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Author Topic: How do you let them know their being irrational when they can't manage their emo  (Read 939 times)
VitaminC
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« Reply #30 on: July 16, 2016, 02:56:44 AM »

Thank you for those insights, Neil, waverider, and zinnia. Helpful.

It makes sense then that even if we'd talked abt sonething and I thought it was dealt with and a good learning experience for us both, that it was STILL brought up months later as "evidence". As if we'd never spoken about it. 

Maddening. Impossible, as far as I'm concerned, with this person anyway. 

 
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VitaminC
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« Reply #31 on: July 16, 2016, 06:02:34 AM »

Can a pwBPD ever start to see (with help and therapy) that they need to start monitoring the size of their reactions at least some of the time? And that they need to look within or look to the past to see the source of their pain.

The crux of the problem and the million dollar question. IMO.
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Meili
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« Reply #32 on: July 16, 2016, 06:08:24 AM »

The answer is yes. They can learn to reign in their emotions.  It just takes far more work than most want to devote. The fear seems to override the desire to look at why they act as they do and make significant change. That's why they project onto and blame others.
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« Reply #33 on: July 16, 2016, 06:10:56 AM »

And one last thing: it took me 6 months to get over the shock if how a very analytical & logical & normally sharp-minded person (him) could become completely illogical & bizarre in his cause-effect rationale.

Totally crazy, in fact.

That makes sense too now.
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waverider
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« Reply #34 on: July 16, 2016, 06:45:41 PM »

Can a pwBPD ever start to see (with help and therapy) that they need to start monitoring the size of their reactions at least some of the time? And that they need to look within or look to the past to see the source of their pain.

Being aware of it is one thing, but learning the self management skills to overcome it is another. Unfortunately many get stuck between the two and feeling like an ever bigger failure. This where depression and a feeling of hopelessness kicks in.

My wife is in this zone. She is aware of this, but in the moment the urge is too strong to resist. It fuels the self loathing
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  Reality is shared and open to debate, feelings are individual and real
Skip
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« Reply #35 on: July 17, 2016, 01:05:11 PM »

it kind of irks me that the choices, as postulated on these boards over and over, are to leave or to validate nonsense.

 Laugh out loud (click to insert in post) Validating a person is not validating nonsense. Validating nonsense makes matters worse. The real take home is that we can be invalidating and it doesn't help our relationship. This video is really good: https://bpdfamily.com/content/communication-skills-validation Maybe the best way to think of this is I need to not be invalidating.

Excerpt
How do you let them know their being irrational when they can't manage their emotions

You don't. When someone is emotionally flooded, you are not going to break through and reach them.  The tool here is to recognize that they are emotionally flooded and do what you can to defuse, or at least not make matter worse (like trying to tell them they are being irrational).

When things are calm and good in a day or two or a week, you can broach the subject then and more in a constructive way - hey dear, how do we deal with this in the future?

Can a pwBPD ever start to see (with help and therapy) that they need to start monitoring the size of their reactions at least some of the time? And that they need to look within or look to the past to see the source of their pain.

Yes. This is what DBT teaches - how to intercept emotions before showering them on the innocent.  Smiling (click to insert in post)  As waverider says, it's a skill learned in stages and not always easy to apply.
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adaw
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« Reply #36 on: August 14, 2016, 03:48:30 PM »

Remember it is like dealing with a traumatized child
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Icanteven
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« Reply #37 on: August 16, 2016, 09:51:54 AM »

Laugh out loud (click to insert in post) Validating a person is not validating nonsense. Validating nonsense makes matters worse. The real take home is that we can be invalidating and it doesn't help our relationship. This video is really good: https://bpdfamily.com/content/communication-skills-validation Maybe the best way to think of this is I need to not be invalidating.

Respectfully, Skip, I completely disagree. Per your link, "To validate someone's feelings is first to accept someone's feelings - and then to understand them - and finally to nurture them. To validate is to acknowledge and accept a person. Invalidation, on the other hand, is to reject, ignore, or judge."

I'm at a dinner party the other night and one of our politically iconoclastic friends expresses the opinion that he believes Gary Johnson will be our next President.  This assertion is met with a smattering of twitters, some outright laughter, some dismissive silence, and by me deciding to attempt to use VAT, so I ask him why he believes this to be true.  His answer is nonsensical and uses mutually exclusive and self-contradictory reasoning that's almost impossible to untangle, which others immediately point out, but I decide to press ahead and ask if he thinks that Trump will drop out and Johnson will pick up Trump supporters, thereby winning the election.  Another convoluted, contradictory answer comes forth that dismisses my question, which is immediately pounced on by a few of the guests who've had a little more to drink than I have.

Could Gary Johnson win the Presidency?  I have no idea, but he certainly can't do it the way it was expressed to us.  And, frankly, the reasoning espoused by our companion absolutely should be rejected as illogical, ignored for being provocative for the sake of being provocative, and judged as being flat out sophistry.

Our dinner companion clearly felt invalidated, as this discussion spilled over to Facebook the next day, with him accusing us of being closed-minded and oblivious to political realities that are a reality only in his mind.

People are shades of gray.  Reality is often very black and white. There's no way to validate what isn't true, even if I'm only attempting to validate the emotions behind it.  You feel like I did something when you're clearly using projection and reconstructing a reality that your own family acknowledges as fanciful?  I'm sorry you feel that way and that must be hard but you are wrong.  You can choose to accept that you're wrong or not, but you're going to be invalidated one way or the other because your feelings ARE NOT VALID.  I can't validate the invalid without making the invalid valid by the definition used in the article.


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Meili
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« Reply #38 on: August 16, 2016, 10:04:54 AM »

icanteven, if you are telling us that you feel the way that you do, I can respect that. If you are discussing the logic behind the concepts, then we need to look deeper into what you are saying.

A person's feelings are never wrong; period. If you reject their feelings simply because you do not agree with their logic or thought processes, you are telling them that their feelings are wrong. At that point, you are judging, rejecting, and insulting the person. Who are you to tell another that his or her feelings are wrong?

Also, reality is never black and white either. What is perceived as reality is different from the next person because we all run the input that our senses provide us through the filters that have been created by what we've learned. My favorite example of this is that to some people "the sky is blue." That is their reality. My reality is that the sky has no color whatsoever. The color that we see is merely light being refracted by the moisture in the atmosphere. Where is the black and white in this? Whose reality is correct? Who gets to decide that?
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Icanteven
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« Reply #39 on: August 16, 2016, 10:19:06 AM »

A person's feelings are never wrong; period. If you reject their feelings simply because you do not agree with their logic or thought processes, you are telling them that their feelings are wrong.

Sure they are.  If you told me you felt like setting my house on fire, we wouldn't be talking about validation, we'd be talking about the police getting involved. 


Also, reality is never black and white either.


Sure it is.  The universe is either 13.5 billion years old or it isn't.  The sun is primarily made up of hydrogen or it isn't.  The moon reflects light from the sun or it doesn't.  If you (not YOU, the royal you) believe otherwise that's a real problem.  As a matter of fact, the denial of certain scientific realities based on the feelings of certain people is a major problem and has been for millennia.


What is perceived as reality is different from the next person because we all run the input that our senses provide us through the filters that have been created by what we've learned. My favorite example of this is that to some people "the sky is blue." That is their reality. My reality is that the sky has no color whatsoever. The color that we see is merely light being refracted by the moisture in the atmosphere. Where is the black and white in this? Whose reality is correct? Who gets to decide that?

That's not a question of reality, it's a question of semantics.  If I told you the sky is blue and you corrected me by talking about prisms and visible light and molecules and red shift you'd be right, but I'm using common parlance in saying "the sky is blue today."  If, as in my other example, I said "the sky is purple" on a day when molecule scattering has caused it to be blue, we have a problem.

One of the major problems with the disorder for pwBPD is that feelings = facts, and the "facts" in many cases are tied to feelings about things that simply aren't true.  And that's my point. 

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Icanteven
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« Reply #40 on: August 16, 2016, 10:40:37 AM »

Let me go one step further.

I have a very close friend who has a relative that is a schizophrenic.  Sometimes this relative decides they don't need to take their (English majors breathe I'm not going to be gender-specific purposely) clozapine, in which case their body is being invaded by aliens.

Now, this friend does their damnedest to validate the relative's feelings, but unless one of two things happen, the feeling does not abate:  a) friend acknowledges that aliens are in fact invading their loved one's body, or; b) clozapine to the rescue.

Implicitly, giving the relative clozapine is invalidating because that feeling is only changed by administering an anti-psychotic.  Aliens are not invading their body.  But they FEEL like they are. 

Is this an extreme example?  Sure, but I'm sure many of us can relate to hearing the statement "I don't know why that's just how I feel" and feeling despair because that feeling is based on incomplete information or has been made up out of whole cloth.  Am I suggesting that we not show empathy?  Absolutely not.  But I can express that it must feel awful to feel that way and I can see how hard that must make it for them while at the same time reminding them that the truth is something different.  I think too often that last letter gets overlooked, and unfortunately, there have been numerous situations where being empathetic and acknowledging their feelings doesn't matter because I don't accept their reality, and that makes me invalidating and erases everything I previously said. 

There are lots of situations where people just want to be heard.  I can do that all day.  There are others where people want their reality to be THE reality, and when that doesn't happen, you haven't heard them.
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Meili
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« Reply #41 on: August 16, 2016, 10:57:28 AM »

Sure they are.  If you told me you felt like setting my house on fire, we wouldn't be talking about validation, we'd be talking about the police getting involved. 

No, they are still not wrong. What you just said is that you feel that how you feel is more important than how I feel. I can feel the desire to commit arson, but until I've acted on that feeling is is nothing more than how I feel. The action in that case is wrong, not the feeling.

Why do you have a right to tell me that my desire to commit arson is wrong? I have not done any action. I have not committed any transgression against you. I just feel that way. Nothing more, nothing less. What makes you right and me wrong in this situation?

Sure it is.  The universe is either 13.5 billion years old or it isn't.  The sun is primarily made up of hydrogen or it isn't.  The moon reflects light from the sun or it doesn't.  If you (not YOU, the royal you) believe otherwise that's a real problem.  As a matter of fact, the denial of certain scientific realities based on the feelings of certain people is a major problem and has been for millennia.

And, once again, you are incorrect. The most basic tenant in science, since you want to try to play in that realm, is that we can never actually know anything. There is no such thing as a fact.

By way of example, we used to be believe that an object with mass could not be in two places at the same time. Science has proven that "fact" as incorrect.

To take your analogy about the Sun a step further, YOUR reality is that the Sun is primarily made up of hydrogen. MY reality is that it is primarily made up of subatomic particles.

As you should be able to clearly see, what you call scientific realities amount to nothing more than currently available and accepted data that is subject to being proven wrong at any moment in time; thus the opposite of this reality of which you speak.

As I said earlier, what you believe to be reality is nothing more than stimuli provided by your senses filtered your own learned concepts. We can go back and forth on this for millennia. Philosophers have been trying to explain this to people for hundreds of years already. There has been no data that has come into existence to refute the position.

That's not a question of reality, it's a question of semantics. 

Oh? What gives you the right to tell me what I find real? Why is your idea that it is a question of semantics more worthy of consideration than mine of reality? It appears to me that you just don't like my position, so you're just going to dismiss, judge, and reject it. A prime example of invalidation based on nothing more than your desire to be right and prove me wrong. I can tell you right now, that will never happen.

If I told you the sky is blue and you corrected me by talking about prisms and visible light and molecules and red shift you'd be right, but I'm using common parlance in saying "the sky is blue today."  If, as in my other example, I said "the sky is purple" on a day when molecule scattering has caused it to be blue, we have a problem.

What problem would we have?

One of the major problems with the disorder for pwBPD is that feelings = facts, and the "facts" in many cases are tied to feelings about things that simply aren't true.  And that's my point. 

(I won't even address again what I said earlier about there really being no such thing as a "fact."

That last statement tells me, however, that you are missing the entire point of not invalidating another. One of the basic tenants is not to validate the invalid. So, if you see a different set of circumstances that give rise to the feelings, it's a good idea to not validate the circumstances. The feelings that the other person has however are what is to be validated.

If you know that feelings = facts to a pwBPD, then you can validate the actual feelings rather than the surface ones. By this I mean that if the pwBPD is angry about something, then validate the anger, not the source of the anger.
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Meili
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« Reply #42 on: August 16, 2016, 11:05:02 AM »

Now, this friend does their damnedest to validate the relative's feelings, but unless one of two things happen, the feeling does not abate:  a) friend acknowledges that aliens are in fact invading their loved one's body, or; b) clozapine to the rescue.

This is not validating feelings. This is attempting to validate the "facts" causing the feelings. To validate the feelings, your friend would only need to validate the fear (or whatever feeling) is being caused by the "aliens." Validate the valid, not the invalid. The fear is real to the other person even if the cause of the fear is not.

I think too often that last letter gets overlooked

I certainly won't dispute that. It happens because people tend to only use part of the tools available to them. In the moment of dysregulation is not the time to discuss the "truth." That should happen later. Attempting to reason a person out of their emotions will only serve to further frustrate the situation.

There are lots of situations where people just want to be heard.  I can do that all day.  There are others where people want their reality to be THE reality, and when that doesn't happen, you haven't heard them.

Then, you get to decide if you want those people in your life or not. That is a boundary for you to set and enforce. Though, it's certainly possible to allow a person to be heard without agreeing with them (which is another tenant of validation btw).
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« Reply #43 on: August 16, 2016, 06:45:36 PM »

So, the other day my PwBPD was having a craving for "menudo" which (for those of you not in the know) is a tripe (beef stomach) chile stew. It's malodorously disgusting with a texture reminiscent of septic waste. She loves it. Calls it comfort food. Lots of people around here dig it, though empirically it resembles the detritus contained in a barf bag. Nasty, nasty innards.

Though whose culinary tastes are empirically accurate? If I told her that eating the nasty bits shouldn't be comforting and tasty, am I invalidating (her) valid or invalid feelings/perception (of course I didn't do that). Perception is a tricky thing. The solipsistic brain in a vat may not perceive "that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in its philosophy."  And as it has been demonstrated over and over in the venue of eyewitness identification--just how unreliable our unassailable perception may be. Prone to suggestibility, environmental influence and innate bias etc. Still, the eyewitness testifying in court is certain about what they saw. However, perception is situational and often obscured.

And will any progress be achieved by directly calling out said eyewitness's credibility, by stating that their sincerely held perception and belief is erroneous. No, they will unequivocally state--"I know what I saw"--"He or she did it". "I was there." Yet, when bias, suggestion, and environment obscure perception--and the resultant DNA evidence exonerates the misidentified perpetrator--does that invalidate the eyewitness's former sincerely held unshakeable perception/belief--albeit an erroneous one. Consequently, perception is a tricky matter.

As the little child attends his first movie with parent in tow. A trailer with a frightful monster appears on the screen--freaking said toddler out. He cries, "that's the monster under my bed" and panics. Will the parent's immediate reaction be to logically explain why the child's perception is illusory, or does he or she simply comfort and hug the child soothing feelings that are in disarray.

So you see, validating the disordered adult is not about whether their perception is accurate, but communing with them. Relating to their feelings on an intimate and compassionate level. Still, member "Icanteven" expresses valid thoughts/feelings that we can all relate to. Because when an irrational adult PwBPD expresses feelings in an attacking, blaming, combative, manner towards their companion day-in-day-out, it takes a toll--perhaps compromising the non's ability to compassionately validate. In those moments, remember perception is a tricky thing and while sincerely held feelings may not be rationally based they remain the product of childhood, trauma and genetic predisposition.

Pure validation does not ensure that life with a PwBPD will be butterflies and rainbows. Though it assists with defusing, soothing and communing. It permits one to survive with a pwBPD. However, once the non has achieved some proficiency at validating, the burden shifts--it becomes incumbent (IMO) upon the PwBPD to self-actualize, by learning and applying skills that were never nurtured during childhood. Consequently, learning how to operate beyond the scope of the default programming driving the engine of emotion. I'd define that as doing one's best and learning to relationally thrive on this blue orb that we all share.
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« Reply #44 on: August 17, 2016, 05:02:02 PM »

If someone feels a certain way, we can't always shift them toward our reality, unfortunately... .they are entitled to their feelings, no matter how misguided those feelings may seem to us. They are real to them.

I have beautiful friends who feel ugly, thin friends who feel fat, smart friends who feel dumb. It's sad they feel the way they do. I can't change that even if I totally disagree with them. This is how they feel, right or wrong. Accept it, acknowledge it, show support and empathy, move along. Maybe gently nudge them with bite sizes of "truth" that they are in fact beautiful, shapely, or intelligent. But take this too far and you risk invalidating them. 

Nothing more to add except to agree with Conundrum's description of menudo. So accurate! Toxic sludge. 

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