Buckets and Dippers

Amy Nelson
Sister Embree
Comm150
12 Feb 2010

Buckets and Dippers link: http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=7722

This article I felt was an accurate representation of self-concept and how our emotions affect our interactions with others. I agree that we tend to still act like children as adults and “we continue to expect others to make us feel good and we blame them for making us feel bad.” It seems to be a natural reaction to expect that everyone lives to please you, and when things aren’t going well it’s everyone else’s fault. It’s kind of that feeling of entitlement that is a problem in this generation, a sense of pride and self-centeredness. Like we talked about in class, emotion is self-centered and makes you think only about you, so it’s easy to see with the buckets and dippers analogy, that if you’re feeling a strong emotion how you would feel very defensive when faced with someone with an empty bucket.


I have a family member who I think has an empty bucket right now, and so is attacking everyone else and acting all defensively, and making everyone else act defensively in turn. I told my mom about this analogy and she thought it made sense and hopefully her seeing my sister with an empty bucket will help her handle her outbursts of emotional drama. Like Dr. Valusek stated: “If we understood and applied the idea of the self as a bucket, we might discover that we would be able to behave quite differently than is usually expected. For example, when an attack is being directed toward us, rather than feeling hurt or counterattacking, we might find that we will be able calmly to view the upset person from a non-emotional vantage point. We could then say to ourselves: ‘Oh, you poor thing! You must have an empty bucket!" This places the attacker in an entirely different perspective. It can make us realize that his state of distress has very little to do with us, even though he seems to think it does. We will be able to realize that he is behaving that way because he feels so bad about himself. His bucket must be empty or else he wouldn’t be behaving that way. We might even be moved to feel genuine sympathy for him.” I think this happens a lot with people every day, and I now notice it in myself.


Thinking out loud on paper here, if I’m in a bad mood now, I know I’m just feeling sorry for myself. When I’m grumpy at people, like my roommates for example, I now see that it’s just because I’m tired and I’m having a hard day and a bad hair day and nothing is going well in my life in that moment in time, not really because I’m mad at my roommates. I suppose that’s me being self-centered and focused inwardly, which is obviously not a good thing. So if this analogy is correct, in order to stop being upset and learn to think outwardly I have to try to fill other peoples’ buckets, instead of worrying about my own.


I feel like this principle of forgetting yourself is taught throughout the scriptures and pretty much all the time at church. Selfless service to others, developing charity the pure love of Christ, these are things that I feel like we should have learned by now, but in our selfish modern society I feel like it’s just more challenging for everyone. A couple good scriptures that teach this principle: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30), “He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it” (Matt. 10:39). Why if I know that someone’s bucket is empty do I insist on making them keep their empty bucket and greedily horde the water in my bucket? It’s like how I am with ice cream and chocolate, I don’t like to share! Why shouldn’t I share the things (chocolate and ice cream) that make me happy when they could make someone else happy too? So now, as Dr. Valusek says, “when you next look upon or have occasion to relate to a child (or a person, I would add) who is angry, sullen, whining, belligerent, rebellious, obnoxious, cruel, tormenting, destructive or non-cooperative, know that you are witnessing the behavior of a person whose bucket is empty. Psychiatric, psychological, educational, or intuitive diagnosis is unlikely to add much to your knowledge about how to react or respond to him. If the diagnosis suggests a procedure or method of approach which is successfully employed and a positive change occurs in the child, you will know that his bucket must have been filled. Because his bucket was filled, he feels good about himself. When he comes to feel sufficiently good about himself, he will no longer need to respond as he did formerly.” I think it will help me with my own emotions to think about people in this manner.