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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Tolerate distress
Try naming the urge in your head as it arrives: this is the urge to send the message. Named, it stops being the only available next step and becomes one option with a price on it. The aim was never to have fewer feelings, it is to stop paying so much for what you do with them.
if a person is patient and forgives, this is one of the greatest things (Quran 42:43). Patience there is not the absence of the feeling, it is what you do once it has arrived.
الشورى
وَلَمَن صَبَرَ وَغَفَرَ إِنَّ ذَٰلِكَ لَمِنۡ عَزۡمِ ٱلۡأُمُورِ
though if a person is patient and forgives, this is one of the greatest things
Qur’an 42:43read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of dialectical behaviour therapy with adolescents found reduced self-harm compared with control treatments, a moderate effect, and a smaller effect on suicidal thinking. The behaviour moved more than the thinking did, which is roughly what a skill aimed at the gap between feeling and action would predict. It is a whole treatment being tested rather than this one move.
Kothgassner OD, Goreis A, Robinson K, Huscsava MM, Schmahl C, Plener PL. (2021). Efficacy of dialectical behavior therapy for adolescent self-harm and suicidal ideation: a systematic review and meta-analysis.. Psychological medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Naming the urge puts a small space between the feeling and your hands.
Let your hands fall open, palms up, on your lap or at your sides, and breathe there for a minute. It is oddly hard to stay in full fight with open hands.
Sometimes the thing that stops your tears is an order somebody gave you decades ago, and you are the one carrying it out now. One woman found her father's words sitting behind a habit of wiping her face dry the moment she cried.
A calming skill handed over at the wrong moment reads as your anger is not welcome here. For someone taught as a child that their anger was unacceptable, that is the old prohibition arriving again in kinder clothes.