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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
You can tell the difference from the inside. Venting has a rehearsed quality, the same phrases coming round again with the heat kept up. Advice arrives before the feeling has been felt and leaves you oddly flatter than before. The third thing is slower and more awkward: saying the true, unimpressive sentence and finding somebody still there afterwards.
Suffering has truly afflicted me, but you are the Most Merciful of the merciful (Quran 21:83). Job states the pain plainly to someone who is listening, which is neither a performance nor a lecture.
الأنبياء
۞وَأَيُّوبَ إِذۡ نَادَىٰ رَبَّهُۥٓ أَنِّي مَسَّنِيَ ٱلضُّرُّ وَأَنتَ أَرۡحَمُ ٱلرَّٰحِمِينَ
Remember Job, when he cried to his Lord, ‘Suffering has truly afflicted me, but you are the Most Merciful of the merciful.’
Qur’an 21:83read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analytic review of 114 studies found that rumination, avoidance and suppression carried large associations with mental health problems, while reappraisal and acceptance carried only small to medium ones. Habitually turning away from a feeling looked more damaging than the particular way of turning towards it, and going over the same grievance again is one of the ways of not turning towards it. These are correlations across many samples rather than an experiment.
Aldao A, Nolen-Hoeksema S, Schweizer S. (2010). Emotion-regulation strategies across psychopathology: A meta-analytic review.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Going over a feeling keeps it turning, and being talked out of it puts it away, while being with someone in it lets it change.
Watch for the swerve. Right after something tender gets said, along comes a story about a brother or a colleague or a thing from years ago, and the tender part quietly gets left behind.
You cannot taste food you are eating fast. Feeling works the same way, so slow the pace until there is something to actually notice.
When you are trying to reach a feeling, stay with the actual sentence that caused it rather than paraphrasing it into something milder.