Why Feelings Can’t Anchor Identity
This episode explores why feelings can never serve as a stable foundation for identity, drawing on the imago Dei as an objective anchor for human worth. It also explains when mental health struggles require clinical intervention, emphasizing that true care combines pastoral support with urgent medical help when needed.
Chapter 1
The Plumb Line vs. The Weather Vane: Why My Truth Collapses
Dr. Michael Brashears
Imagine, er, imagine trying to build a house, okay? But your tape measure is made of, like, woven elastic. So on Monday, when you are feeling great, six feet is six feet. But on Tuesday, when you wake up anxious, that exact same tape measure stretches out to eight feet. What happens to the house? It, it, it collapses. Right? The whole thing falls apart.
Steve Miskelley
It completely caves in. You can not set a foundation on rubber.
Dr. Michael Brashears
Right! Exactly! And yet, er, culturally right now, we are asking people to construct their entire life, their self worth, their sense of moral reality, on feelings. On my truth. But look, feelings are like, um, physical pain receptors. If you touch a hot stove, your nerves send an immediate signal. Ouch! That hurts. The nerve is giving you essential sensory feedback about internal distress. But the pain receptor can not tell you how to repair the stove, or whether the stove is good or bad. It just tells you something is hurting.
Steve Miskelley
So feelings are sensory inputs, not the building blue, blueprints.
Dr. Michael Brashears
Yes! Yes, exactly! When we treat subjective emotion as a plumb line, we are forcing sensory feedback to do structural work it was never engineered to carry. And Dr. Margy Hill wrote a piece for the AACC reminding us that the biblical framework in Genesis chapter one, verses twenty six to twenty seven, grounds human identity in something completely external. Humanity is made in the imago Dei, the image of God. That is an objective anchor outside of yourself.
Steve Miskelley
Wait, so if your worth is locked into the imago Dei, then your worth stays fixed whether your internal emotional weather is sunny or storming.
Dr. Michael Brashears
Bingo. If your identity relies on your mood, you are trapped on a weather vane. Every time the cultural wind shifts, or your neurochemistry dips, you have to completely reinvent who you are. That creates this chronic, grinding identity fatigue.
Steve Miskelley
Man, we see that identity fatigue everywhere in community outreach. People are, they are literally exhausted trying to hold up their own universe every morning based on how they woke up feeling.
Dr. Michael Brashears
It is an intolerable psychological burden! You can not be your own anchor and your own boat at the same time. You just drift and sink.
Chapter 2
The Plumb Line and the Paramedic: The Care Boundary
Jill Miskelley
And Michael, that distinction between objective dignity and shifting symptoms, that is where families get hit the hardest when a mental health crisis strikes.
Dr. Michael Brashears
Tell me more about that, Jill, because this boundary gets blurred constantly.
Jill Miskelley
Well, because if a person bears the image of God, their intrinsic worth remains completely untouched by a psychiatric diagnosis, or trauma, or emotional failure. But so often, when severe illness shows up, people freeze up or they try to pray away something that requires urgent clinical care.
Dr. Michael Brashears
Yeah. That, that is a critical distinction. We have to draw a clear clinical boundary. Spiritual care and pastoral counseling are wonderful for moral wrestling, existential grief, relational distress. But when you are dealing with acute psychiatric crises, like psychosis, severe clinical depression, or active suicidal intent, that is a medical emergency. Period.
Jill Miskelley
Yes! When our son Ian was struggling, we realized how devastating it is when systems shut families out or when people treat a brain health crisis like it is just a lack of prayer. Spiritualizing an acute neurobiological crisis, that is not high faith. It is actually a failure to love the whole person.
Steve Miskelley
It is like seeing someone with a broken leg and telling them to just stand up straight and hold onto their internal plumb line, instead of calling for an ambulance and getting a cast on that leg.
Dr. Michael Brashears
That is the exact analogy, Steve! A paramedic does not negotiate with a broken femur. They stabilize the injury. In the exact same way, escalating a severe mental health crisis to clinical professionals, to crisis stabilization centers, to hospitals, that is an direct action of imago Dei advocacy. You are protecting life.
Jill Miskelley
You are treating the body and the mind with the dignity that divine image demands. Bringing in medical care alongside pastoral support is how we actually wrap around families in the dark.
Dr. Michael Brashears
Amen to that. True care means honoring the image bearer by using every tool available, medical, clinical, and spiritual, to keep them safe and help them heal.