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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
So when someone snaps at you, or when you go cold and clipped yourself, treat that as the top layer rather than the whole story. The useful question is not why are you being like this but what were you afraid of just then. Expect the honest answer to be softer and smaller than the behaviour was, and expect it to take a while to arrive.
God is aware of the most furtive of glances, and of all that hearts conceal (Quran 40:19). What is being hidden is not hidden everywhere, which takes some of the pressure off having to detect it perfectly.
غافر
يَعۡلَمُ خَآئِنَةَ ٱلۡأَعۡيُنِ وَمَا تُخۡفِي ٱلصُّدُورُ
God is aware of the most furtive of glances, and of all that hearts conceal
Qur’an 40:19read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a long prospective study following 536 patients for up to thirty-one years, overt irritability and anger turned out to be common in unipolar depression even though they are not part of the diagnosis. What presents on the surface and what is underneath are plainly not the same thing. It is an observational study of a clinical group, so read it as a pattern worth expecting rather than a rule.
Judd LL, Schettler PJ, Coryell W, Akiskal HS, Fiedorowicz JG. (2013). Overt irritability/anger in unipolar major depressive episodes: past and current characteristics and implications for long-term course.. JAMA psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The sharp feeling is easier to show, so it goes first, and the tender one that set it off stays behind it.
You do not need a long list of feeling words. Half a dozen you can actually reach for under pressure will do more than forty you have to look up.
Say 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.
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.