BPDFamily.com

hi friends, I had a good experience last night that could have gone south, was one of those same conversations we'd had before in some ways, except dd is older and has more insight/meta understanding now so we could head it off by saying things like 'yeah, this kind of conversation hasn't worked for us, because it makes you feel like X and me feel like Y'.  My dd has a lot of self-understanding, which really helps.  Part of the time I remembered to validate, and part of the time not which made her feel worse, but she was able to open up and share some really awful feelings of failure, self-blame, suicidal thoughts.  And the key validation statement that I think helped is just that its normal to grow.  Its normal to have things that don't work the way you want and to learn from them, and to change as a result.  So kind of combining validation with growth mindset.

Anyway very grateful to this forum, I think without the skills I learned here I would have done a lot worse handling it.  I used to feel I had to choose between being 'real' or 'agreeing' - and I often chose the former, which tended to blow up - but validation is real, and can be done authentically, which I really like. 

For all parents with teens and late teens, I think there is probably light at the end of the tunnel.  Two, three and four years ago if I look at my diaries there is so much more pain there.  Now there is some, but proportionally much more positive, warm and happy feelings, and just more stability.  I think keeping that long view and especially acting on principles when your feelings are really negative, and asking dd and ds to act on principles regardless of _their_ feelings, may just work in the long run. 

Ok, so maybe I spoke too soon!  Next day, when I brought up an issue, cleaning something and said I'd been bothered about it, it triggered my dd, who did stuff that triggered me, and we had a fight.  Accusations, I ranted at her, the whole thing.  But, even with that we were able to keep doing what we needed to be doing (we had a deadline) and afterwards we made up over text.  So I think its still progress, but definitely not there yet.  I have to take a break when I get triggered so I can go back to using skills correctly, the thing is we couldn't because we had a deadline.   It worked out all right but I want to try not to repeat that again.