The Emotional Bathtub

21 Oct, 2024

For my first official blog post, I'd like to share one of my many therapeutic metaphors. If you don't have the time or bandwidth to read my many words, feel free to scroll down to the TL;DR at the bottom for a summary.

Sometimes, in the usual course of my work, I'll begin to understand something my client and I are talking about in a more concrete, visual way. Something about the emotions, weight, texture, and context of the situation connects to a more common, every-day feeling.

Projecting the abstract, complex emotional inner world of a human onto a mundane experience can make it much easier to hold, understand, and work through. In the hopes that these metaphors can help others describe and understand their own experience, I present the following:

The Emotional Bathtub
If you've ever lived somewhere with a bathtub, especially an older tub, maybe you can picture this: hoping for a nice relaxing bath, you put the plug in and start the water flowing. Something calls your attention away for a moment, and by the time you return the water has started to flood over the side. Distraught about the potential property damage, or perhaps just the loss of your security deposit, you try to shut the water off, but the tap is stuck.

Freaking out now, you try to reach in to pull the plug, but as your arm plunges into the warm water it causes another wave to launch over the side and now your pants are soaked. Finally you get the plug out, but the drain is partially clogged and while the water is now leaving the tub it can't keep up with the pace of water flowing in.

What is there to do? You get a bucket, and scoop out as much as you can. You go to the basement and shut off the water main. You cover the floor in towels to sop up as much of the mess as you can, and you hope between all that you've done enough to stave off potential disaster. And you're going to think twice before you decide to have a bath again...

Ok, so this is maybe a dramatic example. A lot has to go wrong at once to end up with a flooded apartment and a lifelong fear of running water. But the idea that things can overflow the container meant to hold them is not that outlandish. Some water splashing out of the tub here and there is not a disaster, but you don't want to make a habit of it, or completely neglect the tools designed to keep things contained. And there are plenty of ways our emotional containers can overflow, too.

The Anatomy of the Emotional Bathtub

• The Water: This may be a hot take, but the water is the most important part of a bathtub. It is the only thing that is absolutely necessary for taking a bath--everything else is just containment. The water in this metaphor represents your emotions, sensations, thoughts, memories, experiences... Everything that makes up your inner world, how you relate to the outside world, who you are as a person, etc. ¹
• The Tub: The tub represents how you contain emotions internally. People have different sizes of bathtubs--different capacity for emotional self-containment. We often call this "distress tolerance" although we have plenty of emotions that are difficult to contain that are not distress. The only way to build your capacity to hold more is to practice, and to remind yourself that emotions feeling "too big" is not inherently dangerous, and your tub is often bigger than you think.
• The Faucet: The faucet is the flow of water coming into the tub. Metaphorically, it can be daily stressors, trauma, big life events, sensory stimuli, important tasks, distractions, etc. Some situations fill your tub faster than others. Sometimes it feels like someone dragged a garden hose in through the bathroom window and is spraying it full blast into your container. Sometimes there's a tiny drip that you try to ignore and before you know it you're full to capacity. Often the best way to regulate and contain our emotions is to find a way to shut off the water for a bit and just let things settle naturally.
• The Plug: This is what keeps all the water inside of the tub instead of letting it flow out through the pipe. Just like sometimes we want to take a nice warm bath, sometimes we want to hold on to our feelings. Maybe we're really enjoying time with a friend, and making space for that joy is meaningful and important. In these cases, that plug is a form of mindfulness and intention, where we create space for emotions and don't try to shift away from them. Other times, we need to let go of things to make space for more, or keep things from overflowing. In these cases, finding tools for emotional expression and release, like journaling, meditation, art, talking to a friend or therapist, etc. can help us let go of emotions that no longer serve us, like water spiraling down a drain. Sometimes the pipes can get clogged too--maybe someone dumped a whole bunch of mud in your bath and now the water can't drain--in these cases a good therapist is like a good plumber, helping you get to the bottom of why your emotions aren't flowing as you'd like and clearing out the parts that are stuck.
  

Outside the main features of the tub, we can continue to expand the metaphor:

• Bubble Bath: If you dump a bottle of bubble bath into your tub, it's going to overflow really fast. We all have things we ruminate on, and when we focus our energy on them they expand and surpass our emotional capacity surprisingly quickly. These can be negative beliefs about ourselves, the world, our relationships, etc. Things like trauma responses, sensory sensitivities, repeated stressors/microaggressions, etc. can also fill a lot of your tub very quickly, often because of what's already there before the water even started flowing.
• Towels: Towels help us clean up the floor after the water already overflowed. This can be the relationships we have with the people around us which can help with repair. It can be self-care and self-soothing strategies we've built up over a lifetime. It can be apologizing to the people you've overflowed onto, or forgiving ourselves for having the emotions in the first place. You can't really put the water back in the tub, but you can make sure it doesn't soak into the foundations of your home.
• Water Main: When all else fails, sometimes you need a full reset. Some days, you've hit your limit and nothing you can do will keep the water inside the tub. These are days you might just want to call it a day, stop pushing yourself to do more or live up to your usual standards, take a nap and try again tomorrow. This doesn't mean you can never take a bath again. It just means your tub needs time to fully drain so it doesn't keep overflowing every time you try to turn the water back on.
  

This is certainly not an exhaustive list--maybe your bathtub has rubber duckies, or a bath bomb, or a showerhead... feel free to use as much or as little of the metaphor as you find helpful.

The Overflow If a literal bathtub overflows, it means water gets on the floor and your belongings, which can cause property damage or perhaps drip down to the apartment below yours. What does it mean for the emotional bathtub to overflow?

Emotional overflow looks different for each person, in each context, in response to each trigger. And just like with physical water, emotional overflow is not about how much water is being put in at any one time, but about how full the tub was and whether we had space for what we tried to add. Emotional overflow can look like yelling, screaming, blaming others, hitting, or throwing things. Emotional overflow can also look like crying, shutting down, going silent, blaming ourselves, self-harm, avoiding responsibilities, or isolating.

It may not always be obvious to the outside why someone is overflowing, because we can never know what someone's tub held before we interacted with them. Similarly, there are so many things filling our tub each day that we may or may not be fully aware of. This is why compassion, for ourselves and others, is so important. Once we stop blaming ourselves for the overflow itself, we can start to understand whether it's caused by a leaky faucet, a clogged drain, or forgetting to take the plug out. Next time you start to feel the water threaten to spill over the edge, maybe you can find a way to shut off the water, let it drain a moment, and then slip into a warm bath and be present with everything filling up your inner world.//

TL;DR: Just like a bathtub can overflow with water, humans can overflow with emotions. Sometimes the thing that pushes us past our capacity to cope doesn't seem that important by itself. Emotional overflow can affect us and the people around us. However, we can do a lot to expand our emotional capacity (get a bigger bathtub), release emotions that don't serve us (pull the plug), limit the flow of emotions in (turn off the tap), and mitigate the impact when they do inevitably overflow. We can forgive ourselves for being imperfect, and learn for next time.

https://www.capycounseling.com/