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Low mood and hard feelings
Feelings are information before they are problems. The practices here are about naming what you feel accurately, sitting with what will not move yet, and acting on what matters to you even on the days nothing feels like anything.
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14 practicesHow long you have
Approach · Emotionally focused
There is a kind of anger that floods a room and a kind that arrives with a request inside it. The second one gets answered.
The difference is audible before it is anything else: the voice steadier, the sentence shorter, an actual ask at the end of it. I am angry, and what…
Nobody ever came for help because they were too happy. What arrives as irritation or flatness on the surface is usually fear, grief or shame underneath.
So when someone snaps at you, or when you go cold and clipped yourself, treat that as the top layer rather than the whole story. The useful question…
Say the frightened thing rather than the sharp thing. It is far more exposing and it is the only version that tends to get a kind reply.
Under most rows sits something like I think there is something wrong with me, or I have already lost you and I am pretending I have not. Sharp words…
Go back to the second before you reacted. Not the argument, not the history, just that one second and what crossed you in it.
Most people have to genuinely search for the answer, and the searching is where the work happens rather than in whatever they eventually say.…
Once the feeling is actually in the room, ask the plain question: what did you hear her saying about you? The answer is usually where the sting really lives.
A comment about the washing up does not floor anyone by itself. It floors you because of what you heard underneath it, something along the lines of…
Watch for the swerve. Right after something tender gets said, along comes a story about a brother or a colleague or a thing from years ago, and the tender part quietly gets left behind.
Swerving is not dishonesty. It is what people do when a feeling gets close, and it works, which is exactly why it is so easy to follow along.…
If a conversation has wandered off and you have lost the thread, go back to the last thing that had real feeling in it, and go back using the words they used.
Not a summary of those words. The actual phrase: 'you said she has her standards and you will never meet them, and your eyes went red when you said…
You do not have to reflect back everything a person just told you. Pick up the part that carries the weight and say that much.
A long, careful summary can flatten what someone has just risked saying. If the heart of it is that he feels defeated and frightened of never being…
When all you can say is that something happened and you went off, take it apart in five pieces: what set it off, how you read it, what your body did, what you made it mean, and what you wanted to do next.
Written out on paper it usually stops being a blur. You often find the trigger was small and the meaning was enormous, or that your body was already…
Ask what is happening in the body right now, in the moment it happens, rather than asking afterwards what the feeling was.
A shutdown is quickest to catch while it is switching on. The question that works is small and physical: what is happening in your chest, your…
The same sentence lands completely differently depending on who says it. If nothing stirs when it is described second hand, let the person it belongs to say it to you directly.
A therapist repeating what your partner said is information. Your partner turning to you and saying it, in their own voice, is an event. That is why…
Rather than arguing with someone who says they feel nothing, say plainly what would ordinarily hurt about it. Hearing that the person you love is disappointed in you is a hard thing to hear.
Said warmly, this is not a challenge. It sets out what a person would usually feel and leaves them to notice the gap between that and what they are…
When you go blank or shut down under pressure, try meeting it with 'of course I did'. That response was learned somewhere it was needed, and it is still running long after the danger passed.
Put a place on it if you can. Whose house were you in when going quiet was the safest thing available? Naming where it came from does two things at…
There is a real difference between not caring and not knowing how. A lot of what gets called failing at a relationship is simply a skill nobody ever taught you.
If you go blank when your partner cries, or answer hurt with logic, ask who ever showed you anything better. Probably nobody did. A gap like that can…