn, the mockery only grew louder. My pain was falsely mislabeled with diagnoses and begging to medicate me into silence. My tears were seen as weakness. My search for safety and healing was weaponized against me.

What few understood is that being silenced and invalidated every time I expressed emotion fractured something in me. Psychology shows this happens when people must shut down parts of themselves just to survive, frequently seen in causes of individuals experiencing prolonged trauma. I had to hide anything that felt too deeply, too painfully, too inconveniently for others...just to receive a little love.

By the time I was 35, I found myself tending to the child versions of me who had been left in the dark, unheard and unloved. I had to choose to either heal the younger parts of myself or pass on my pain to my children by invalidating them and continuing the cycle of psychological and emotional abuse. As an adult experiencing this without knowing what was happening to me, I dissociated often to escape the pain and loneliness I grew up with. As a child, I now recognize that what teachers saw as "constant daydreaming" was actually my body disconnecting from a reality it couldn't handle.

Tragically, the same abandonment and invalidation I experienced as a grieving child resurfaced when I tried to heal as an adult. Instead of empathy, I faced consistent gaslighting, silence, and more abandonment. Rather than helping me heal, it re-traumatized me and kept me reliving the trauma for years, instead of what could have taken a few months according to trauma-informed therapy experts who have taken me under their wing. This lack of safe presence drove me deeper into hopelessness and reopened the very wounds I was fighting to recover from.

Healing, especially for the sake of my children and their future, also meant losing the family and friends I thought would stand by me. This isn't meant to shame those who couldn't handle me. But the truth is, most only knew how to love the version of me that smiled and stayed silent. Their love was conditional because the love they had been shown was conditional. My survival became tied to silence, not safety. And strangely, I’m thankful for this pruning now...because God forbid if I ever lost my spouse or child, I’ve come to see who would truly stand with me in that pain.

How we treat others in their time of need, especially our children, matters. If we consistently shut down their pain, they may shut themselves down just to survive. If they can’t bring their sadness to us, they’ll learn to hide it, and the cost may be their identity, their joy, or their peace.

Parents are meant to be nurturing, protective, and safe...to build up, not tear down. Children need compassion, not correction or condemnation for emotions they don’t yet understand, let alone regulate. Empathy isn't optional; it shapes the inner world they carry for life. We don't need to "teach" empathy, we can model it by how we treat them in their painful emotions.

Honestly, our feelings do matter. That may sound obvious, but sadly, many still mock that truth...not because they think feelings are meaningless, but because validating someone else’s pain would force them to confront their own that they've buried and repressed to survive themselves. So instead of comfort, they turn to control, correction, or coldness.

But feelings aren’t nuisances to be managed. They are signals of the heart. And God cares deeply about the heart. He says, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." (Ezekiel 36:26)

If we truly follow Christ, we cannot turn away from pain just because it’s uncomfortable. Jesus didn’t avoid the brokenhearted. He knelt beside them. He didn’t say, "Nobody cares." He cared, He wept, and He was present. And in that presence, He healed. If we claim to follow Him, we are called to do the same. Our very presence can be the Christlike healing someone desperately needs.

Scripture is clear about how we treat the hurting:

"Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap." (Galatians 6:7)

"Whoever mocks the poor shows contempt for their Maker; whoever gloats over disaster will not go unpunished." (Proverbs 17:5)

"He mocks proud mockers but shows favor to the humble and oppressed." (Proverbs 3:34)

"The mocker seeks wisdom and finds none, but knowledge comes easily to the discerning." (Proverbs 14:6)

"For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." (Matthew 12:34)

God has written His law on every human heart, so we are without excuse (Romans 2:15). We know when we’re being cruel. We know when pride, not love, is behind our response.

I don’t say any of this out of bitterness or to wound. I say it out of urgency...now that I’m finally beginning to feel safe in my own body and starting to see how emotionally disconnected the world can be from pain. Too many people are mistreated with cruelty, then mocked for how they react to that mistreatment.

It is my prayer that this process of reliving trauma...grieving out loud, breaking down, becoming small again...has helped just one person reconsider how they parent, how they respond to pain, and how they treat those in their most vulnerable moments.

The deepest wound wasn’t the loss of my dad or my brother—it was how I was treated in my grief: the minimizing, dismissal, and abandonment. That’s what truly broke me. It wasn’t the dead, but the living who left the deepest scars. I couldn’t even fully grieve the pain of losing my family because I was surrounded by people who couldn’t sit with me in that pain. So instead, I grieved the absence of presence itself and the lack of safety. Sometimes, I still grieve the fact that I couldn’t just grieve.

Some might say I relied too much on others for validation and comfort. But what if reliance isn't a flaw...what if it’s a design? What if God actually created us to grieve together, to carry one another’s burdens, to reflect His love through presence? Maybe we’ve simply grown too used to isolation, too polite to inconvenience each other, too afraid to admit we need each other’s care.

Most people would never believe what was said to me by "friends" just one week after my brother died. It wasn’t love or support. I remember feeling ashamed for asking for help. Like something was wrong with me for needing someone. But it wasn’t me. It was avoidance disguised as strength designed to shift the discomfort of empathy back onto the one who needed it most.

I now know that that’s not how Jesus loves.

Children and grieving adults don’t need correction or teasing for their tears. They need presence. They need someone willing to sit in the ashes with them, not scold them for being covered in soot. They need to see what real agape love looks like.

Because the truth is: there was never anything wrong with me.

What was wrong was a world that couldn’t hold space for grief unless it was polished, quiet, and easy to manage. A world that labeled my sorrow as dysfunction and tried to fix it with silence and shame. When in truth, all I ever needed was someone willing to stay. Maybe deep down, that's what all of us really need...but admitting it is too painful, because the world is becoming more isolated and less likely to stay. Toxic positivity is going to kill us all. But one day, when we experience true tragedy, we are all going to want someone to say:

"You’re not too much. You’re not broken. I’m not going anywhere. I will love you through this. What you're going through is hard. And I’ll help you find healing—not because you’re a problem, but because you matter. And I care about you."

Instead of: "You need to see a psychiatrist. You need medication. You’re obsessing. You’re a problem. You’re delusional. You’re mentally ill. You’re unstable. You have a personality disorder, you’re a burden, you’re too sensitive and dramatic."

Why have we become a world so quick to diagnose and medicate God-given emotions? Why are we more comfortable diagnosing pain than sitting with it? Why do we numb what was meant to be nurtured, suppress what needs support?

We need to stop treating emotional expression as dysfunction and start recognizing it as a cry for connection...a sign that someone is still alive, still human, and simply reaching out to be understood.

Maybe it’s time we stop labeling people’s pain and start honoring their humanity. Maybe we could sit with people in their sorrow before trying to fix them. Maybe their emotions aren’t signs of instability but evidence of resilience and courage. Maybe we need to stop pathologizing pain just to preserve our own comfort.

Because that’s what agape love does.

God doesn’t shame, mock, dismiss, or invalidate our pain. He doesn’t rank or rush it. He cares about all of it. And His Word makes it clear: indifference and mockery aren’t just unkind—they’re wrong. Because there was never anything wrong with me or with you. Only something deeply wrong with a world that’s forgotten how to weep with those who weep. (Romans 12:15)

And through it all, I am deeply thankful for Jesus—my best friend, my Comforter. He sat with me on my bed all those years after my dad died, holding space for a little girl in unbearable grief. He didn’t rush me. He didn’t shame me. He simply stayed. His compassion wrapped around me in ways no human could, and I still don’t believe you can find that kind of love anywhere else.

I’m grateful for His faithfulness. But I’ll be honest—sometimes I’m angry too. Angry that when you experience that kind of supernatural compassion so young, it’s hard to understand why others can’t or won’t love like that. Why presence and empathy are so rare.

But I’m learning. And I’m healing. And I trust that one day, when He’s finished rebuilding what was shattered, I’ll be able to love others with that same compassion He showed me. That, to me, is redemption.

Reflections for the Reader

I’d love to hear your reflections… please feel free to share in the comments below. Here’s a few questions for us to consider as a community, in love, grace, and truth.

• How can we relearn how to ‘weep with those who weep’—both in our homes and our churches?

• Why do you think we, as a culture, are so uncomfortable with emotional pain?

• What would it have meant for you, as a child or adult, to simply hear: “You’re not too much”?

Thank you all for your support and encouragement in writing! Many prayers for blessings, encouragement, and peace for anyone reading this! <3

With tears, truth, and a little sarcasm,

…Megan