What Wicked Teaches Us About Balanced Decisions, Validation, and Acceptance

I have a few teen girls at my outpatient therapy clinic job who I’m providing with Dialectical Behavioral Therapy skills to help them learn to regulate their emotions. I’m always looking for ways to connect key concepts with relatable things. After seeing Wicked Part 1 in the theatre three times, I realized that you can find almost every element of DBT. I’ll talk through the main three (all of which were in Defying Gravity). 

The Three States of Mind

DBT teaches us to make decisions from a mindful place called Wise Mind and to consider logic (our Reasonable Mind) and emotions (our Emotion Mind) when making decisions. 

Where the Characters Fall on the Scale

Elphaba innately leads with her Emotion Mind. There’s a line before “I’m Not That Girl” when rescuing the baby tiger where she tells Fiyero, “You think I like caring this much?” All of her magical mistakes happen because she struggles to regulate her emotions. Glinda is in Reasonable Mind throughout the musical because she bases her choices on what others think of her (“Popular”). Fiyero is usually in a Reasonable Mind because he suppresses his feelings to avoid painful ones, as stated in Dancing Through Life (“nothing matters when nothing really matters”), which Elphaba acknowledges when they are rescuing the baby tiger, which leaves an impact on him (he begins “thinking a lot, which is very concerning”). 

Impact on Decisions

In Defying Gravity, Elphaba is entirely in her Emotion Mind when she decides to fly solo, and Glinda tries to rein her in by reminding her of her original goal (to meet the wizard). Because Glinda reminds her of Reasonable Mind, Elphaba begins weighing the Pros and Cons of what she is considering and arrives at Wise Mind, where she factors in facts and her emotions. She acknowledges that she needs Glinda’s ability to understand others' emotions and base decisions on those. Glinda recognizes that her gift and Elphaba’s emotional magic are necessary to make change happen (“dreams the way we planned them/if we worked in tandem”). We all need someone by our side with different talents to make dreams a reality (or as close to them as possible). Glinda chooses not to come with Elphaba but wishes her “happy travels” because, at that moment, she realizes that the best way she can support her friend in her mission is to help bring down the wizard from the inside (or at least that’s my interpretation). She also genuinely craves other’s approval. Elphaba flies away anyway, but it’s no longer a decision purely based on emotions. 

Validation and Invalidation

Defying Gravity begins with Glinda asking Elphaba, “Why couldn’t you stay calm for once/instead of flying off the handle?” Later on, in the introduction to the main ballad, Glinda states that Elphaba has “delusions of grandeur” and assumes that she still wants to be with the wizard, which Elphaba corrects. In those instances, Glinda invalidates Elphaba by indicating that her thoughts, feelings, and actions are irrational and inaccurate. 

Elphaba has likely received countless messages that she is overly emotional, as her ability to control her emotions directly impacts her ability to control her magic. It isn’t until she arrives at Shiz and Madame Morrible helps her realize that she is capable of learning how to control both and that this could turn “a curse that I’ve tried to suppress or hide” into a gift that could help her achieve her goal (“The Wizard and I”). 

Finally, in the OzDust ballroom scene, Glinda notes that Elphaba suppresses her emotions for fear of her expressing them, leading to further invalidation. When Fiyero states that he admires how she doesn’t care about what anyone else thinks of her, Glinda states that she does and “just pretends not to” care. 

Looking at her sister, Elphaba’s father invalidates Nessa Rose’s need for independence by having Elphaba stay for orientation. Elphaba backs her up when she states this first to her father and then to the dorm assistant, further reinforcing the belief that she can’t do things for herself. 

Radical Acceptance

The “dialectical” in DBT means two opposing sides or views simultaneously. Radical acceptance is the concept that you can both accept something for how it is and actively work to change it in the ways that are within your control.

In Defying Gravity, Elphaba accepts that “some things I cannot change” (the “love I guess I lost” and the realization the wizard is a fraud who has now pinned her as a wicked witch), “but till I try, I’ll never know” (to fix the wizard’s harmed the animals). Additionally, when the wizard first hints that he has ways to change her skin color when he shows her and Glinda the Oz of Tomorrow, Elphaba refuses, radically accepting herself. 

Returning to Nessa Rose, her father likely invalidates her because he struggles to accept that she survived. At the same time, her mother died in childbirth, and she is ready to be independent despite her mobility challenges. You can imagine that this would make Nessa feel like she isn’t capable and feel the need to overcompensate by later invalidating Boq by cutting him off when he tries to explain his feelings in the OzDust ballroom scene. 

Biosocial Theory: Why Elphaba Struggles with Emotions

Elphaba is also an example of DBT’s biosocial theory. The biosocial theory states that certain people are genetically prone to having problems with emotional regulation, so when told their thoughts and feelings are invalid, it becomes harder to control them than others in that situation. They tend to either overexpress them or try to suppress them, in healthy or unhealthy ways, to avoid intense negative feelings. Elphaba was judged for her explosive magic when emotional, so she tried to “suppress or hide” them, but they came out anyway. She has trouble accessing Wise Mind. (The armchair diagnostician in me thinks she has Borderline Personality Disorder, but I digress).