Areas › Your body › Your nervous system
Try saying it plainly, out loud if you can: my body did what it needed to do, and I am still here.
Say the specific version rather than the general one. My body went still so it would be over sooner. My body kept quiet so it would not be noticed. Written down it looks too simple to help, and it often lands anyway, because it may be the first time the story has been told without a verdict attached.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'Did We not relieve your heart for you' (Quran 94:1). Relief is described as something done for a person under strain, which makes it something to ask for rather than to earn.
أَلَمۡ نَشۡرَحۡ لَكَ صَدۡرَكَ
Did We not relieve your heart for you [Prophet]
Qur’an 94:1read 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 cognitive appraisals found that how a person sizes up a stressful situation, and which emotion they feel about it, predicts their cortisol and immune response. Interpretation shapes physiology and not only the other way round. These were laboratory stressors rather than trauma memories, and the effects were measured across groups, so the fair claim is that reframing is a real lever, not a large or reliable one for everybody.
Denson TF, Spanovic M, Miller N. (2009). Cognitive appraisals and emotions predict cortisol and immune responses: a meta-analysis of acute laboratory social stressors and emotion inductions.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
How you interpret what happened changes what your body does with the memory.
When not to
If saying it brings the event back vividly instead of settling you, stop and do this with a therapist.
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
Most of the traffic on the nerve joining your gut, heart and lungs to your brain is heading upwards. When your stomach turns or your chest tightens, your body is reporting in.
The unsettled pattern is not simply a smaller rhythm. It is a jagged one, swinging up and down without much order to it.
If your response to being hurt was to go blank rather than fight or run, look at how old you were and how big they were. Blank may have been the only thing left.