Coping with Bipolar Emotions Using Logic

Posted on February 15, 2014

Photo: flickr

I'm a very logical person. I’m an intellectual. I was raised that way and I remain that way to this day. Likely, because of that, it's more obvious to me than many that logic can be used to deal with bipolar emotions. I can separate my logical self from my emotional self. It seems to me that the general person does not do this. However, I consider applying logic to emotion a critical skill in coping with bipolar disorder.

We all have an emotional self. It's the part of us that flashes into emotion (usually) because of an external stimuli. So, for example, someone says something hurtful to us and we experience emotional pain and likely want to reach out and hurt that person back. This is a pretty normal emotional chain.

Of course, in bipolar disorder, this emotion may be a great overreaction to the situation. Or, perhaps even worse, our bipolar emotions are not in response to any external stimuli but simply exist because of the disease.

On the other hand, there is the logical self. This is the self that moderates our emotional self. Our logical self is able to deal with situations in an intellectual and empirically reasonable way. For example, when someone says something hurtful, we still experience emotional pain, but the logical self may stop us from reaching out and retaliating against the other person.

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Category(s):Mood Swings / Bipolar

Source material from Bipolar Bubble