Mental Health for Christians: The Coping Tool of "Defusion"

If you are like me, a barrage of uninvited thoughts and emotions can invade the present moment (or flood it!), especially during my ups and downs. I suffer with bipolar-II, so I go up and down. At my peaks I experience hypomania. (Not to be confused with the runaway mania of bipolar-I.) In my troughs I experience both depression and anxiety. I refer to these times as "hyponormalia"--I like making up words. (In Greek, hyper means above and hypo means beneath. Still confused? Hypomania means below the manic.)

So what can be done to deal with those pesky, and times overwhelming, thoughts and feelings. Let me introduce you to a "skill" taught in dialectical behavioral therapy or DBT. It's called "thought defusion" or "emotion defusion." As I type, my spell-checker has underlined in red the word, "defusion," since it is a made-up word. Defusion combines two words: defusing and diffusion. To defuse is "to reduce the danger or tension in (a difficult situation)." (Google Dictionary). That's an apt description of what DBT does, defuse stuff (crippling thoughts, intense emotions). For diffusion, I'm going to turn to my materials science background for a definition: "the migration of atoms from a region of high concentration to a region of low concentration." (See NDE-Ed.org) The goal here is to defuse by diffusing, hence defusion. We diffuse away unwanted (harmful?) thoughts and feelings, thereby defusing their effect on us.

So here's the "skill" called defusion. The idea is to imagine some "vessel" on which unwanted thoughts or emotions can be placed, and then simply watch them diffuse away. Examples from The Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Skills Workbook by McKay, Wood, and Brantley (2019) are:

place your thoughts on a cloud and imagine them floating away

place your thoughts/feelings on leaves in a stream, and watch them float

away

picture yourself in a room, watching your emotions entering one door and

and exit out the other door

I favor the leaves-in-a-stream picture. When a stray thought or emotion invades, I stop to recognize it, and if it's not helpful, I conjure up a leaf (it sometimes needs to be a large one!), put that thought or emotion on the leaf, and watch it float away. For most leaves I watch until the stream takes it out of sight. But for the ones I want never to come back, I imagine a waterfall taking the leaf and the odious thought/emotion down with it. Give it a try for yourself.

You may be surprised to learn that God does this with our sins. "As far as the east is from the west," David opines, "so far does he remove our transgressions from us." And that's a long way! If God does this for us, you should seriously consider trying "defusion" for yourself. It can't hurt.

"But," you might ask, "how do you as bipolar-II deal with those potentially troublesome tendencies in your "up" state?" In other words, in my hypomanic (not quite manic), but hypernormal (noticeably above normal) state. That's a very good question, one I plan to address in my next blog. So stay tuned... Until then, try practicing some thought/feeling defusion!

Blessings,

The Christian Bipole