Validation example - it worked!

[LittleRedBarn]

I wanted to share this example of validation, in case it can help others here.

My husband and I live in the USA. We are low-income and we don't have health insurance. Last year, we qualified for 100% financial assistance from our local hospital, which covered all our medical costs. We had to reapply again this year and, because my husband has started drawing a pension, they told us that he would only get 75% of his costs paid, but I would still qualify for 100%.

I handle all our finances, so I'm the one who had to deliver the news to him. I knew he would react badly and decided that I would do my best to use the validation skills that I have learned in my DBT Family Skills training course.

His reaction was as I'd predicted - This is a total f***ing disaster. There is no way we can afford it. I'll just stop going to the doctor altogether. I'll stop taking my meds. I don't need these people anyway. They are just out to get us. It's forces of evil, that's what it is. They are trying to separate us. They are treating us as individuals, not as a couple, because they can't bear how much we love each other. This could actually succeed in splitting us up.

In the past, I would have reacted by trying to calm him down, telling him that it's not that bad really, at least we are still getting nearly all of our medical expenses paid, and we've definitely got enough savings to cover the 25%, so he doesn't need to worry about it. That would have triggered him into the next stage of the fight - You have no empathy. You don't care about us as a couple, all you care about is you. It's fine for you, you're still getting 100%. This is it. I'm on my own now. I wish you would take more responsibility. You don't give a sh*t about me. and we would escalate from there.

This time around, I took a deep breath when he started, and tried to take a mental step back. I asked open questions to try and understand exactly what he was thinking and feeling. I tried to stay in a place of curiosity. I didn't try to reassure him or tell him that he was over-reacting. I listened, and reflected back what he was saying. And then I said, "I understand. I get that you believe there is a real risk that this news is going to break us up as a couple. And I can see how scary that is for you. I don't share your belief, but I totally get that, if you believe this is going to break us up, you would be really, really scared. It makes sense to me."

I was really surprised by his reaction. It totally de-escalated the situation. He immediately became much calmer. He was still distressed, but he seemed able to own it and for the first time ever in this kind of situation *he didn't blame me*. And him not blaming me made it much easier for me to support him as he worked his way through the crisis.

What I noticed, is that by validating him like this, I could get a much clearer view of what he was feeling, and I found it much easier to separate his feelings out from mine. In the past, our feelings used to get totally tangled up together until I really had no idea which way was up. This time around, although I feel like we've been on a roller-coaster, I can see that it was his roller-coaster, not mine, and I made a choice to ride it alongside him.

All this gives me hope for the future.

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[strawberrypeach4]

This is fantastic!! Such an encouraging thing to read, and I'm so happy it worked for you.

Could I ask, would you mind sharing examples of the questions you asked? I have tried this approach with my partner, but unfortunately she interprets any question as a passive aggressive attack on her, and gets more worked up. I'm wondering if I need to ask questions in a better way.

Good on you for being able to take a step back, pause, and take a different route. It's hard! I'm really glad it paid off.

[LittleRedBarn]

Hi Strawberrypeach

Thank you for the reply!

I think the most important thing is to lower our own emotional temperature before trying to validate. This can be hard because our whole body is screaming, 'Danger, danger!' as our loved one starts to show the BPD behaviors that we've been on the receiving end of too many times before. I use 'three mindful breaths' to try and calm myself down before speaking. Otherwise, I know that I can come across as aggressive or patronizing. Slowing things can down can help too. So I might say something like, 'Okay, let's slow this down. I really want to try and understand. Can you talk some more about whatever it is?

My husband tends to speak in whole chapters rather than sentences or paragraphs when he is dysregulated. So this time, I interrupted him and said, 'Hold on a second, I'm just trying to understand. What I think I heard you say - and you absolutely must correct me if I'm wrong - is because you will only get 75% of your medical costs covered, our relationship will not survive and it's inevitable that we will split up. Did I get that right?".
Tone is really important - it needs to sound compassionate, caring and genuinely interested. So I tried to stay in a place of genuine curiosity and to keep some emotional distance. I know that any hint of aggression or incredulity on my part inflames things further. 

The form of words can also be important. Saying "What I think I heard you say" works way better than "You said", which my husband interprets as me flinging his words back at him. A lot of it is trial and error, and what works for one person may not work for another.

Then when he answered the first question, I paraphrased and reflected back, without any judgement or interpretation. Then I asked if I'd got it right, then asked another question to clarify further until I genuinely understood where his thought process was going.

There was just one point where I got impatient. I said, "Can't you just be happy that at least one of us is getting 100% financial assistance?". This immediately escalated things again to "No, I f***ing can't!". So I backed off and went back to asking questions and reflecting back.

Once I actually understood the crazy (to me) logic, I suddenly saw just how terrified he was, this grown man sitting on a bench in a shopping mall thinking that his entire world was coming to an end. So it was easy for me to be compassionate and say that I understood how scared he was, I totally got it. I didn't share his fears, I said, but I completely understood that, if he genuinely believed that this financial news was going to lead to us splitting up, that would be really frightening, especially given what he went through in his childhood in terms of abandonment. It would frighten me too, if I'd had his life experiences and was in his shoes.

That was the point at which the emotional temperature really started coming down.

What I was trying to do was to validate the valid (his terror), while not validating the invalid (the idea that him having to pay 25% of his medical costs would lead to us splitting up).

Hope this helps!

[LittleRedBarn]

Working on learning to validate my BPD husband has reminded me of something that happened a long time ago, when I was married to someone else.

My then-husband was working alone in the woods behind our house and had a nasty accident involving a weed-whacker with a rotating metal blade. I was out of the house at the time and my in-laws were looking after the children. He cut a major artery and  almost certainly would have died if someone hadn't heard him shouting before he passed out. Luckily, he made a full recovery, but my son, who was 6 at the time, became very anxious afterwards and couldn't bear it if my husband and I were both out of the house at the same time.

My instinct was to totally rearrange our lives to accommodate my son's fear. We could reorganize things so one of us was always at home, just until he "got over it" or "grew out of it". But I talked to a friend who was a child psychologist. She said it was really important to recognize my son's fear, and at the same time show him that I didn't share it. That meant that sometimes he would have to be home with another caretaker, as he always had been before, and I would need to help him learn strategies to deal with the fear while we were out. So we did that, and it worked - he very quickly became much less anxious about us both being out of the house at the same time.

I guess the mistake I've made in my current marriage is that I need to do the same thing with my BPD husband as I did with that 6-year-old boy.

[dowhatittakes]

If I could count the amount of times a situation came up in which he was feeling negative and irrationally self loathing about pretty much anything, in which I tried to "fight him" in order to try to force him into a more positive view of himself or a situation I would probably fall short. In my mind doing so was meant to lift him up from a dark place or from a self loathing state but it literally never worked. Two weeks ago he was telling me was going to pack up and sell all his hobby stuff. It was something he's put years into and tens of thousands of hours, while I didn't argue he shouldn't sell it I did try to "prove to him" that he wasn't as useless as he was claiming to be. Unfortunately, 5 minutes later I received a picture of a smashed monitor as a result of my attempts to convince him of how wrong he was about himself. Some lightbulb just came on in my head and I thought of how he was feeling about the situation, how the whole thing would make him feel, the situation is not a rational one, so rational arguments aren't going to cut it. I told him something to this avail: "I'm really sorry, whatever broke can be replaced, what's really important is that you're okay and I just realized that I might have really screwed up, trying to argue with you in that situation only makes you feel antagonized and invalidated, I wasn't trying to argue with you for the sake of arguing. but obviously this and the other times I've been dead wrong about it because it's not about proving anything at that point, it's about you not feeling like I'm fighting you when you need me"

Low and behold his face literally lit up and he was like, yes, that's right and it's awful to feel like you're just trying to prove me wrong and argue with me, and it does nothing to calm me down.

Two days ago something similar happened and I caught myself about to do it again, I reversed course on the fly and.... it worked again, it wasn't as dramatic but what was starting to look like another tough conversation turned into nothing but validation from me, and him just saying okay and going back to calm.

[LittleRedBarn]

Hi dowhatittakes

This is so encouraging! Thank you for posting your experience.

I'm slowly working out that all my attempts to rationalize, calm and soothe my BPD husband when he's in a crisis have had the effect of further invalidating him. Far from calming things down, I have (with the best of intentions) been escalating the situation.

I really believe that truly validating his feelings, however irrational they might seem to me, will make all the difference to our lives. It's a really hard skill to learn and it's going to take a lot of practice. Luckily, there is no shortage of opportunity!