Invalidation

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I wonder if the more traumatized the person is, the more sensitive they are.

and the person who wants mainly sympathy, the person who wants mainly solutions, and the person whose misery loves company are all totally different types of people, and woe be onto the one who can't read the person correctly. the sympathy seeker who is given solutions/suggestions will feel invalidated, the solution seeker who receives sympathy or company will feel poo-poo'ed, and the company seeker who gets instead sympathy or solutions will feel either poo-poo'ed or otherwise invalidated.

Also there are some people out there speculating that BPD is really just C-PTSD.

I think it's the other way around. The more sensitive a person is, the more easily they are traumatized.

...

what does the "C" stand for?

Complex

A person who conveys his/her feelings wants the other person to really LISTEN to him/her. To not listen, and to criticize without forethought, leads to a feeling of "invalidation."

Most of the time, the person who conveys the feelings doesn't necessarily need a solution. They might not even want the person to convey a solution at all. All they need, in essence, is a "partner for the moment."

As far as I can tell from reading both the list and the website it comes from, the very attempt to tell somebody to have different feelings is the invalidation. You are not supposed to ever tell somebody how to feel, just accept that that's how they feel.

On the one hand, I can understand that. On the other hand, framing it the way that list and website does just turns people into villains and victims. If intent counts for nothing, if it doesn't matter that somebody was only trying to help or to say what they thought was the right thing, where does that leave people who have a hard time predicting the effect of their words?

I'm NT and that list is too full of freighted social nuance for me. Adhering to its' rules requires ninja skills of saying the right thing. I sure don't don't have those ninja skills of always saying the right thing even though I lack an AS diagnosis. On the one hand, posts prior to mine make it clear that many AS people have heard these things before and felt invalidated. On the other hand, there are a gazillion [i]more[/i posts (not in this thread) by people who have endlessly been accused of being the invalidator for saying the wrong thing and making other people even more upset. Saying the right thing is hard. This list makes it infinitely harder. So much harder that giving up and just not communicating at all is easier.

As I said upthread, it works great in a therapist's office, but not so much outside it. It just shuts down all possibility of communication and fosters a villain/victim dynamic.


And just as I was about to post, I see there are a dozen posts that happened while I was typing so hopefully mine is still relevent.

thank you this whole thing is a complex subject, no?

Too complex to break down into a group of rules as what's invalidating one moment to one person is validating another moment another person.

Maybe the key is in somehow listening well enough to know what people want. I've not found the magic answer either.

There is no "one" magic answer. What might be "magic" to one person is "poison" to another.
That why we must see people as individuals, not as statistics which arise from research studies.