Ever since her senior year of high school, Dr. Jane Sinden has been passionate about rowing. She excelled in the sport while she was an elite athlete, yet she and her teammates experienced difficult mental and physical health issues, being told by coaches to just “suck it up and row.” Though she had originally planned on becoming a lawyer, she decided to redirect her academic endeavours toward understanding how elite sport can be improved through social-emotional learning, a topic she has continued to study for more than two decades.
“I remember thinking, there’s a lot of us, not just women … who had lots of complaints about training and many health issues,” says Sinden. “If we felt overtrained, we really didn’t know who to talk to about it because we didn’t want to look like we weren’t tough enough to handle it.”
Dr. Lisa Devall-Martin has a similar story, though in the context of being a public school principal and experiencing staff burnout. These insights served as inspiration for her doctoral research at Johns Hopkins University on emotional labour in teaching. Realizing the connections between their research—the similar roles of educators and coaches—Sinden and Devall-Martin set out to learn more about emotion in practice and vocation, a process Devall-Martin described as “life-giving.”
The Word of God brings healing and restores us, as does prayer. Coaches and teachers, how are you rooting your athletes and students in Christ?
Sinden is an associate professor of kinesiology and physical education, also teaching in the education department, and Devall-Martin is an assistant professor of education. Together, they recently wrote a research paper titled “Emotions Are Not in the Way, They Are the Way: Abolishing Unhealthy Beliefs about Emotion and Cultivating the Spiritual–Emotional Development of Athletes” that was published this past February in the journal Religions for a special issue on sport and Christianity in the 21st century. According to the abstract, the paper presents “theoretical, educational, and practical insight into the areas of emotion and spiritual development,” serving as a resource to leaders in sport who seek to mentor and educate athletes on emotional and spiritual formation.
“My focus in this research is to create a biblical framework with respect to what our emotions reveal to us about our heart, our health and our relationship with God … And it’s very biblical to seek to understand our emotions,” says Sinden. “God instructs us to examine ourselves.” Sinden finds this self-examination clearly in Scripture, particularly Psalm 51:6: “Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.”
In this publication, Sinden and Devall-Martin explore topics such as emotional norms, clinical sport psychology, the healthy expression of emotions, the fall’s effect on emotion and spiritual formation, citing figures from philosopher Michel Foucault to Reformed thinker and Redeemer professor emeritus Al Wolters. Toward the end of the paper, they construct a summarizing model that displays the interplay between emotions, fears and inordinate (obsessive) affections. To contrast this visual, another model follows that shows how being rooted in God’s love and walking in the Spirit can lead athletes down the right emotional path.
One concept that is re-examined in the paper is Sinden’s doctoral work on what she called the “normalization of emotion” in sport. She explains that athletic environments can sometimes encourage athletes to conform to certain emotions because of false beliefs that emotions are negative, irrational, private, weak and feminine. Sinden explains that it is these myths about emotions that often lead to the suppression of emotions and subsequently unhealthy behaviour.
Understanding our emotions is the way to understanding why we’re feeling the way we’re feeling and our covenantal relationship with God, which leads us to health, fruit and all the good things God wants to give us.
Devall-Martin explains that, with this research, “the goal is to destigmatize emotion.” Athletes face incredible pressure to succeed, and overcoming these heavy burdens, she says, requires self-awareness. She shares an example from her personal life: on one occasion, her son came back defeated from an athletic competition with the words, “You have to lose to get the silver.” In a field where anything less than perfection can be understood as a failure, God’s redemptive power can play an important role.
“The Word of God brings healing and restores us, as does prayer,” says Devall-Martin. “Coaches and teachers, how are you rooting your athletes and students in Christ?”
To understand emotions from a Christian perspective, according to Sinden, is to see each emotion as neither inherently good nor bad, but in terms of structure and direction. Though our emotions were created good by God (structure), sin has distorted them, and now we must work to discover how we can express emotions in ways that are healthy and pleasing to the Lord, and accept what it feels like to be fully known (direction). Sinden believes emotions play an important role in indicating deeper things about our heart.
“Understanding our emotions is the way to understanding why we’re feeling the way we’re feeling and our covenantal relationship with God, which leads us to health, fruit and all the good things God wants to give us.”
Devall-Martin agrees and reinforces the importance of emotion education. “Culture suppresses emotion. We have emotion for a purpose: to connect with God, and connect with each other and be transformed into the likeness of Christ.”