Emotions

Most declarations of “I have a right to feel this way!” are more honestly stated “I have surrendered to feeling this way.” The feelings themselves are never the problem. Evil things ought to induce anger. Depressing things ought to induce sadness. These are expected, amoral effects of events intersecting with emotional creatures, and there’s no need to feel shameful of them.

But using a word like “right” to describe your relationship with them is a choice. You’re no longer simply acknowledging the reason you feel a certain way. You’re proclaiming entitlement that carries a hint of subservience. It’s the grammar of an addict. That emotion is unequivocally yours and you will not be taking any questions on whether it’s appropriate to act on it in a given way. 

Any bystander on more level ground knows who’s in charge of whom. You are caught in a monkey trap: hand firmly grasping the treat, yet unable to free itself from the gourd in which it sits. Blind to your own captivity, and yet aggressively defensive of it. Attempting to liberate someone from such bondage goes about as well as it did between Gandalf & Bilbo:

“Also I think you have had it quite long enough. You won’t need it any more, Bilbo, unless I am quite mistaken,” said Gandalf. 

Bilbo flushed, and there was an angry light in his eyes. His kindly face grew hard. “Why not?” he cried. “And what business is it of yours, anyway, to know what I do with my own things? It is my own. I found it. It came to me.”

“Yes, yes,” said Gandalf. “But there is no need to get angry.”

“If I am it is your fault,” said Bilbo. “It is mine, I tell you. My own. My Precious. Yes, my Precious."

We’ve gone stupidly too far in convincing people our emotions are anything more than a spotty signal of the underlying state of our heart — a heart, but the way, that is “deceitful above all things.”  They are a beacon, not an ally. We owe them as much respect as we do a check engine light. Useful, absolutely worth hearing out, but often full of trash. And certainly not something we should lend any allegiance.

A man without self-control
    is like a city broken into and left without walls.
- Proverbs 25:28 ESV