Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Tolerate distress
Ask what you were taught about crying, about anger, about needing anything. Not what you believe now, but what you were told then, in the words that were actually used.
Most rules about feelings were installed rather than chosen, and once you can hear the original sentence, boys do not cry, do not be so sensitive, it stops sounding like your own considered opinion. That is the point at which it becomes revisable. You may well find the rule made complete sense in that house and makes none in your life now.
Qur’an and Sunnah
you are sure to hear much that is hurtful (Quran 3:186). What was said to you is treated there as a real injury, not as something you should simply have absorbed.
۞لَتُبۡلَوُنَّ فِيٓ أَمۡوَٰلِكُمۡ وَأَنفُسِكُمۡ وَلَتَسۡمَعُنَّ مِنَ ٱلَّذِينَ أُوتُواْ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مِن قَبۡلِكُمۡ وَمِنَ ٱلَّذِينَ أَشۡرَكُوٓاْ أَذࣰ ى كَثِيرࣰ اۚ وَإِن تَصۡبِرُواْ وَتَتَّقُواْ فَإِنَّ ذَٰلِكَ مِنۡ عَزۡمِ ٱلۡأُمُورِ
you are sure to be tested through your possessions and persons; you are sure to hear much that is hurtful from those who were given the Scripture before you and from those who associate others with God. If you are steadfast and mindful of God, that is the best course
Qur’an 3:186read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a cross-sectional study of inpatients with substance use problems, different kinds of childhood maltreatment lined up with different adult difficulties, with physical abuse specifically linked to aggression and trouble regulating emotion. That is a snapshot of one clinical group and cannot establish cause. It is consistent with the idea that what happened around emotion early on shapes what happens with it later.
Banducci AN, Hoffman EM, Lejuez CW, Lejuez CW, Koenen KC, Koenen KC. (2014). The impact of childhood abuse on inpatient substance users: specific links with risky sex, aggression, and emotion dysregulation.. Child abuse & neglect doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A rule you can hear in somebody else's voice stops feeling like a fact about you.
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
Whether a feeling is nowhere to be found or far too much, the questions are the same: what breath, what movement, what sentence, what person helps me stay with this?
Wise mind is not a calmer version of you. It is the state where what you feel and what you have thought through are both in the room, and neither has thrown the other out.
If a movement keeps cutting a feeling short, work with the movement rather than the feeling. Stay with the dabbing of the eyes itself, slowly, and see what turns up.