“Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
For many, especially those who struggle with emotional instability, scrupulosity, or intense spiritual swings, that command feels overwhelming. Perfect? As God is perfect? It can sound like a demand for flawless moral performance and total emotional control without any room for messing up.
But is that really what Jesus is referring to? God’s moral perfection?
Maybe, but given the rest of the passage, I don’t think that’s what is going on here. Let’s look at the whole passage together and see what we can see.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
So, what’s going on here? What perfection is Jesus talking about? He’s talking about the perfection of consistent love. Everyday, to every person, God loves with the same intensity, the same presence, and in the same way.
And that tells us something profound about emotional regulation.
The Gaze That Forms a Self
A baby is born emotionally unregulated. It isn’t something that comes naturally to the human person. We have to learn what to do with our emotions.
Just think about how quickly a baby moves from one emotional state to another. In one moment, the baby can be crying, then in the next laughing, and then just seconds later in a full on tantrum. Babies move from one emotional state to the other, almost as if they are emotionally fluid, because they need to learn how to regulate their emotions on their own.
And the only way we can learn how to do that is through relationship. Starting with the gaze of a stable caregiver.
When a stable caregiver offers a baby a consistent, loving, steady gaze, it prunes the nervous system. That steady gaze says: You are safe. You are loved. You are cared for.
It is not dramatic. It is not intense. It is not exciting. It is stable. And that stability teaches the child what to do with their emotions and how to regulate them. Through the parent, external stability becomes internal stability. The gaze becomes an inner anchor.
But when that stable gaze is inconsistent, frightening, or absent, the brain develops differently. Dysregulation becomes the organizing principle and the child begins to identify emotional intensity with necessity.
Without a stable relational anchor, calm becomes disorienting, as if it is something dangerous. It results in an experience of a blurring of the lines when it comes to emotions. Sometimes (or all the time) feelings feel like truth. They aren’t received as signals. They’re received as facts.
So, what I feel reflects a reality that everyone, if they love me, will accept and organize themselves around.
Emotional intensity then becomes the primary way the self knows itself and knows the world. When there is a strong feeling — positive or negative — it creates a sense of existence. When there is numbness or calm, it can feel like fragmentation. Emptiness. Danger.
For the emotionally dysregulated person, the one wounded by an absence of a consistent loving gaze, calm does not register as peace. It registers as a threat. And emotional intensity becomes the only reliable signal of being alive.
So when things are stable, it doesn’t feel safe. It feels like something is wrong, making healing something difficult.
The Body Is Not Instrumental — It Is Us
This is where St. John Paul II becomes indispensable.
He insists that the person is not reducible to intellect and will. The body is not instrumental. It is constitutive of the person. The body and the body alone makes visible the invisible.
Our emotions are not just passions to be subdued. They are part of our body-soul unity. And through the body — through wounds, relational failures, concupiscence, broken attachment — dysregulation can form long before conscious choice ever enters the picture.
So when someone struggles with emotional regulation, we are not simply dealing with weak willpower. We are dealing with conditions under which self-possession may never have fully formed.
This Is Why Healing Can Feel Boring at First
For someone accustomed to crisis as the anchor of identity, calm feels wrong. It feels like disappearing.
Which means that healing requires restoring the conditions under which the person can begin to know who they are — not just how they feel.
And that only happens in stable relationship.
In mentorship. In spiritual direction. In marriage when healthy. And ultimately, in experiencing the perfect gaze of the Father.
The goal is not suppressing emotion or forcing the will to respond. The goal is integrating it so that you can finally experience the goodness of a stabilized experience of life.
God’s perfection shows us what emotional maturity actually looks like: love that does not fluctuate with mood.
God is always on. He is always God. He loves with the same infinite love. That is perfection. And that is the foundation of emotional regulation.