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• What and when to validate
• Recovering from invalidation
• Learning to validate yourself
• Validating others
  • To validate others
  • Communicate what you understand about the situation
  • Legitimize the “facts” or another’s responses
  • Explain your own feelings after expressing understanding
  • Acknowledge the situation, the other’s opinions, feelings, etc.
• Respect emotions, reactions and goals

Sections of the module

1. Validation of others

• It is the core of communication between individuals and within couples, friends and families, so it can help with all relationships
• It builds trust and slows negative reactivity
• It maintains fairness and decreases anger
• It improves mutual understanding
• It increases self-respect
• It helps relationships to get through “rough” spots
• It makes closeness and intimacy possible

2. How I can validate myself

• Be mindful of thoughts and feelings: observe and describe them as being present and being real; just notice (what is, is); remember, I do not necessarily have to participate in the thought
• Be mindful of self-judgments regarding my thoughts and feelings; practice observing and describing them non-judgmentally
• Search for understanding of and legitimacy in myself and my experience, honestly and non-judgmentally
• Recontextualize the thing(s) I tend to invalidate (consider a broader and more balanced context for the thing I'm invalidating)
• Normalize my normal behavior
• Respond in a way (action) that takes myself seriously
• Recognize problematic behavior and target it for change
• Provide myself with nurturance and support, or seek it from another
• Use a wise mind
• Practice willingness with respect to my own experience

3. Invalidation and recovering from it

• Invalidation is any time that your experience was not respected as being legitimate or true
• We frequently receive "mixed messages," especially when we know on one hand that love is demonstrated through caring behaviors, and yet we feel hurt
• Another form of invalidation is being told that we do not, or should not, feel the way we do
  • For example, we may be told that we have "no right to be hurt," "need to get over it" or should "stop overreacting"

4. The many ways to invalidate the valid

• Do things to diminish safety (make threats, be coercive or aggressive)
• Ignore or don’t pay attention (or pretend not to pay attention)
• Minimizing feelings or their legitimacy
• Be critical or judgmental; put the worst possible “spin” on the behavior
• Let miscommunication stand unrepaired
• Be willful (focus on being right instead of effective or decent)
• Make assumptions about another person that are not mindful, are judgmental, not consistent with the facts, or the worst “spin”
• Up the ante: escalate conflict
• Try to win an argument by being more hostile or attacking
• Don’t pay attention to another’s pain or suffering
• Engage in “controlling” behavior
• Engage in crazy-making behavior (e.g., “gaslighting,” be dishonest, or patronizing, insist she or he feels or thinks something even though they say they don’t – even if you are “well-intended”) 
• Don’t validate enough
• Treat the person as though she or he is fragile

• Prioritizing your goals
• DEARMAN, GIVE and FAST tools and practice
• Additional practices for interpersonal effectiveness

Sections of the module

1. Prioritizing your goals

• Before responding during a stressful, high-conflict interaction, you want to understand what your primary goal is.
• What do you most want to leave the situation with?
  • What you are requesting
  • The relationship at risk
  • Your self-respect

2. Depending on what you want to leave the situation with, you will tailor your approach:

• Skill #1: DEARMAN
  • Describe the facts of the situation
  • Express your opinions and feelings
  • Assert what you want or need, or say “no”
  • Reinforce the other person to want to do what your request
  • Stay Mindful of your goal of the situation
  • Appear confident
  • Negotiate only what you’re willing to give up to attain your primary goal
• Skill #2: GIVE
  • Be Gentle towards the other person
  • Act Interested in what they’re saying
  • Validate this perspective
  • Use an Easy manner
• Skill #3: FAST
  • Be Fair to yourself
  • No Apologies for what you’re requesting
  • Stick to values
  • Be Truthful about the situation

Some fun ways to describe the skills

• Steps for practicing emotion regulation
• TEASE MASTERY tool to reduce vulnerability to negative emotions

Sections of the module

1. Steps for practicing emotion regulation

• Step #1: Mindfulness of current emotions
  • Learn to observe your emotions
  • Remember you are not your emotions
  • Do not judge or suppress your emotions
• Step #2: Challenging emotional responses
  • Checking the facts
    • Ask yourself which emotion you want to change?
    • Ask what the event is that is prompting your emotion?
    • Ask what interpretations, thoughts and assumptions you hold about the event?
    • Ask whether you’re assuming a threat?
    • Ask whether your emotion and/or its intensity matches the facts of the situation?
    • Ask what’s the worst case scenarios and how likely is it?
  • Opposite action
    • Identify and name the emotion
    • Check the facts (see above)
    • Identify and describe your action urges
    • Ask your wise mind (see mindfulness module)
    • Identify opposite actions to your action urges
      • Opposite action of shame = tell the secret to people who will accept it
      • Opposite action of sadness = get active
      • Opposite action of anger = gently avoid/be a little nice
      • Opposite action of anxiety = approach/don’t avoid
    • Act opposite all the way to your action urges, always keeping safety in mind
    • Repeat acting opposite until your emotion changes
  • Problem-solving
    • Figure out and describe the problem situation
    • Check the facts to be sure you have the right problem situation
      • If the facts are not correct, repeat the previous step
    • Identify your goal in solving the problem
    • Brainstorm as many solutions without being critical of any of them
    • Choose the solution that fits the goal and is likely to work
      • If you are having trouble, do a pros and cons list to compare solutions
    • Put the solution into action
    • Evaluation the results of using the solution
      • If it did not work, try the next best solution
  • Do one pleasant activity each day
  • Focus on positive events in your life
    • Refocus your mind when it wanders to negative events or starts thinking about when the positive events will end

Some fun ways to describe the skills

Imagine driving on the freeway and a car cuts, you off and enters your lane. You have to slam on your breaks and nearly get in a car accident. What do you do? Many people’s action urge would be to honk their horn, shout loudly or engage in some other aggressive behavior. However, this does not match the facts. The correct emotion is fear or worry, thus you should problem-solve and decide whether to engage in opposite action. To remain safe, the best option likely to take a few deep breaths and continue driving, possibly moving to a lane far from the other driver, if safe.

2. Use the acronym “TEASE MASTERY” to remember ways to reduce vulnerability to negative emotions

Steps for increasing positive emotions and decreasing negative emotions:

• Treat physical illnesses
• Eat a balanced diet
• Avoiding mood-altering drugs
• Get enough Sleep
• Exercise daily
• Build MASTERY of some skill or activity to increase your sense of control (e.g. get good at something you enjoy)

• Crisis survival strategies: Self-soothe
• Thinking of pros and cons
• Guidelines for accepting reality: Observing your breath exercises
• Radical acceptance and turning the mind

Sections of the module

1. Crisis survival strategies: Self-soothe

• In group, you will learn several options for self-soothing through activating your five senses: vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Examples of activities include listening to music, lighting a candle, having a good meal, petting your animal and smelling scented lotion.

2. Thinking of pros and cons

• One main aim of group is learning to decide when to act on your urges. An early step of distress tolerance is making a list of the pros and cons of tolerating the distress and not tolerating the distress. By visualizing this information on a chart, you can more easily decide your best option in the moment.

3. Guidelines for accepting reality: Observing your breath exercises

• One method of reducing the physiological and cognitive symptoms of experiencing distress is to focus on your breath. This can be done in multiple ways, including, but not limited to counting your breath, deep breathing, and measuring your breath by your footsteps.

4. Radical acceptance and turning the mind

• Radical acceptance means accepting your mind, heart and body as is, all the way. It is acceptance of your reality, including facts about the present and past and accepting that everything has a cause and that life can be worth living even after we experience a painful event. This can be done by turning the mind, which requires us make a commitment to accepting reality. This requires a choice to accept reality, but not to necessarily label something as being “good.” This also may require you to commit over and over when you find yourself starting to reject reality.

Some fun ways to describe the skills

Mindfulness is intentionally living with awareness in the present moment (waking up from automatic or role behaviors to participate and be present in our own lives). When we talk about mindfulness, we’re talking about being aware. So this means being aware of the current moment.

Most of us spend a lot of time in our heads, thinking, worrying, or planning, and may actually be ‘zoned out’ from our actual lives. Have you ever driven somewhere in your car, and when you get there you can’t remember the drive? It may feel like you’re living your life on autopilot, going through the motions but not actually living. This is the opposite of mindfulness.

Be present in the moment without judging or rejecting the moment (noticing consequences, discerning helpfulness and harmfulness—but letting go of evaluating, avoiding, suppressing, or blocking the present moment). Mindfulness can be used as a means of controlling your own mind instead of letting your mind control you. The idea here is that we will be learning to be able to do what’s right for you, despite being worried, scared, overwhelmed, etc.

Many women tell us that they know what would be best for them, but just can’t seem to do it. Mindfulness is the skill that helps us to move forward even when it’s tough. Without attachment to the moment (attending to experience of each new moment, rather than ignoring the present by clinging to the past or grabbing for the future).

How can mindfulness help?

Mindfulness can help reduce suffering and increase happiness. This can be achieved by alleviating pain, tension and stress through mindfulness. Mindfulness can also help increase control of your mind; this will help stop letting your mind be in control of you.

Mindfulness can help you experience reality as it is (e.g., learn to live life with your eyes wide open). You can learn to experience the reality of your:

• Connection to the universe
• Essential “goodness”
• Essential validity

Skills/concepts taught in this module

• Wheel of abuse
• States of mind
• "What" skills
• "How" skills
• Chain analysis

Sections of the module

1. Wheel of abuse

• This is the wheel of abuse and it shows the common strategies abusers use to keep others trapped. Not only do abusers use everything they have to keep the relationship they also try and destroy resources one could use to escape the abuse (e.g. isolating from social support, getting you fired, etc.).

2. States of mind

• Emotion mind: When in emotion mind, you are ruled by your moods, feelings, and urges to do or say things. Facts, reason, and logic are not important (e.g., hot; mood-dependent; emotional focused)
• Reasonable mind: When in reasonable mind, you are ruled by facts, reason, logic, and pragmatics. Values and feelings are not important (e.g., cool; rational; task-focused)
• Wise mind: Seeing the value of both reason and emotion. Bringing left brain and right brain together. The middle path. (e.g., The wisdom within each person) ​

3. "What" skills

• Observe: Just notice the experience. Notice without getting caught in the experience. Experience without reacting to your experience.
• Describe: Put words on the experience. When a feeling or thought arises, or you do something, acknowledge it. (Make sure to do non-judgmentally)
• Participate: Enter into your experience. Let yourself get involved in the moment, letting go of ruminating. Become one with your experience, completely forgetting yourself.

4. "How" skills

• One-mindfully: do one thing at a time. When you are eating, eat. When you are walking, walk. Do not multi-task.
• Effectively: Focus on what works. Do what needs to be done in each situation. Stay away from “fair” and “unfair” “right” and “wrong” “should” and “should not.”
• ​Non-judgmentally: See but don’t evaluate. Take a non-judgmental stance. Just the facts. Focus on the “what” not the “good” or “bad” the “terrible” or “wonderful” the “should” or “should not.”

5. Chain analysis

• Step #1: Describe the problem behavior.
• Step #2: Describe the prompting event that started the chain of events leading to the problem behavior.
• Step #3: Describe the factors happening before the event that made you vulnerable to starting down the chain of events toward the problem behavior.
• Step #4: Describe in excruciating detail the chain of events that led to the problem behavior.
• Step #5: Describe the consequences of the problem behavior.

Activities to practice at home

Below are some different ways to practice each skill and understand when and how you are mindful. Some will be easier than others and help provide information regarding which aspects of your life could be improved by practicing mindfulness.

Skill: Observe

Exercise:  Conveyor Belt

Get comfortable in your chair, close your eyes and try to blank out your mind. I want you to picture a conveyor belt.  Picture yourself walking up the conveyor belt, watching everything coming towards you.  What you are watching for are your thoughts, urges, emotions or sensations.  Watch them come down the conveyor belt. As they come closer to you, I want you to just watch them come and go and get back to watching to see what comes down the conveyor belt next.  Try not to attach or push away what you notice on the conveyor belt.  Just let it come and go.  Afterwards, notice which things you had a hard time “letting go” of on the conveyor belt.

Skill: Describe

Exercise: Nit Pickin’

Put three objects on a table (a flower, a shoe, a glass with some type of liquid, Mardi Gras beads, a banana, etc.). Describe each object one at a time using your describe skill (“JUST THE FACTS”), describing just what you know, only what you observe. Add nothing, subtract nothing. Observe any “nit-picking” and just “observe” this, use a “non-judgmental stance” and get back to using “just the facts”. We tend to assume things as they are and usually our assumptions are wrong, so make sure to look at “what is” (reality) and respond from there.

Skill: Participate

Exercise: Body-to-object

Focus your attention on where your body touches an object (floor or ground, air molecules, a chair or armrest, your bed sheets and covers, your clothes, etc.). Try to see all the ways you are connected to and accepted by that object. Consider the function of that object with relation to you. That is, consider what the object does for you. Consider its kindness in doing that. Experience the sensation of touching the object, and focus your entire attention on that kindness until a sense of being connected or loved or cared for arises in your heart.

Skill: Non-Judgmental Stance

Exercise: Judging the Media

Take a magazine or newspaper and try to identify all the judgments you make about what you are looking at or reading. Pay close attention to the emotion(s) you feel as you are judging. Write down what you are judging and how it made you feel. Notice how judging causes unending problem emotions.

Skill: One-Mindful

Exercise: Multiple Games

Some fun at-home game require players to concentrate.  Some examples of these games are:

• Jenga
• Concentration
• Memory
• Building houses out of playing cards
• Twister
• Simon
• Don’t Spill the Beans
• Hungry Hungry Hippos
• Operation
• Perfection