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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
You do not need to know what it is yet. Hold the smaller version for a while: something here is difficult, and the pulling back is how I have been handling it. If you are sitting with someone who has only managed 'I just shut down', you can offer them that same small step and then stop, rather than filling in what the hard thing must be.
God inspired the soul to know its own rebellion and piety (Quran 91:8). Inner movement carries information, and reading it honestly is part of the work rather than a distraction from it.
الشمس
فَأَلۡهَمَهَا فُجُورَهَا وَتَقۡوَىٰهَا
and inspired it [to know] its own rebellion and piety
Qur’an 91:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
An fMRI study of anxiety found that it sharpened people's detection of and response to threatening faces rather than pleasant ones, which the researchers read as the emotion doing a job rather than malfunctioning. This was one laboratory task with one emotion, so it will not carry much weight on its own. What it does suggest is that a pull away from something is tracking a real appraisal, and is worth reading before it is overruled.
Robinson OJ, Charney DR, Overstreet C, Vytal K, Grillon C. (2012). The adaptive threat bias in anxiety: amygdala-dorsomedial prefrontal cortex coupling and aversive amplification.. NeuroImage doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The urge to escape points straight back at whatever it is escaping from, so following it gives you somewhere to look.
When you are trying to reach a feeling, stay with the actual sentence that caused it rather than paraphrasing it into something milder.
If a conversation has wandered off and you have lost the thread, go back to the last thing that had real feeling in it, and go back using the words they used.
If the size of the feeling does not match the size of what just happened, it is probably carrying something older into the room.