The Bucket Theory is pretty simple to understand. Lets image that inside you, you have a bucket and lets label it your anger bucket. Every time something happens to you that makes you angry, it goes in this bucket. This bucket gets full after a while, if you don’t empty it. Things go in to this bucket when things make you angry. If you don’t empty the bucket eventually it will be full and even overflow.

When you have a full bucket, and you add more to an already full bucket, you have mess. It will over flow and things get all messy. When this anger bucket gets full to the top, much like a cup that is full of water, if you pour more water into that full cup, it overflows and gets all over the place.

We also have a peace bucket inside us. This peace bucket is all the things that we have let go of on the inside of us. This peace bucket never gets full, because each time you move something to this peace bucket, it becomes small and flows to the bottom of the bucket.

If we do not intentionally empty this anger bucket, it will just over flow and life will be very messy at times when the bucket gets stuffed beyond it capacity. When our anger bucket does overflow, we are usually very moody, we might rage, and we definitely are going to be angry.

The goal here is to move these things from the anger bucket to the peace bucket. This is done by moving each individual item one at a time, from one bucket to the other. This can be done several ways, and it does take a lot of time.

One way to move the items is to take an event that you know has upset you in some way, and move it to the other bucket by visualizing it as moving into the peace bucket. When you are thinking about the event, you use language that states that you are “not going to let this event to affect” you in the future.

“I refuse to allow this (name the event or the person or circumstance) to continue to control me in the future” are the words I used to move my own items from the anger bucket to the peace bucket.

When I am working with someone who has a lot of items in their bucket, I ask them to make a list of all the things in their past that have harmed them. This list can be checked off as they think about each item and move it into to peace bucket. This seems like it takes a long time, and it does.

The interesting thing here is even if you don’t “feel’ this this will work, it does. Your mind is designed to do what it is told to do, and what you are doing is to tell your mind that it needs to rewire the old neg events to a non emotional event.