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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Tolerate distress
Going in with nothing is not brave, it is flooding, and it teaches your system that feelings really are dangerous. Pick two or three supports in advance and try them out before you need them. Standing up and feeling the floor counts as a support. So does the fact that someone is in the next room.
seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast (Quran 2:153). Two definite supports are named, and what is promised alongside them is company rather than removal of the difficulty.
البقرة
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱسۡتَعِينُواْ بِٱلصَّبۡرِ وَٱلصَّلَوٰةِۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ مَعَ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
You who believe, seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast
Qur’an 2:153read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A randomised trial found that a brief, skills-only version of dialectical behaviour therapy reduced suicidal and self-harming behaviour in 84 high-risk outpatients, which suggests the skills themselves carry real benefit rather than working only inside the full programme. That is one trial in a high-risk group. It supports having concrete skills ready rather than relying on willingness alone.
McMain SF, Guimond T, Barnhart R, Habinski L, Streiner DL. (2017). A randomized trial of brief dialectical behaviour therapy skills training in suicidal patients suffering from borderline disorder.. Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Support is what keeps arousal inside the range where you can still learn something.
Anger tells you to say the thing. Fear tells you to leave. You can feel all of it and still not do what it asks, and that gap is the whole skill.
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.
You are allowed to put something down. Put it down with a time to pick it up again: Thursday morning, with my therapist, not tonight.