Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Tolerate distress
Sometimes the thing that stops your tears is an order somebody gave you decades ago, and you are the one carrying it out now. One woman found her father's words sitting behind a habit of wiping her face dry the moment she cried.
That is worth knowing because it changes who the rule belongs to. It was his voice, in her hands, running long after he had gone. Naming the source does not undo it on the spot, but it does let you ask a question that was not available before: do I still want to be following this?
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not grieve over them; do not be distressed by their scheming (Quran 16:127). What others did is placed outside you there, which is where an inherited prohibition belongs too.
وَٱصۡبِرۡ وَمَا صَبۡرُكَ إِلَّا بِٱللَّهِۚ وَلَا تَحۡزَنۡ عَلَيۡهِمۡ وَلَا تَكُ فِي ضَيۡقࣲ مِّمَّا يَمۡكُرُونَ
So [Prophet] be steadfast: your steadfastness comes only from God. Do not grieve over them; do not be distressed by their scheming
Qur’an 16:127read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A longitudinal cohort of nearly 11,000 young people found two different routes into self-harm, one running through long-standing emotional and behavioural difficulty from early on and another emerging later without those early signs. Early experience shapes some of these paths and does not account for all of them. So it is worth looking back for the origin of a pattern without assuming one is always there to find.
Uh S, Dalmaijer ES, Siugzdaite R, Ford TJ, Astle DE. (2021). Two Pathways to Self-Harm in Adolescence.. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A rule stops being simply yours the moment you can hear whose voice it is in.
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
Before you go anywhere near the hard memory, you need to be able to stay in your own body while something difficult is happening in it. That capacity is part of the work, not a delay before it starts.
Before telling someone what you have noticed about them, ask whether they want it. Do you mind if I offer something back to you? Then describe only what you saw, plainly.
Anger wants the body to do something, so let it. Breathe deeper and higher into the chest, stand up, press both palms hard into a wall, walk on the spot, push down through your feet.