Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

This book was recommended to me by my spiritual mentor. I really enjoyed this book's balance of practical and spiritual advice. The main point of this book is that one must be emotionally mature before they can be spiritually mature. This requires us to sort out our trauma, confront our emotions, and throw away outdated mental models. For example, I used to think that we must commit our emotions to GOd, such as anger and bitterness, but what I was actually doing was stuffing them under the carpet. What God really wants us to do is work through them, which takes even more effort.

Trauma

Another point is the impact of trauma. People often underestimate the impact of their childhood on their present, especially when it can be 20/30+ years in the past. However the impact is directly ingrained into our minds and sense of self and these learnt mental models are often have lots of flaws. Real problems arise when we incorrectly correlate things happening to us now to what happened to us in the past. For example, the author Peter grew up with non-present parents and so when his wife wanted to leave for the weekend, it triggered him. Peter names this phenomenon "Emotional Allergies"