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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
When you cannot feel your own signal you also stop picking up theirs, so the room goes quiet even when they are reaching for you. The loneliness that follows then makes numbing look even more necessary, which is how it seals itself. Small returns work better than grand ones: one sentence about one thing you felt today, said out loud to the person you have gone quiet with.
When God wishes to guide someone, He opens their breast to islam (Quran 6:125). What is wanted is an opened chest, and numbness is the closing of it.
الأنعام
فَمَن يُرِدِ ٱللَّهُ أَن يَهۡدِيَهُۥ يَشۡرَحۡ صَدۡرَهُۥ لِلۡإِسۡلَٰمِۖ وَمَن يُرِدۡ أَن يُضِلَّهُۥ يَجۡعَلۡ صَدۡرَهُۥ ضَيِّقًا حَرَجࣰ ا كَأَنَّمَا يَصَّعَّدُ فِي ٱلسَّمَآءِۚ كَذَٰلِكَ يَجۡعَلُ ٱللَّهُ ٱلرِّجۡسَ عَلَى ٱلَّذِينَ لَا يُؤۡمِنُونَ
When God wishes to guide someone, He opens their breast to islam; when He wishes to lead them astray, He closes and constricts their breast as if they were climbing up to the skies. That is how God makes the foulness of those who do not believe rebound against them
Qur’an 6:125read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of 131 studies found that people with anorexia reported more unhelpful and fewer helpful ways of handling emotion, with the largest difference of all in experiential avoidance, meaning the habit of pushing feeling away. That is one clinical group rather than everyone. What it shows is how far avoidance can rise as a way of coping and how heavily it can sit alongside distress.
Oldershaw A, Lavender T, Sallis H, Stahl D, Schmidt U. (2015). Emotion generation and regulation in anorexia nervosa: a systematic review and meta-analysis of self-report data.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The same closing that keeps your own feeling out keeps the other person's feeling out too.
Numbness after trauma is protective and should not be forced open quickly, especially without support.
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.
When you are trying to reach a feeling, stay with the actual sentence that caused it rather than paraphrasing it into something milder.
Often nothing is buried. The pieces are all there, they have simply never been put next to each other.