DBT wise mind: benefits of practice
Clare McCarthy, ATR-BC, LCPC
Wise Mind is that part of each person that can know and experience truth. It is where the person knows something to be true or valid. It is almost always quiet, it has a certain peace. It is where the person knows something in a centered way. —M. Linehan
In the field of psychology, clinicians and clients use a variety of theories to assist them in framing their internal cognitive processes, and in developing and using new tools to move towards better mental health and improved quality of life. From the perspective of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) there are three primary ways we understand our internal psychological states. Let us explore them each below:
Emotional Mind occurs when our thinking is being driven or controlled by our emotions. When the emotions are intense, our thoughts may become so volatile that we have trouble being reasonable and behaving rationally. In this state, logical thinking is difficult or impossible, facts can become distorted, discounted, or amplified, and the energy of our connected behavior tends to match the intensity of the feelings.
The Emotional Mind is housed within our unconscious mind, which includes pre-conscious material (things that we can call to mind with intentionality), as well as unconscious material (beliefs, memories, previously acquired learning, instincts, and automatic physiological processes like heart rate, breathing, digestion, and perception). Unconscious processes are quick and relatively undemanding of cognitive capacity—operating at many parallel levels simultaneously. While this process is fast and powerful, it is largely outside of our control, and can contribute to numerous self-inflicted personal costs.
Reasonable Mind is engaged when we are approaching things intellectually, thinking logically, acquiring and practicing new knowledge, using sequential goal-oriented analysis, and executing planning and cognitive modeling. These mental processes attend to observable, measurable phenomena and employ internally consistent symbolic logic.
The reasonable mind is seen as housed in the conscious mind, which encompasses deliberate, analytic processes that operate relatively slowly and laboriously as compared with the unconscious mind. If sufficent cognitive energy is not available, these processes are not readily accessible or sustainable.
Wise Mind is the synthesis or the overlap of Reasonable Mind and Emotional Mind; when they intercept one another, they produce something more than the sum of their parts. What is added through this cognitive alignment is intuition, a sense of creative flow, and increased ability to uncover the underlying essence of something—a deep sense of knowing clearly and profoundly. This can feel like grasping the three dimensional fullness of an experience when before only distinct parts were understood. The state of Wise Mind is a synergistic state, which can feel like swimming skillfully while being propelled along by a powerful natural current. In this state we can experience performance improvement, deepened integration of diverse perceptions, and ignited personal creativity and innovation.
Wise Mind is like a deep well in the ground. The water at the bottom of the well, the entire underground ocean is wise mind. But on the way down there are often trap doors that impede progress. Sometimes the trap doors are so cleverly built that you believe there is no water at the bottom of the well. The trap door may look like the bottom of the well. Perhaps it is locked and you need a key. Perhaps it is nailed shut and you need a hammer, or it is glued shut and you need a chisel.
Wise Mind is like having a heart, everyone has one, whether they experience it or not.
—M. Linehan
How does art therapy practice help us to enter and sustain a state of Wise Mind?
While there is no single “right” way to encourage or practice a state of Wise Mind, art therapy offers powerful strategies for engaging diverse aspects of our cognitive processes in support of the psychological alignment and peaceful internal state experienced in Wise Mind.
Art making helps us access and engage our Emotional Mind. This is particularly valuable in therapy, as the majority of the vast psychological material contained within the unconscious mind requires methods beyond recall and traditional verbal processing to access it in a meaningful way. Art making offers us many ways to connect us to our Emotional Mind in service of uncovering, expressing, and regulating our emotions.
Art making allows us to activate our unconscious processes, as we naturally react emotionally to our interactions with art materials, the creative process, and our emerging art product.
Through mindful use of color and expressive kinesthetic mark making, we can carefully tap into and externalize the raw and powerful emotional states contained in our bodies without being overwhelmed or shut down by them.
Art therapy helps us to employ our creative instincts to intuitively illustrate and explore our implicit emotional associations and underlying belief structures.
As we create and reflect on personally relevant imagery in the art therapy process, we are able to explore our unconscious emotional material through our projections of potential meanings onto our own creative product.
As emotions are expressed and externalized through art making, we are often less driven by emotional intensity, and are more able to gain perspective beyond the physiological escalation connected with feelings of emotional intensity.
Art making helps to better access and utilize our Reasonable Mind. Art therapy helps us to relax into a state of focused concentration that supports the regulation of racing or non-sequential thoughts, and the reduction of emotional arousal that impedes clear cognitive work. Making art in art therapy helps us to engage our critical faculties through a variety of interactive mechanisms.
Art making assists us in entering a state of passive and focused concentration that supports slowing our minds down to better parse apart various interconnected components of our cognitive experiences. The art making process also helps us to reconnect these same components into more accurate mental models reflective of empirically-grounded reality.
Active sensory-oriented creativity puts us into direct contact with the tangible physical world to better recognize the perimeters and limits of our internal emotive states, and connects us with our grounding present circumstances.
Through visual expression we are able to engage our rational cognitive processes and abstractly represent our unique schematic perceptions as conceptual diagrams to illustrate, shape, and restructure our thought patterns in a way that supports mental heath.
Therapeutic art making allows us to practice using our conscious mental processes to work towards desired outcomes and to build confidence and mastery in a controlled, low-stakes setting.
A state of focused art making helps us step away from ongoing distractions that may be obscuring counter evidence is essential in re-working our inaccurate or unhelpful thought processes.
The art therapy process helps us to synthesize our conscious and unconscious mental systems in a way that utilizes both the emotional/unconscious and rational/conscious brain towards aligned goals:
Activating both cognitive processes at the same time can set us up for experiencing deep insights, broad connections, and periods of satisfying creative flow that can connect us to highly positive mental space.
As we experience our Wise Mind state, we build knowledge of our authentic self as a dynamic and diverse individual system.
Being able to enter the Wise Mind outlook through art making helps us to understand what this mental framework feels like, and also provides us with tangible reminders (our art products) to assist us in re-entering that state in other circumstances.
