In this article, you’re going to learn what it means to be in Emotion Mind versus being emotional, what it means to be in Reasonable Mind versus being logical and what it means to be in Wise Mind.
Having awareness of the state of mind that you’re in will help you to manage your emotions, have better emotion regulation, and promote effective behavior that will further your healing from narcissistic or sociopathic abuse.
States of Mind
Let’s jump right in to the three states of mind: Emotion Mind, Reasonable Mind, and Wise Mind are terms that come right out of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, DBT. DBT is the gold standard treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder, but it is also really helpful for everyone else. Everybody needs to learn to manage their emotions. They need to learn distress tolerance. They need good interpersonal skills. DBT is a mindfulness-based approach that applies not only to people with a BPD diagnosis, but everyone else out there.
Emotion Mind
Let’s talk about Emotion Mind. Emotion Mind is your state of mind when your emotions are in control and are not balanced by reason. I want you to be careful not to confuse being emotional with Emotion Mind. You can be emotional without being in Emotion Mind.
Emotion Mind is all about your emotions being in control and reason and logical thinking are crowded out. You can be emotional without losing control of your ability to reason, without pushing reason out the window. For example, when you’re feeling love for a pet or if you win an award and you’re happy, or you have some success about, about something and feel really good, you’re emotional, but your emotion is not overruling your reason. You can still think logically and rationally when you are feeling love for your pet goldfish, right?
Think about a time when you were emotional, but not in Emotion Mind. You felt love or another good feeling and remained able to think logically. Why is it important to distinguish Emotion Mind from being emotional? Think about a time when you were in love with the narcissist or sociopath. Think about the walking on eggshells, the being gas lit and all of the feelings associated with the abuse. I’m going to venture a guess that you were really operating from Emotion Mind in those moments.
Let me give you an example from my own personal life. One thing that’s extremely triggering to me is being yelled at, and I would instantly just be thrown back to when I was a kid when the abuser yelled at me. My logical thinking went right out the window whenever he was yelling at me. I couldn’t make good logical decision or even a balanced decision when I was in that state of being triggered and when Emotion Mind was overriding my logical thinking brain.
Now contrast that with the love I feel for my dog. I really love my dog. She’s the best dog ever to walk the face of the earth. She loves me every day, all the time. She is forgiving when I accidentally push her a little bit in my sleep with my leg, She doesn’t hold a grudge or give me the silent treatment or try to gaslight me. My love for my dog, not matter how strongly I feel love for her, it doesn’t crowd out my ability to make other decisions about the business or other things that need to be approached in a logical manner. Right? I can love her and I am still a rational thinking, logical human being not.
Emotion Mind in this context is all about emotions being in control and crowding out reason. I think that as targets of narcissists, survivors of narcissistic and sociopathic abuse, we are really familiar with that state of Emotion Mind.
Reasonable Mind
Let’s move on to Reasonable Mind. This is your state of mind that is ruled by facts and logic and pragmatics without being balanced by emotions and values. You can be logical and reasonable without being overtaken by Reasonable Mind, such as when you’re following a recipe or when you are looking at a map, trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B.
If you’re way over on the side of Reasonable Mind and you’re making decisions in your life that are excluding your values, excluding your emotions, that’s not where you want to be because you are excluding a whole side of yourself. Sometimes we tend to think that Reasonable Mind is the better side to err on, especially if we struggle with being in Emotion Mind and regulating our emotions. In reality, Reasonable Mind in the extreme of leaving your emotions and values out of your decision making and it’s equally detrimental.
Wise Mind
It’s best to have a balance of Reasonable Mind and Emotion Mind. And guess what? There’s a term for that — Wise Mind. You can also call it your inner wisdom, your intuition. It’s when you’re in the state of mind where you make good decisions and act skillfully. Wise Mind, your inner wisdom, is a synthesis of emotional mind and reasonable mind. It’s a balance of moderate, less extreme, more balanced parts of Emotion Mind and Reasonable Mind. Wise Mind is the state of mind that we strive for in DBT and coming to Wise Mind at will is a skill you can develop.
Now, keep in mind that the states of mind that I have talked about: Emotion Mind, Reasonable Mind and Wise Mind, you can think of these as existing on a continuum. The farther away from Wise Mind you get, the less Emotion Mind and Reasonable Mind can work as a team.
Nobody can be in Wise Mind all the time, but you can learn to live less in the extremes of Emotion Mind and Reasonable Mind. Try to be mindful, that is aware of the thoughts going on in your head, recognizing when you’re tending towards the extreme of Emotion Mind. Noticing that you’re letting decisions be based in large part on your emotions to the exclusion of rational, logical thought, or maybe you’re one of the people that tends more to shut off emotion and operate more in Reasonable Mind and maybe you push yourself to do things, even though it doesn’t feel right. Or maybe you don’t notice that it doesn’t feel right.
Practice observing your state of mind and try to stay out of the extremes of Emotion Mind and Reasonable Mind and make decisions from Wise Mind. This is important because when you’re coming out of narcissistic or sociopathic abuse or abuse of any kind, your feelings are going to be all over the map. Processing the abuse and the grief is a process and it’s not linear. It’s common to have feelings bounce from anger to acceptance to bargaining and back again.
If you try to pretend that those feelings aren’t there, if you push them down, it’s not like they evaporate into thin air. They just get submerged and they might pop out as irritability at your kids or the clerk at the store or in some other way. They could even manifest as extreme fatigue or listlessness feelings. Feelings just don’t go away. They will find other ways to pop out if you don’t pay attention to them. This is why it’s important to be aware of your state of mind and what makes you prone to being unbalanced, and then taking steps to stack the deck, so to speak, in your favor, towards being balanced.
Things to Think About
- What makes you personally more vulnerable to extremes of Emotion Mind or Reasonable Mind?
We know that for many people going through trauma, self-care is really important, and it often takes a back seat when we’re healing. Lack of self-care, lack of sleep, lack of emotional support, lack of eating properly sometimes get really difficult to follow through on. Not tending to these needs increases your vulnerability to Emotion Mind or Reasonable Mind extremes.
One action step you can do this week is to look in yourself and try and figure out what makes you more vulnerable to the extremes of Emotion Mind or Reasonable Mind and then make sure you take care of those things.
- What are some of the benefits of emotions to you personally?
A lot of people that I’ve worked with hear this question and their immediate knee-jerk reaction is “Emotions! I just am so done with them. I don’t want to deal with them. I am so volatile and just tired of it.” I’ve had points in my own life where I have literally said, “I am just so tired of dealing with emotions that I just kind of need a break from them.”
The fix for the overwhelming feeling is usually some kind of self-care or doing something that I enjoy or just allowing myself to take a break, go outside in nature or watching some funny videos.
- What are some of the problems with emotions for you personally?
Feeling sad and the “negative emotions” are not fun to go through. If you really struggle with being in Emotion Mind, your emotions can cause more problems in your life. Maybe you will be more impulsive in dealing with the narcissist or sociopath if you cannot go no contact. You may be more impulsive or likely to say things that are not going to benefit your situation and could even make it worse. Think about some of the problems with emotions for you personally.
- Can someone appear calm and collected but still be in Emotion Mind?
That’s an interesting to consider, right? Because just think about it for a minute. The automatic reaction might be, “Well, no, someone who’s calm and collected isn’t going be in Emotion Mind.” I’d like you to just consider that perhaps appearance is not everything. There are lots of people out there in the world, maybe you’re one of them, who can really appear calm and collected on the outside. It looks like they’ve got everything together, but internally they are fighting a big battle. Their emotions are still overriding the logical side of things.
You may look calm and collected when you are “grey rocking” the narcissist, that is, emotionally detaching and trying to be as bland as possible. If you are not well-practiced in the grey rock technique, you can look calm, collected on the outside and internally you are still struggling with your emotions overriding your logical side.
Take-Aways
- Emotion Mind = being so emotional that your feelings are overriding your ability to think and act logically and rationally.
- Reasonable Mind = being so rational that your values and feelings are not taken into account when making decisions.
- Wise Mind = a balanced state of mind where emotions and reason are both used to make decisions. Wise Mind is also known as intuition or the middle path.
- Being emotional or being reasonable are different from being in Emotion Mind or in Reasonable Mind.
You can listen to the podcast episode this article is based on at https://bit.ly/statesofmind30. Download the free States of Mind Printable