Validation

[Eye438]

I am having trouble understanding this term, I have never heard it before my BPD ex. In my own personal inventory I am trying to identify clearly this term and how I may have used or misused it. I feel personally that I am good at validating but when it came to being involved with a BPD I began to judge and invalidate due to my own desperate need to hang on and just breath and the need to be validated myself.

I guess my question is this, why does this term come up so often with a BPD and a non? How can anyone validate a mentally ill person to begin with?

[eeks]

Great topic, Eye438! 

First of all, and this is the thing that confuses enough people at the outset that I hear it repeated often, validation is not the same thing as agreeing, or approving of the person's behaviour.

Nonviolent Communication is a simple (if not easy) method to start out with.  One of the very basic principles is that feelings are signposts to unmet needs.   Another basic principle is that even if people are harming themselves and/or others, this is a tragic attempt to meet their needs.

Self-awareness of feelings and needs is really kind of luck of the draw in terms of whether your parents modelled it for you, what kind of school you went to etc., so for a lot of people, self included, this has meant a lot of practise noticing my own feelings and needs before I was able to use NVC in even moderately intense conflict situations with other people.  I believe much of the work of psychotherapy boils down to learning the self-validation that we did not get in our FOO (even though of course, we are learning it from another person who we can mirror off of)

The pwBPD is a unique case, my experience was that similar words and approaches that would help other people in my life feel heard and validated, the pwBPD did not respond the same way to them.