This exercise will give you more practice in identifying your thoughts about emotions and will help you learn different ways of talking to yourself about them. Below are some examples of validating statements: nonjudgmental statements that you could say to yourself about how you feel that won’t end up making you feel worse.
Highlight or underline the statements that you would most find helpful for the emotions you tend to invalidate. Then, in the space provided, see if you can come up with some more statements that will help you think in a nonjudgmental, more balanced way about these emotions. Remember that this is not about liking the emotion or not wanting to change it; rather, it’s a nonjudgmental way of thinking about the emotion you’re experiencing so that you don’t add fuel to the fire of your emotion and trigger more pain for yourself.
___________
___________
___________
___________
___________
Because changing your thoughts this way can be pretty hard, you might want to rewrite this list of validating statements on a separate piece of paper that you can carry with you. That way, when you start to experience an emotion that you don’t like and that you tend to invalidate, you can pull out your list and read it to yourself.
So far in this chapter, we’ve looked at skills to help you reduce the amount of pain in your life—by not judging yourself and others, and by not judging your emotions. The next skill is similar in that it helps to reduce the amount of emotional pain in your life, this time by focusing on how you think about the situation.
When was the last time you were in a painful situation and heard yourself say, “This is so unfair. It’s not right; it shouldn’t be this way” or something along those lines? Did it help to think about the situation this way? Or did it make you feel more emotions or feel your emotions more intensely? It’s pretty natural for us to try to fight whatever causes us pain. When we fight reality in this way, though, it actually makes our pain worse. Take a look at the following exercise to help you think about this idea.