Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
Take one episode from this week and give it five lines: what set it off, how you read it, what happened in your body, what you took it to mean, and what you wanted to do.
Doing this with an actual event, rather than in general, is what makes it useful. Keep the lines short and resist tidying them into something more reasonable than they were. Most people find the same one or two meanings turning up across quite different events, which is worth far more than any single entry, and it is usually the meaning that is worth working on rather than the trigger.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God knows everything that is in your hearts, whether you conceal or reveal it (Quran 3:29). Nothing is being disclosed by writing it down that was not already known, so you can be blunt on the page.
قُلۡ إِن تُخۡفُواْ مَا فِي صُدُورِكُمۡ أَوۡ تُبۡدُوهُ يَعۡلَمۡهُ ٱللَّهُۗ وَيَعۡلَمُ مَا فِي ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَمَا فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِۗ وَٱللَّهُ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيۡءࣲ قَدِيرࣱ
Say [Prophet], ‘God knows everything that is in your hearts, whether you conceal or reveal it; He knows everything in the heavens and earth; God has power over all things.’
Qur’an 3:29read 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 331 samples and 670 effect sizes maps how acceptance, avoidance, distraction, suppression, mindfulness, problem solving and reappraisal relate to one another and to the ability to tolerate distress. The plain message is that these are distinguishable moves rather than one blur of coping. That mapping is correlational, so treat it as a picture of the territory rather than a set of instructions.
Naragon-Gainey K, McMahon TP, Chacko TP. (2017). The structure of common emotion regulation strategies: A meta-analytic examination.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A flood written down as a sequence becomes something you can hold and work with.
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.
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.
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.