Areas › Low mood and hard feelings
Low mood and hard feelings
Feelings are information before they are problems. The practices here are about naming what you feel accurately, sitting with what will not move yet, and acting on what matters to you even on the days nothing feels like anything.
What works for this
Behavioural activation
The strongest self help evidence in this whole field says the way out of a flat heavy state is through what you do, not through what you think. You act first and the feeling follows, which is the opposite of what the state tells you.
One move, today
Choose one small thing you used to do and do it today without waiting to feel like it. Ten minutes is enough. Waiting to feel like it is the trap.
What matches
8 practicesSay the frightened thing rather than the sharp thing. It is far more exposing and it is the only version that tends to get a kind reply.
Under most rows sits something like I think there is something wrong with me, or I have already lost you and I am pretending I have not. Sharp words…
Once the feeling is actually in the room, ask the plain question: what did you hear her saying about you? The answer is usually where the sting really lives.
A comment about the washing up does not floor anyone by itself. It floors you because of what you heard underneath it, something along the lines of…
You do not have to reflect back everything a person just told you. Pick up the part that carries the weight and say that much.
A long, careful summary can flatten what someone has just risked saying. If the heart of it is that he feels defeated and frightened of never being…
The same sentence lands completely differently depending on who says it. If nothing stirs when it is described second hand, let the person it belongs to say it to you directly.
A therapist repeating what your partner said is information. Your partner turning to you and saying it, in their own voice, is an event. That is why…
Rather than arguing with someone who says they feel nothing, say plainly what would ordinarily hurt about it. Hearing that the person you love is disappointed in you is a hard thing to hear.
Said warmly, this is not a challenge. It sets out what a person would usually feel and leaves them to notice the gap between that and what they are…
When you go blank or shut down under pressure, try meeting it with 'of course I did'. That response was learned somewhere it was needed, and it is still running long after the danger passed.
Put a place on it if you can. Whose house were you in when going quiet was the safest thing available? Naming where it came from does two things at…
There is a real difference between not caring and not knowing how. A lot of what gets called failing at a relationship is simply a skill nobody ever taught you.
If you go blank when your partner cries, or answer hurt with logic, ask who ever showed you anything better. Probably nobody did. A gap like that can…
Anger wants the body to do something, so let it. Breathe deeper and higher into the chest, stand up, press both palms hard into a wall, walk on the spot, push down through your feet.
Pressing against something solid gives the mobilisation an outlet with nothing broken and nobody hurt. Keep going until the charge drops a little,…