It’s important to note that when you feel absolutely certain about something, you may be missing important information. That can be a helpful cue that you should consider other points of view.
Realizing your first reaction may be exaggerated
When you feel passionately about something, it’s easy to react strongly when you feel misunderstood or when someone disagrees with you. If you’re an emotionally sensitive person, you may have been told that you have big reactions to things. It’s important to understand that sometimes reactions — the ones that happen quickly — are exaggerated or too big. This is simply something to know about yourself. That knowledge will help you assess when you feel like your reaction fits the situation, or when it may be driven too much by your emotions. Again, the more you practice mindfulness (see Chapter 9), the easier this practice will become.
People are often judged by others for having exaggerated or larger emotional reactions to things, and this can be very painful. That being said, it’s important to realize that at times our reactions are too big and that this can be due to a range of things, including our own sensitivity to vulnerabilities such as being sick, feeling stressed at work or school, having financial stressors, dealing with relationship problems, being hungry, or simply not getting enough sleep.
The first step to opening your mind to multiple points of view is to accept, with compassion, that your initial reaction may in fact be exaggerated, too big, or too rigid and certain. This involves knowing that this reaction is a problem and wanting to change it. It can be helpful to remember that you are not letting go of your position or belief, but instead, holding onto it while also being open to other information or hearing other perspectives. That is dialectical thinking.
Matching your reaction to what is in front of you
When you’re in the moment, before you can expand your awareness, you must regulate whatever strong emotion is coming up. Emotions like fear, anger, shame, jealousy, and envy can be particularly challenging to work with. Sometimes you’ll need to use another approach, such as employing DBT distress tolerance skills (see Chapter 11), to decrease the intensity of how you feel, and then it will be much easier to open your mind to new or other information.
Think about someone who reacts to situations in a way that you would like to react. Ask yourself how they would react in this situation, and compare your reaction to theirs.
Use self-validation by recognizing how your emotions make sense, and stay away from judging yourself. This will help you decrease the intensity of your emotions and access your inner wisdom to assess your reaction. It’s often self-judgment, self-blaming, and self-invalidation that continue to drive up the intensity of your emotions and make it hard to think (see Chapter 5 for more on self-validation).
Take five mindful breaths to help you decrease the intensity of your emotions. Just taking a few breaths will help begin to calm both your body and your mind.
Be aware of topics or situations that prompt your reactivity. This awareness will help you know that certain situations leave you at a higher risk to be reactive so that you can plan ahead for them. Some people find it helpful to identify these topics or situations as “red flags” and then make a skills plan or cope ahead plan to use when they come up. If you can identify these red flags, you can catch yourself before you react and instead use your skills.
Holding off on taking action
One of the three functions of emotions is to motivate action. In some cases, that is exactly what needs to happen; however, in other cases moving into action too quickly can get you into trouble. When the goal is to open your mind and be able to see multiple perspectives, you’ll often need to observe your urge to argue your point of view, ignore or dismiss another position, or get stuck in a state of certainty that there are no other options.
Simply observing, which is discussed more in Chapter 9, means having awareness that moving into action isn’t necessarily going to be helpful or effective. Sometimes you may find that awareness after you have charged ahead; in those cases, your task is to observe with compassion and remember that in many cases, it isn’t too late to slow down, breathe, and work to open your mind.
Expanding Your Perception
Once you have the willingness and skill to observe your first reaction (as we describe earlier in this chapter), you’ll have the opportunity to expand your perception and consider alternative points of view. The wonderful thing about developing this type of awareness is that you can give yourself some choices about what to do next. You can decide to stay stuck in your perspective, but it’s more likely that your mind will become more open and less certain, and that you’ll find it easier to consider different possible perspectives. Expanding your perception and awareness can be very helpful when you are stuck feeling like you have only one option to solve a problem or are in a conflict where it feels like you can’t understand the other person and they can’t understand you. Often strong emotions blind us to alternatives that are really helpful.
Being able to expand your perception is critical to nurturing and maintaining important relationships. Many relationships end when one or both people can’t slow down and see alternative perspectives. Simply seeing another perspective doesn’t mean that you’ll necessarily agree with it, and if you can see and understand where the other person is coming from, you can validate their emotions and become more curious and non-judgmental about how they got to their position. If the interaction is becoming escalated, this can decrease the emotional intensity for everyone involved. By approaching it in this way, you’ll help the other person be curious about your perspective, allowing for a more effective conversation.
The following sections walk you through the main steps of expanding your perception and considering other points of view.
Considering your therapist’s point of view
As we discuss earlier in this chapter, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to not move into action to make a decision, to continue a conversation or debate, to get in the last word, to quit a job or school, or even to end a relationship. Due to the very direct nature of communication in DBT, clients sometimes have difficulty seeing their
