Dialectical Behavioral Therapy

Imagine your emotions as a flame. With anger, this often seems easy. What do we do with a fire? If your first thought was to put it out, I encourage you to keep reading.

The overlooked nature of strong emotions (even those that sometimes seem negative) is that every single one of them comes about for a reason. By attempting to cast them aside, we only serve to kick the proverbial can down the road until the next time the emotion flares up. Only this time, it will flare up with much more ferocity. What this suggests is that there is a balance between stamping a fire out and letting it rage into something uncontrollable.

Fire, while holding the potential for great danger, also provides light. It acts as a communal center for camp sites. Similarly, our emotions give us information. A starting point for conversation. They require our attention and maintenance, though, in order to get out of them what will benefit us the most.

Here is an example. Maybe you get home from work after a long day, and your significant other says something that just gets under your skin. Sometimes, the remark is outright aggressive. In that case, it makes sense that you respond in an emotional way. Your anger is telling you that you have been wrongfully accosted.

In a similar yet different scenario, some part of you knows that under different circumstances the remark would not have sounded offensive. Maybe you lash out because you are just in that state of mind, or maybe you hold back because you feel that you don’t actually have the right to be angry. In the case of the latter response, you might feel like you overcame your toxic emotions.

However, the emotion came up for some reason. By not addressing it, maybe the fire is out, but you do not have the opportunity to discover what caused it in the first place. Without understanding that internal process, you leave yourself vulnerable to another flare up of that anger. Alternatively, it is possible that the fire remains burning under the surface unattended. In this case, when the doorway to that specific anger opens back up, it comes back all the more intensely.

By attending to the fire, you not only gain the ability to get in touch with your own inner self, you gain the ability to respond to the situation in a way that benefits your partner as well. By harnessing your emotions in a constructive way, you have the opportunity to move through difficult times and grow at the same time.