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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
This is why advice to communicate better so often goes nowhere. The words come out tidy and land as nothing, because there was no felt need inside them for the other person to answer. Try finishing the sentence what I really wanted in that moment was, and let the first honest ending stand even if it sounds childish. Being told I needed to know you still wanted me here is answerable in a way that you never listen is not.
I will feel stressed and tongue-tied, so send Aaron too (Quran 26:13). Moses names the feeling first and then makes a specific request, in that order.
الشعراء
وَيَضِيقُ صَدۡرِي وَلَا يَنطَلِقُ لِسَانِي فَأَرۡسِلۡ إِلَىٰ هَٰرُونَ
and I will feel stressed and tongue-tied, so send Aaron too
Qur’an 26:13read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of 15 neuroimaging studies found that difficulty identifying and describing feelings went with reduced activation in several brain regions during emotional processing. So the difficulty looks like a real difference in how the work gets done, not laziness or evasion. These are small imaging studies pooled together, which makes the finding suggestive rather than conclusive.
van der Velde J, Servaas MN, Goerlich KS, Bruggeman R, Horton P, Costafreda SG, Aleman A. (2013). Neural correlates of alexithymia: a meta-analysis of emotion processing studies.. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A request only carries weight when it is carrying a real need behind it.
Emptying the feeling out at somebody does not shift it, and being told what to do instead skips over it. What changes things is feeling it with someone who stays.
If all you can say is that you want to get away, that is already information. Nobody moves away from nothing, so somewhere in there is something that felt hard.
If a conversation has wandered off and you have lost the thread, go back to the last thing that had real feeling in it, and go back using the words they used.