Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
You cannot taste food you are eating fast. Feeling works the same way, so slow the pace until there is something to actually notice.
In practice that means one sentence at a time, with a pause after it, and questions like what happened in you just then. Both of you will want to speed up, because slow is uncomfortable and fast feels productive. It is worth staying with, since a feeling rushed through is just the old loop running again, and a feeling given room can turn into something else.
Qur’an and Sunnah
it is in the remembrance of God that hearts find peace (Quran 13:28). Remembrance is slow and repeated by nature, and hurry is the one thing it cannot survive.
ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ وَتَطۡمَئِنُّ قُلُوبُهُم بِذِكۡرِ ٱللَّهِۗ أَلَا بِذِكۡرِ ٱللَّهِ تَطۡمَئِنُّ ٱلۡقُلُوبُ
those who have faith and whose hearts find peace in the remembrance of God- truly it is in the remembrance of God that hearts find peace
Qur’an 13:28read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In an imaging study, breathlessness and pain were both handled in the insula, anterior cingulate, amygdala and thalamus, regions with a well documented part in fear and anxiety, which shows bodily warnings and emotions running through shared machinery. That is a reason to take the body's tempo seriously when you are working with feeling. It is a small experimental study of specific sensations, so hold the wider conclusion loosely.
von Leupoldt A, Sommer T, Kegat S, Baumann HJ, Klose H, Dahme B, Büchel C. (2009). Dyspnea and pain share emotion-related brain network.. NeuroImage doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A feeling has to be experienced slowly enough to be noticed before it can change.
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
Going numb is a good way to survive something and a poor way to live near someone. It shuts the line in both directions at once.
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.
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.