How to Create Emotional & Spiritual Health in Your Home with Debra Fileta, M.A., LPC

Raising Mentally Healthy Kids with Michelle Nietert

I want to ask you a simple, but hard question - “Are you really okay?” In this episode with licensed professional counselor and author Debra Fileta, we’re focusing on how we as parents can do the hard work of building emotional awareness within ourselves so we can normalize talking about emotions within our homes. Debra also shares how our view of God, others, and self affects our spiritual health and offers a practical exercise you can do with your child to help them explore their emotions and create healthy conversations.

Key points from our conversation:

🩹 Healthy people make healthy relationships. So much of what we learn is modeled, so one of the best things was can do is take care of ourselves.

🌋 It’s crucial that we build emotional awareness. If we don’t release the emotions building under the surface in healthy ways, they will show up in an emotional outburst.

🎨 To help your child unpack their emotions, try the “feeling in my body” activity. Have the child draw an outline of their body and have them color it using different colors to show emotions in the body. The magic of the exercise is in the conversation it creates. It normalizes that it’s good and normal to talk about emotions.

❓ There are over 500 different emotions. Asking questions expands your child’s emotional vocabulary and helps them discover what they’re feeling and why.

✨ Emotions are real, but they are not always true. What makes emotions right or wrong is not feeling them, but what we do with that feeling. Emotional control means lining up what you feel with God’s truth.

✝️ Our view of God, others, and self are a big indicator of spiritual health because we often transfer our hurts to what we think about God. We must know what we truly believe about God. If we believe the wrong things, then our actions are rooted in the wrong things. The why is crucial.

❤️ What you believe about yourself determines the kind of relationship you believe you deserve.

Resources mentioned:

Are You Really OK?: Getting Real About Who You Are, How You’re Doing, and Why It Matters Printable feeling wheel The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

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