Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
Feeling has no real sense of when. An old injury arrives in the present body with all its original force, which is why a small remark can flatten you. The useful part is that it can be worked with now, in the moment it turns up, instead of being traced back through a history. Say it as it is: I know this is bigger than what you said, and it is landing in an old place.
His eyes went white with grief and he was filled with sorrow (Quran 12:84). Jacob's loss was years old and entirely present in his body, which is how grief tends to keep time.
يوسف
وَتَوَلَّىٰ عَنۡهُمۡ وَقَالَ يَٰٓأَسَفَىٰ عَلَىٰ يُوسُفَ وَٱبۡيَضَّتۡ عَيۡنَاهُ مِنَ ٱلۡحُزۡنِ فَهُوَ كَظِيمࣱ
and he turned away from them, saying, ‘Alas for Joseph!’ His eyes went white with grief and he was filled with sorrow
Qur’an 12:84read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In an imaging experiment, briefly anticipating something bad engaged mechanisms that genuinely prepare a person, while sustained anticipation recruited different regions tied to anxiety and defensive behaviour. The same signal turns costly once it stops switching off. Applied here, a feeling that outlives its occasion is behaving as the study describes rather than telling you something new about now.
Grupe DW, Oathes DJ, Nitschke JB. (2013). Dissecting the anticipation of aversion reveals dissociable neural networks.. Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Feeling carries its original charge forward, so the past arrives in the present at full volume.
If old memories return with the force of happening again, that is trauma territory and is best worked on with a therapist.
When someone finally gets one true word out about how they feel, resist explaining it to them. Ask what that word is like from the inside and let them find the rest.
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.
Go back to the second before you reacted. Not the argument, not the history, just that one second and what crossed you in it.