sit with that

How to spot it

Read the sentence above the pause and ask it one plain question: what feeling is named here? A line that asks a reader to sit with that wants a beat of quiet around something, and the something has to be on the page already. Cover the instruction with your hand and read what is left. If the sentence above it says what happened and what it cost (she read the message twice and did not answer, or the ward was quiet at four in the morning), the pause has an object and earns its keep. If what is left is only a summary or a moral, the pause is holding air.

A second check is the object the verb takes. A writer who has a feeling in hand usually names it, so the pause lands on the guilt, or on the call she never returned. Generated prose reaches for the emptiest object it can find, often a bare "that", because an empty object commits to nothing anyone could argue with. Placement gives it away as well. The reflexive version arrives last and closes a paragraph the way a door closes, exactly where a writer who has run out of things to say wants a line that sounds like patience.

Why models overdo it

At the end of a paragraph about something difficult, a model has a slot to fill and no feeling to put in it. This phrase fills the slot cheaply. It reads as restraint and asserts nothing a reader could check, and it can follow almost any sentence ever written. A system that picks the likely next line over the true one finds that property very convenient. Deciding what was actually hard about the scene is work, and nothing in the process requires the model to do it before the paragraph ends.

There is a second reason, and it has to do with where the words came from. Over the past decade therapy language has spread well beyond therapy, into advice columns and into the captions under photographs of lit candles. That is a great deal of text, and in it the instruction to dwell on a feeling turns up constantly without ever having to earn itself. A system trained on that material learns the phrase as a way of ending a thought, which is close to the opposite of what a clinician means by it. So the line keeps landing at the close of paragraphs that never said what was difficult.

When it's fine

Often the instruction is the right one, and the writers who use it well have already done the work it asks for. Parth Sharma, writing in PLOS Mental Health about who gets paid for lived experience, asks the reader to sit with the discomfort they feel as they approach the idea of reparations. The discomfort is named and so is its cause. Sharma has already laid out the contradiction in paid lived-experience work that leads there, and asks the reader to keep both the why and the how in mind for the rest of the essay. The request is for a reader to hold one specific position long enough to notice they are standing in it.

Sarah Polley's line works for a different reason. In an anecdote she tells against herself, she recalls how many customs officials groaned at the title of her film, Women Talking, until she snapped at one of them at Logan Airport in Boston. She asked whether he would see a film called 12 Angry Men, he said maybe, and she told him she just wanted him to sit with that. The object sits right there in the exchange. It is a pointed comeback about a double standard, aimed at the man who had just shown it, and nobody hearing it has to guess what they are being asked to hold.

A clinician using the phrase in session is fine too, and so is a friend texting about something you told them last week. The rule is small and easy to carry. If you can say in plain words what the reader is being asked to hold, keep the line. If you cannot, the line is standing in for a sentence you have not written yet, so write that sentence and let it close the paragraph instead.

Where it comes from

No source consulted for this lesson dates the first use of the phrase. Wiktionary gives it one idiomatic sense, to consider slowly and carefully, and offers no origin for it. One route it has travelled can be documented. Dialectical behavior therapy, developed by Marsha Linehan, builds a set of skills around distress tolerance, the practice of getting through a feeling you cannot change yet without acting on it or running from it. The DBT Self Help skills list glosses that kind of tolerating with this very verb, and general-reader guides to DBT's emotion-regulation skills tell people they may just need to sit with the emotion.

Therapy language is a well-worn road into everyday prose, and this phrase shows up all along it. By 2019 a Guardian feature on anger could quote Mo Gawdat telling readers to acknowledge their anger and sit with it, and nobody needed the instruction explained. A few years on it had drifted into film interviews and entertainment copy, where it does roughly the work of a raised eyebrow. Somewhere along that road the phrase stopped carrying a skill and started carrying a tone. A tone is easy to copy, and generated prose copied it, which is probably why the line keeps turning up at the end of paragraphs with nothing underneath.