Emotion vulnerability can leave you feeling out of control of your emotions, thoughts, and actions. You might feel consumed by your emotions and unable to see out of them. As Dr. Marsha Linehan has described, people with high emotion vulnerability can be like emotional burn victims, sensitive to the slightest touch (Linehan, 1993a). The other side of the “dialectic” here is self-invalidation. Self-invalidation involves rejecting or invalidating your emotions. When you’re stuck in emotion vulnerability, you’re caught up in your emotions, and when you’re stuck in self-invalidation, you’re judging or rejecting yourself for having these emotions. It’s like going from being sad and devastated about a breakup and then telling yourself it’s stupid to feel that way, there’s something wrong with you, or your mental health problems are acting up. In DBT, we believe that people can learn to invalidate themselves by growing up in invalidating environments or being around other environments that invalidate their emotions. Beyond parents or caregivers, society (including mental health treatment providers) can be invalidating and outright rejecting to people who struggle with mental health problems. There also might be a genetic vulnerability for the tendency to self-criticize or self-invalidate. In any case, if you get caught in this dialectic between emotion vulnerability and self-invalidation, you might find yourself at times swept away by and feeling like a victim of the storm of your emotions, and then engulfed by self-criticism, self-judgment, and shame about your emotions. Harshly invalidating and criticizing yourself might sometimes work temporarily to jolt you out of unwanted emotional experiences but the cost in terms of long-term personal suffering, shame, self-hate and inwardly-directed anger are not worth this meagre and inconsistent short-term benefit.
How can people get out of this cycle? Well, one starting point is to try to improve your ability to notice, understand, accept, and regulate your emotions. This is the focus of the emotion regulation skills in DBT (see Linehan, 2015), and DBT therapists often look for opportunities to help clients understand, experience, and regulate their emotions. When you have BPD and strong emotional vulnerability, managing your emotional system can be like trying to fly a fighter jet. It takes a lot of skill and training to operate the many dials and buttons and adjust based on the various dials and gauges. Harnessing all of that emotional power and complexity takes work and training. Other people have emotional systems that are more like family sedans with automatic transmission, where very little skill is required to get from place to place safely. If you’re dealing with strong emotion vulnerability, you can get to the point where you are able to step back (even at high speeds and in turbulent conditions), observe and notice how you’re feeling, and accept, experience, or regulate your emotions. Regarding self-invalidation, I think of this as much like a well-worn path in the woods. Your brain is used to invalidating your feelings, in fact so used to it that the invalidation path is easy to see, well-groomed, and well-marked. Learning the opposite – to validate yourself – can take some help and a lot of practice. If you’re working with a therapist, you can seek help figuring out how to self-validate, and the question I find most helpful is: How does it make sense that I’m feeling this emotion right now? We believe that all emotions have causes; thus, all emotions make sense and are valid on some level. Therefore, instead of criticizing or berating yourself for how you feel, start by simply asking yourself how your emotions make sense. Then, wait for the answer. Seek help from a trusted therapist or close loved one if you’re having difficulty seeing how your emotions make sense. Validating yourself won’t take away your emotions, but it is an act of kindness and understanding that will likely make them easier to bear. ~ Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.