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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Tolerate distress
That framing is useful because it tells you what to do next. You do not have to understand where it came from before anything can change. What you need is small chosen doses of the sensation, with enough support around you, often enough that your system stops filing the feeling itself under danger.
We shall certainly test you with fear and hunger, and loss of property, lives, and crops (Quran 2:155). Fear is listed among the expected things, so its arrival is not proof that something has gone wrong in you.
البقرة
وَلَنَبۡلُوَنَّكُم بِشَيۡءࣲ مِّنَ ٱلۡخَوۡفِ وَٱلۡجُوعِ وَنَقۡصࣲ مِّنَ ٱلۡأَمۡوَٰلِ وَٱلۡأَنفُسِ وَٱلثَّمَرَٰتِۗ وَبَشِّرِ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
We shall certainly test you with fear and hunger, and loss of property, lives, and crops. But [Prophet], give good news to those who are steadfast
Qur’an 2:155read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A randomised trial showed that a brief intervention reduced people's fear of their own anxiety sensations, a known risk factor, in a short space of time. A separate randomised experiment found that reducing this fear of bodily sensations also lowered anxiety about pain, suggesting the fear generalises across different kinds of discomfort. Both are short studies of a specific fear rather than tests of trauma treatment.
Keough ME, Schmidt NB. (2012). Refinement of a brief anxiety sensitivity reduction intervention.. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology doi
Watt MC, Stewart SH, Lefaivre MJ, Uman LS. (2006). A brief cognitive-behavioral approach to reducing anxiety sensitivity decreases pain-related anxiety.. Cognitive behaviour therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A fear stays certain of itself only while you keep away from the evidence.
If contact with the sensation reliably tips you into panic or dissociation, do this with a therapist rather than by yourself.
Say it plainly: my anger is allowed here. It is a healthy feeling and it is usually the thing telling me where a line should go.
Accepting reality as it is means dropping the fight with what has already happened. It does not mean staying somewhere that is still harming you.
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.