Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Tolerate distress
A calming skill handed over at the wrong moment reads as your anger is not welcome here. For someone taught as a child that their anger was unacceptable, that is the old prohibition arriving again in kinder clothes.
Let the anger be seen first. Say that it makes sense, that there is a reason for it, and only then offer anything that settles the body. The order matters more than the technique does. And if you are the one being offered a skill and something in you bristles, that bristle is worth saying out loud rather than swallowing.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Seek help with steadfastness and prayer, though this is hard indeed for anyone but the humble (Quran 2:45). Even the instruction comes with an admission that it is hard, and that is the acknowledgement a skill should be offered with.
وَٱسۡتَعِينُواْ بِٱلصَّبۡرِ وَٱلصَّلَوٰةِۚ وَإِنَّهَا لَكَبِيرَةٌ إِلَّا عَلَى ٱلۡخَٰشِعِينَ
Seek help with steadfastness and prayer- though this is hard indeed for anyone but the humble
Qur’an 2:45read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Experimental work on social anxiety found that protective behaviours are not all alike: strategies involving hiding oneself made interactions worse, while impression management strategies behaved differently and were not uniformly harmful. What carries over is that the same outward behaviour can serve very different functions. Whether a regulation skill regulates or suppresses depends on what it is doing for the person using it.
Plasencia ML, Alden LE, Taylor CT. (2011). Differential effects of safety behaviour subtypes in social anxiety disorder.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A skill offered before the feeling has been welcomed lands as a request to stop having it.
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
Soothe yourself through the senses: a warm drink, a soft cloth, a good scent, a slow walk. Be kind to the body.
Tell yourself the true thing: this feeling is real, and it is temporary. No state lasts. Ride it out.
Watch for the small thing that happens right as a feeling starts: the reach for a tissue, the laugh, the change of subject. Notice it once and say nothing, notice it again, and only then mention it.