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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
Once a feeling has a job it stops being a defect you have to apologise for. That matters, because the ones we treat as shameful are precisely the ones we hide, and hidden feelings keep working on us unsupervised. Try saying it as a sentence: this fear is trying to get me out of a room where I expect to be humiliated. You can then decide whether that is what the situation actually needs.
I plead my grief and sorrow before God (Quran 12:86). Jacob's sorrow is not argued out of him, it is directed somewhere it can be received.
يوسف
قَالَ إِنَّمَآ أَشۡكُواْ بَثِّي وَحُزۡنِيٓ إِلَى ٱللَّهِ وَأَعۡلَمُ مِنَ ٱللَّهِ مَا لَا تَعۡلَمُونَ
He said, ‘I plead my grief and sorrow before God. I have knowledge from God that you do not have
Qur’an 12:86read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In an imaging experiment, anxiety sharpened people's detection of and response to threatening faces rather than pleasant ones, and the authors describe this as anxiety doing its job rather than going wrong. That is a good picture of a signal working as designed. It was a controlled laboratory task, so it shows the sharpening clearly without telling you when the sharpening is worth its cost.
Robinson OJ, Charney DR, Overstreet C, Vytal K, Grillon C. (2012). The adaptive threat bias in anxiety: amygdala-dorsomedial prefrontal cortex coupling and aversive amplification.. NeuroImage doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A feeling with a purpose can be listened to and then answered, while a feeling treated as a fault can only be suppressed.
When all you can say is that something happened and you went off, take it apart in five pieces: what set it off, how you read it, what your body did, what you made it mean, and what you wanted to do next.
If someone is saying so much that you have lost the thread, stop them kindly and check. Sorry, that is a lot and it matters, can I say back what I have got so far.
Going deeper into a feeling only helps if it is being put in order at the same time. Depth without order is just flooding.