Question 1

Name the specific feeling you learned to manage most carefully. The one that, when it arrives, you have the most practiced response to containing. Where did you learn to contain it? *(Listening for: the primary suppressed affect and its origin. Most people can name it when asked directly. The naming is often the first time they have said it aloud.)*

Question 2

What would you describe as the emotional range of your average week? Name the upper and lower end of what you actually feel, not what you believe you should feel. *(Listening for: the compression of the emotional register. A very narrow reported range in either direction, particularly the absence of the lower registers, is the signature of systemic dimming.)*

Question 3

Is there a joy that you know should be available to you, that other people seem to access, that you find yourself unable to quite reach? Name it specifically. *(Listening for: the shadow joy. The approximate but not-quite, the near-miss that the dimming produces when it cuts the channel to pain and cuts the channel to joy simultaneously.)*

Question 4

What feeling, if you allowed it fully, do you believe would be intolerable? Name that feeling. Then sit with the question of whether the belief about its intolerability has ever actually been tested. *(Listening for: the untested hypothesis at the core of the dimming. Very often the feared feeling, when finally encountered, is survivable in ways the person had not imagined.)* ---