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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When you go numb
Said warmly, this is not a challenge. It sets out what a person would usually feel and leaves them to notice the gap between that and what they are reporting, and very often something moves in the noticing. It works because it takes their side rather than doubting them. Delivered with any edge of gotcha it does the opposite, so the tone has to be soft and unhurried and genuinely willing to be wrong.
We are well aware that your heart is weighed down by what they say (Quran 15:97). The weight is named for him by someone else, without waiting for him to report it first.
الحجر
وَلَقَدۡ نَعۡلَمُ أَنَّكَ يَضِيقُ صَدۡرُكَ بِمَا يَقُولُونَ
We are well aware that your heart is weighed down by what they say
Qur’an 15:97read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The emotion is usually there rather than gone. Pooling fifteen imaging studies, difficulty naming emotions was associated with altered activity in regions supporting bodily awareness and emotional evaluation, not with an absence of emotion. What is disrupted is the reaching and the naming, not the feeling itself.
van der Velde J, Servaas MN, Goerlich KS, Bruggeman R, Horton P, Costafreda SG, Aleman A. (2013). Neural correlates of alexithymia: a meta-analysis of emotion processing studies.. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Naming what would normally hurt lets a person notice what they are not letting themselves feel.
If the person holds their ground and says the feeling is not there, let it go rather than pressing; being pushed is its own reason to shut down.
Going still and needing nothing is usually something a person worked out young, somewhere it was the sensible answer.
If a medicine has taken the edge off everything, including the good things, that is worth raising with whoever prescribed it. Taking the sharpness out of pain is one thing. Feeling nothing at all is not a way to live.
Pulling back makes you harder to reach, which makes people give up on reaching, which looks like proof that nobody was coming. The loop closes itself.