Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
Often nothing is buried. The pieces are all there, they have simply never been put next to each other.
This hurts but I do not know why usually means the event, the feeling in the body and the meaning are being held separately. So join them up out loud, slowly: she said that, my stomach dropped, and what I took it to mean was that I am replaceable. People expect emotional work to be digging. Far more of it is assembly, and it is a relief to find there was no secret to be excavated.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Moses' mother felt a void in her heart (Quran 28:10). A void is a real state with no content to it yet, and she is not told she is imagining it.
وَأَصۡبَحَ فُؤَادُ أُمِّ مُوسَىٰ فَٰرِغًاۖ إِن كَادَتۡ لَتُبۡدِي بِهِۦ لَوۡلَآ أَن رَّبَطۡنَا عَلَىٰ قَلۡبِهَا لِتَكُونَ مِنَ ٱلۡمُؤۡمِنِينَ
The next day, Moses’ mother felt a void in her heart––if We had not strengthened it to make her one of those who believe, she would have revealed everything about him––
Qur’an 28:10read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of 66 samples covering over seven thousand people found the link between difficulty naming feelings and awareness of the body was small overall and depended heavily on how bodily awareness was measured. The popular story that it all comes down to reading your body is stronger than the data behind it. So keep the body in the picture, and do not expect it to hold the whole answer.
Trevisan DA, Altschuler MR, Bagdasarov A, Carlos C, Duan S, Hamo E, Kala S, McNair ML, Parker T, Stahl D, Winkelman T, Zhou M, McPartland JC. (2019). A meta-analysis on the relationship between interoceptive awareness and alexithymia: Distinguishing interoceptive accuracy and sensibility.. Journal of abnormal psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A feeling becomes speakable once its parts are joined into something with a shape.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
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.
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.
I am used to it is not the same as I feel nothing. It usually means a great deal of practice at feeling nothing, and that practice costs something.