Emotional Vulnerability and Self-Invalidation: Opposite Ends of a Dialectical Dilemma
Key Points
- Emotional vulnerability vs. self-invalidation dilemma was the primary impetus for developing DBT.
- It accounts for the struggles of the patient in attempting to reconcile whether it is the environment or themselves which is to blame for their circumstances.
- In order to synthesize the two opposing sides, the therapist must effectively validate without reinforcing problem behaviors and listen for the innate wisdom of the patient’s current experience.
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Transcript
Emotional Vulnerability vs Self-Invalidation.
The experience of this dilemma was reported by Linehan to be the primary impetus for developing DBT. The theme centers around who’s to blame and the patient may fluctuate rapidly between blaming themselves and blaming others. You may recall how Linehan began working with chronically suicidal people using behavioral therapy and that it was not particularly effective on its own because the true biologically inborn emotional vulnerability of the patient was not taken into account. Thus, the patient was highly invalidated rather than helped.
On the one side of the dialectical dilemma, emotional vulnerability, we have an individual with a genetically inherited disposition of sensitivity. There is true emotional pain. When the patient is on this side of the dilemma, the message either explicit or implicit is be careful, I’m fragile.