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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Tolerate distress
The version that hurts is the one you fall into without deciding and feel ashamed of afterwards. Choosing changes the whole thing: I am not up to this tonight, so I am watching something until eleven. Same behaviour, different relationship to it, and nothing to clear up in the morning.
patiently endure what they say, ignore them politely (Quran 73:10). Disengaging is named there as a permitted move, not as a failure of endurance.
المزمل
وَٱصۡبِرۡ عَلَىٰ مَا يَقُولُونَ وَٱهۡجُرۡهُمۡ هَجۡرࣰ ا جَمِيلࣰ ا
patiently endure what they say, ignore them politely
Qur’an 73:10read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analytic mapping of common regulation strategies found that acceptance, distress tolerance and non-judgement group together and separate out from avoidance-based strategies, suggesting these really are distinguishable skills rather than one lump. That gives some backing to the idea that deliberate disengagement is a different animal from avoidance. It is a structural finding about how strategies cluster, not a trial of using them.
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.
Chosen and time limited is a decision, while unplanned and endless is a slide.
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.
When a feeling is genuinely unbearable, escaping it is the only regulator you have, so the drinking or the shutting down is doing a job. Build up what you can bear and the job disappears.
Ask what you were taught about crying, about anger, about needing anything. Not what you believe now, but what you were told then, in the words that were actually used.