Behavioral health clients with problematic behaviors and emotional patterns often have stories they tell to themselves that justify how they act. This sort of rationalization can assuage feelings of guilt, but can also shield oneself from the full picture or deflect accountability. Ultimately, rationalization, while not inherently wrong, can enable one to perpetuate disempowering, destructive, or abusive situations.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) teaches a more holistic approach: Wise Mind. Wise Mind treats intellectual evaluation as one piece of the full picture. The other part is the emotional side, which tends to be missing when using rationalization alone. Wise Mind weaves these two sides together into a perspective that allows clients to access their full intelligence and trust their intuition.