86 The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook
As in the last chapter, it is important that you do the exercises in this chapter in the order
that they’re presented. Each of these exercises builds on the one before it.
WISE MIND
As stated in the last chapter, wise mind is the ability to make healthy decisions about your life
based on both your rational thoughts and your emotions. This sounds easy to do, but let’s consider
the traps that many people often fall into.
For example, Leo was a successful salesman with a new company. He had a happy family
and a fairly good future ahead of himself. However, Leo frequently became upset when he couldn’t
close a deal, and so he often felt depressed and thought of himself as a person who would never
be able to fully succeed in his life. Despite the positive feedback he received from his supervisors,
Leo couldn’t shake the feelings of failure that came from deals he couldn’t close. As a result, a few
months after starting his job, Leo quit, just like he had quit similar jobs in the past. He went on
to take a new job, but similar feelings of failure followed him wherever he went, and he never felt
fully satisfied with himself.
Similarly, Takeesha was a popular college professor who always received high ratings from her
students and other faculty members. But after a few unsuccessful personal relationships, Takeesha
felt very lonely. She eventually stopped trying to meet new people because she anticipated that
those relationships would just end in failure too. As a result, she felt unworthy of anyone’s love and
resigned herself to spend the rest of her life living alone.
Unfortunately, both Leo and Takeesha were overcome by what dialectical behavior therapy
calls emotion mind (Linehan, 1993a). Emotion mind occurs when you make judgments or decisions
based solely on how you feel. But keep in mind that emotions themselves are not bad or problem-
atic. We all need emotions to live healthy lives. (You’ll learn more about the role of emotions in
chapters 6 and 7.) The problems associated with emotion mind develop when your emotions control
your life. This trap is especially dangerous for people with overwhelming emotions because emotion
mind distorts your thoughts and judgments and then these distortions make it hard to formulate
healthy decisions about your life. Consider what happened to Leo and Takeesha: despite their
successes, their emotions overwhelmed their lives and led them to make unhealthy decisions.
The balancing counterpart to emotion mind is reasonable mind (Linehan, 1993a). Reasonable
mind is the part of your decision-making process that analyses the facts of a situation, thinks clearly
about what is happening, considers the details, and then makes rational decisions. Obviously, ratio-
nal thinking helps us solve problems and make decisions every day. But again, as with emotions,
too much rational thinking can also be a problem. We all know the story of the very intelligent
person who didn’t know how to express his or her emotions and, as a result, lived a very lonely
life. So here too a balance is needed in order to live a fulfilling, healthy life. But for people with
overwhelming emotions, balancing feelings and rational thought is often hard to do.