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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
Swerving is not dishonesty. It is what people do when a feeling gets close, and it works, which is exactly why it is so easy to follow along. Listening, you can let the story finish and then come back: 'can we go back a moment, because something happened just before that'. Telling it, you can catch yourself mid anecdote and say so out loud.
Jonah 'went off angrily' and then 'cried out in the deep darkness' (Quran 21:87). The turn came when he stopped going away and spoke from where he actually was.
الأنبياء
وَذَا ٱلنُّونِ إِذ ذَّهَبَ مُغَٰضِبࣰ ا فَظَنَّ أَن لَّن نَّقۡدِرَ عَلَيۡهِ فَنَادَىٰ فِي ٱلظُّلُمَٰتِ أَن لَّآ إِلَٰهَ إِلَّآ أَنتَ سُبۡحَٰنَكَ إِنِّي كُنتُ مِنَ ٱلظَّٰلِمِينَ
And remember the man with the whale,when he went off angrily, thinking We could not restrict him, but then he cried out in the deep darkness, ‘There is no God but You, glory be to You, I was wrong.’
Qur’an 21:87read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of 331 samples mapped how distraction, avoidance, suppression, acceptance, mindfulness, problem solving and reappraisal relate to one another and to distress tolerance across 670 effect sizes. It is a map of how these moves cluster, not a verdict on whether any one of them is wrong in a given moment. What it offers here is a name for the swerve: distraction is a recognised way of managing feeling, not a random detour.
Naragon-Gainey K, McMahon TP, Chacko TP. (2017). The structure of common emotion regulation strategies: A meta-analytic examination.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Changing the subject brings the feeling down, which is the same reason the important thing gets lost.
When somebody says they just get on with it, take the getting on with it seriously. That is the door, and arguing with the nothing is a wall.
If the size of the feeling does not match the size of what just happened, it is probably carrying something older into the room.
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.