Dialectical Behavioral Therapy/Emotion Regulation Skills/Understanding the function of emotions/Self-validating feelings

Jane’s self-validating feelings

Jane (not a real person) is a teenager living with her parents, who does not do well with stress. She is doing the best she can, but when she is put under pressure she gets nervous. She is fine most of the time unless there is a deadline of some kind. With any sort of time limit, she feels overwhelmed, anxious, and confused. When there is time pressure, Jane starts to ruminate; she becomes forgetful, irritable with others, and tends to isolate. Jane’s reaction to stress causes problems in school, work and home.

Jane’s family assumes that she is she stable person she appears to be. They do not understand that she can get so anxious and upset with pressure. In fact, Jane works hard to stay in control and avoid pressure. Sometimes, her family puts what they this is normal pressure on her to do something and Jane “freaks out” as she angrily pushes people away. take her unstable mood into consideration, sometimes they expect more out of her than she can give at the time. She is expected to do what her family asks despite her problem with anxiety – how she feels or what she thinks. Jane’s private experiences (feelings, thoughts, moods, fears) are not appreciated.

Her family believes the problem is her motivation. They believe if she would try harder she could do what they expect of her. “You could do it if you wanted to.” Her family is emotionally invalidating because they do not consider her personal experience or appreciate her emotional and mental experience. Jane can not consistently live up to their expectations and thinks she has disappointed “everyone.” Instead of feeling proud of what she has done, she feels guilt and shame for not pleasing her family and her occasional nervous breakdown.

One way for Jane to have her feelings taken seriously is to increase the intensity of her expressed emotions. “I can’t do it!” she screams. As her behavior becomes more frantic and desperate (mood-dependent), the intensity of her emotional expressions increase, she finally gets her family’s attention and sympathy. Unfortunately, when she is so out of control, she is not able to be really persuasive and get them to understand. She is expressive but not logical. Rather, when expressing such intense emotion, others perceive her as being “manipulative” (by which most people mean that she is using emotion to get them to do something) and they resent feeling controlled by her.

When she has calmed down and has a good day, Jane demonstrates normal behavior. She does what her family says she “should” do. Then her family believes that she really could do what they expected her to do all along. “See you can do it. We knew you could do it if you tried.” They believe her behavior depends on her motivation. So she feels guilt and shame (instead of pride of accomplishment) because she “should” have been behaving like this all along. Because she demonstrated normal behavior, the high expectations kick in again and the all-or-nothing thinking. She is criticized for not living up to their expectations. Jane again feels misunderstood and invalidated.

Jane lives with the shame of not being good enough to live up to her parent’s expectations. Her feelings of depression and sadness naturally follow from her thoughts. Her feelings are self-validating because she feels as she believes. She has internalized the messages she has gotten from the invalidating environment and has based her interpretation of her behavior on her family’s assessment. She feels sad because she believes she’s not good enough and she believes she’s not good enough because she has repeatedly disappointed her family. The function of her depressed feelings is self-validating: she thinks about herself the way that she feels about herself and feels about herself the way she thinks about herself. Her feelings determine her thoughts and vice versa.