Emotional Validation with Honesty

A few months ago I posted a piece on the validating statement and earlier today I posted on the I-AM-MAD communication tool. While both recommend validation (actually one is a sub-set of the other), sometimes if you are new to validation the statements and questions that I recommend can seem (as Wandering Coyote put it in her comment) “so trite, so patronizing.” It can seem that way (or rote) if you don’t validate with honesty. If you’re “reading from a script” the validation will seem empty to the other person. The key thing IMO is that you really try and empathize with the other person’s feelings and not judge those feelings as crazy, stupid or wrong. If you can find the truth in those emotions and speak to that, validation will not sound as rote or scripted. A person with BPD can be a good emotional bullsh*t detector, because, at times, that person can be all emotions. If you put your emotional glasses on and try and find the emotional truth to another person’s situation and you PRACTICE the skills with honesty, validation works well in those emotional situations. It helps to combat the invalidation that a person with BPD has grown to expect from the hostile world around them.

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Related posts:

1. Validation and DBT
2. Emotional Independence and the Types of Love
3. What Diane Schuler’s story can tell us about emotional honesty and acceptance
4. An exercise in validation
5. Validation Article from DBT’s perspective
6. Validation versus Agreement
7. Talking to someone with emotional issues
8. Levels of Validation
9. More on Validation and DBT
10. Ask Bon: Why do you emphasize emotional validation so much?

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