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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Tolerate distress
Numbness and overwhelm look like opposites and they are both a problem of not being able to stay with the material. The same supports work in either direction depending on how you use them, so breathing more deeply can bring a faint signal up or hold a big one steady. That is convenient, because it means one set of things to remember rather than two.
truly where there is hardship there is also ease (Quran 94:6). The same short line is given twice over, and repeating one steady sentence is a good deal of what this work asks of you.
الشرح
إِنَّ مَعَ ٱلۡعُسۡرِ يُسۡرࣰ ا
truly where there is hardship there is also ease
Qur’an 94:6read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A review of this field concluded that difficulties regulating emotion turn up across a wide range of mental health problems and are a plausible thing to treat, while being clear that most of the evidence is correlational. That fits one set of tools being applied to quite different presentations. It does not show that the same protocol suits everyone.
Berking M, Wupperman P. (2012). Emotion regulation and mental health: recent findings, current challenges, and future directions.. Current opinion in psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Too little feeling and too much are both ways of not being able to stay, so both need whatever helps you stay.
Watch for the small thing that happens right as a feeling starts: the reach for a tissue, the laugh, the change of subject. Notice it once and say nothing, notice it again, and only then mention it.
Before you go anywhere near the hard memory, you need to be able to stay in your own body while something difficult is happening in it. That capacity is part of the work, not a delay before it starts.
When one bit of you wants to let the feeling come and another bit is frightened of it, you are not being difficult. You are two things at once, and both of them have their reasons.