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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
A lot of the distress is not the feelings themselves but the argument over which one is the real one. Try saying both plainly, out loud: I am relieved and I am heartbroken. The habit of one feeling at a time is partly cultural rather than a rule about people. Holding the pair is uncomfortable at first, and it does settle.
'where there is hardship there is also ease' (Quran 94:5). Hardship and ease are named together, in the same place, which is what a mixed feeling is.
الشرح
فَإِنَّ مَعَ ٱلۡعُسۡرِ يُسۡرًا
So truly where there is hardship there is also ease
Qur’an 94:5read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A research review argued that ADHD makes better sense when emotion and its regulation are treated as two interacting parts of the picture, instead of everything being read off executive difficulties. A small pilot randomised study in a different group, 64 people with borderline personality disorder, compared mindfulness training with interpersonal effectiveness skills across separate facets of impulsivity. Both are pointers rather than proof, and neither one tested holding two feelings at once.
Martel MM. (2009). Research review: a new perspective on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: emotion dysregulation and trait models.. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines doi
Soler J, Elices M, Pascual JC, Martín-Blanco A, Feliu-Soler A, Carmona C, Portella MJ. (2016). Effects of mindfulness training on different components of impulsivity in borderline personality disorder: results from a pilot randomized study.. Borderline personality disorder and emotion dysregulation doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Feelings do not have to be sorted into true and false before you are allowed to carry them.
The big promise is usually made in a rush of love rather than after a calculation. It is meant sincerely, which is exactly why it keeps happening, and why the disappointment keeps landing.
What you expect from a treatment shapes what you get from it. That is worth a conversation before you start, not months later when it has not worked.
The change mostly happens between the sessions rather than in them. Catching a thought where it actually turns up, at the kitchen table or in the car park, is what makes a new one stick.