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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
Believe the person when they say they are used to it, and hear what is inside the sentence: this has happened often enough that they have built something to get through it. Ask what getting used to it takes, rather than insisting there must be a feeling under there. That question is answerable and does not call them a liar, which is why it tends to be the one that opens things.
We know what his soul whispers to him (Quran 50:16). Whispering is the right word for what is still going on underneath a calm surface.
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وَلَقَدۡ خَلَقۡنَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ وَنَعۡلَمُ مَا تُوَسۡوِسُ بِهِۦ نَفۡسُهُۥۖ وَنَحۡنُ أَقۡرَبُ إِلَيۡهِ مِنۡ حَبۡلِ ٱلۡوَرِيدِ
We created man––We know what his soul whispers to him: We are closer to him than his jugular vein––
Qur’an 50:16read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A cross-cultural comparison found habitual suppression linked with worse functioning among European American students but not among Hong Kong Chinese students, so holding it in is bad for you is not a universal finding. Whether it costs depends on the person and the setting they live in. These were student samples compared across two cultures, so it is a caution against the sweeping version rather than a full account.
Soto JA, Perez CR, Kim YH, Lee EA, Minnick MR. (2011). Is expressive suppression always associated with poorer psychological functioning? A cross-cultural comparison between European Americans and Hong Kong Chinese.. Emotion (Washington, D.C.) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Holding a feeling down is work, and asking about the work is easier to answer than asking about the feeling.
Emptying the feeling out at somebody does not shift it, and being told what to do instead skips over it. What changes things is feeling it with someone who stays.
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.
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.