Shari Y. Manning > Quotes

“The psychological definition of an invalidating environment is an environment where the responses of the child are pervasively treated as inaccurate, unrealistic, trivial, or pathological, independent of the actual validity of the behavior. This is really a mess of words, but here are some examples of invalidating responses: The child says he doesn’t like green beans. “Of course you like green beans. Everybody likes green beans.” The child brings home a grade of 98 on a test. “Why didn’t you get a 100? I know you could have gotten a 100.” The child says she is hungry. “You are not hungry. You just ate.” The child comes home crying after a fight with a friend. “You didn’t need him as a friend anyway.” The teenager comes home after a terrible day at high school. “Don’t you complain. These are the best days of your life.” (Honestly, would you want to do high school again?)”
― Shari Y. Manning, Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder: How to Keep Out-of-Control Emotions from Destroying Your Relationship

“Validation helps to bring down emotions and make them more manageable for everyone, not just the person with BPD.”
― Shari Y. Manning, Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder: How to Keep Out-of-Control Emotions from Destroying Your Relationship

“DBT works on the premise that people who have lives that include meaningful relationships, activities, and purpose do not attempt suicide. In other words, to be less suicidal, people have to have a life worth living. I have never met someone who said, “I have people I love and who love me, a job I enjoy, and hobbies that keep me engaged, and I want to die.” People become suicidal or engage in problem behaviors because they do not believe they have love or meaning and often because they are consumed by overwhelming despair about what has happened in their lives and hopelessness about what will happen in the future. People”
― Shari Y. Manning, Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder: How to Keep Out-of-Control Emotions from Destroying Your Relationship

“Those who practice DBT are compassionate and dedicated to understanding the experience of BPD but at the same time believe, unwaveringly, that the most compassionate thing we can do is help people with BPD to change.”
― Shari Y. Manning, Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder: How to Keep Out-of-Control Emotions from Destroying Your Relationship

“1. Ask yourself what emotion you’re having and focus on not responding from the emotion. As you saw in Chapter 4, regulating your own emotion is always the first step in responding effectively to someone with BPD. This is true no matter which of the faces of BPD described in Part II you’re seeing. But it’s paramount when your partner is being pulled down by emotional vulnerability. Let’s say your spouse or sibling or best friend is going back and forth between extreme sadness and despair that her life is not different and anger at you. It’s only human to have emotional reactions to being attacked. In addition, believing that your loved one might actually lose control of her emotions and the consequences might be dire is frightening. It’s these high emotions of your own that can cause you to make frantic attempts to fix things or to withdraw from your loved one.”
― Shari Y. Manning, Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder: How to Keep Out-of-Control Emotions from Destroying Your Relationship