Understanding Brings Authority

I actually applied for a trademark for this phrase. It is the fundamental expression of everything I know and have learned about mental and emotional health. Back when Forbes was a magazine, Malcolm Forbes would put a quote at the front of each issue, and the one I remember is “With all thy getting, get understanding.”

We experience our emotions, and generally they (whatever they are) control our pattern of behavior. Most people have only a passing awareness of this control and maybe no awareness at all that they have the ability to choose their response rather than just react. Viktor Frankl wrote “In between a stimulus and a response is a space. In that space lies our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Along those same lines, Benoit Mandelbrot wrote “My life seemed to be a series of events and accidents. Yet when I look back I see a pattern.” The pattern is where we find understanding. Our pattern of assumptions, beliefs, and judgments is the very fertile soil from which our thoughts and emotions grow and flourish.

When we start to see the pattern - and that tends to only happen when we have become sick and tired of being sick and tired - we then have a sense of agency to DO something, to create (I love that word) ON PURPOSE incremental change. We are aware of our ability to actually choose our response, now being aware of the old pattern of reaction.

DBT is the set of skills that we can draw upon when our old pattern asserts itself, when the propaganda machine of our Childish Emotional Mind fires up and starts spewing bullshit into our thoughts.

I still am aware of those “stories” and the kernel of truth that feeds them, but I get it. I understand, and now those stories can’t control me.