How to validate someone with BPD without agreeing with them

If you love someone with borderline personality disorder — or someone with intense emotions who has never been near a diagnosis — you have probably been told to "validate more."

If you love someone who experiences intense emotions, validation is an evidence-based skill that is proven to improve communication in those difficult moments.

Validation means recognizing the deep emotion underneath our loved one's rage towards themselves or others, assuring them that the emotion is real, and that it makes sense from inside their experience. It's not about agreeing with their version of the facts, excusing bad behaviour, nor making a commitment about the future.

When learning about validation, many people initially feel like they are being asked to give in to manipulation, roll over, or let their loved one walk all over them. One reason it feels like that is often that we aren't aware of our own emotions and how they are influencing our reactions. But the true meaning of validation doesn't imply these things at all.

Why validation feels like surrender

Validation doesn't feel logical. The terrible things our loved ones are saying just aren't factually correct, and we want to debate them. Their demands are unrealistic and impossible, and we just want to talk some sense into them! Validation feels like capitulating, and that reaction makes sense.

But validation doesn't say "you're right about the facts." It says "your feelings are real, and given how this looks from inside your experience, they make sense." You can believe someone is factually wrong and still recognize that their emotion is genuine and understandable.

Validation vs. agreement, approval, and problem-solving

Three things validation is routinely mistaken for:

• Agreement — "You're right, we did exclude you." Validation doesn't concede facts. "It really hurt to feel left out" concedes nothing except that the hurt is real — which it is.
• Approval — validating anger is not endorsing what the anger did. You can validate the feeling and still hold a boundary about the behaviour, in the same conversation.
• Problem-solving — the fastest way to invalidate someone is to fix them. Advice, offered before the feeling has been acknowledged, lands as "your emotion is a malfunction to be corrected." Solutions come later, if they're wanted at all.

Why it works

When emotions get big, our pre-frontal cortex — the reasoning part of the brain — goes offline. You know what that feels like: someone cuts you off in traffic and you're in a blind rage for a few minutes, unable to think clearly. For our highly sensitive loved ones, it can be like that all the time. In that state, the capacity to process language, weigh perspectives, and reach for coping skills genuinely shrinks — the reasonable, well-constructed argument you're composing will not be heard, not because they refuse to hear it, but because right now they can't.

You can't have a rational discussion while the pre-frontal cortex is offline. Validation is what brings it back online. It's often the only message small enough to get through; everything else waits.

Chris Voss, the FBI's former lead international hostage negotiator, describes in Never Split the Difference the number one weapon he brought to high-stakes negotiations with terrorists and hostage takers: "tactical empathy." Validation is not soft. It is a precision tool we can use to move towards accurate communication.

A three-step structure

1. Put down your counterargument. Not forever — for now. You cannot listen for the feeling while assembling the rebuttal. If it helps, tell yourself: the facts can be litigated tomorrow; the feeling is here tonight.
2. Find the kernel that's true. Under almost every accusation is an emotion that makes sense from inside their experience: fear of being abandoned, shame at needing help, grief at being different. You're not looking for what's accurate about the story — you're looking for what's real in the feeling.
3. Say it plainly, and stop. Name the feeling, connect it to how things look from their side, and resist the "but." Everything before a "but" gets deleted by the listener. If a boundary or correction is needed, it goes in a separate sentence — often a separate conversation.

What to say

The all-purpose validating phrases — small enough to get through, hard to get wrong:

• "I hear you."
• "That sounds tough."
• "That makes sense."
• "I can see how much this hurts."
• "Tell me more."
• "I'm here."

Five scripts

Words to adapt, not recite — they only work in language that sounds like you.

What not to say

• "Calm down." (Has never once worked in the history of human conflict.)
• "You're overreacting." (Names their emotion as defective — the definition of invalidation.)
• "That's not what happened." (Maybe true; wrong moment. Fact-checking mid-escalation reads as attack.)
• "I understand, but…" (The "but" erases everything before it.)
• "Other people have it worse." (Comparison is invalidation wearing perspective's coat.)
• Anything that uses the diagnosis as a weapon — "you're being so borderline right now."

When validation isn't enough

Validation is never an excuse for physical abuse or threats to safety. Never hesitate to call 911 for protection. Tell the police that it is a mental health issue — that will help them respond appropriately. Validation of feelings sits alongside firm limits when it comes to safety, for everyone.

Self-validation, self-care, and grief

The skill you're learning to offer them, you're allowed to use on yourself. Your exhaustion makes sense. Your resentment, your fear of the next phone call, the love and the anger existing in the same minute — all of it is a reasonable response to a genuinely hard situation. Practising validation toward someone else does not mean your own feelings wait forever.

Self-care here isn't spa language; it's maintenance of the only instrument you have. Sleep, food, movement, one thing each week that is yours, and at least one person you can be honest with. When your reserves are empty, validation becomes impossible — not because you don't love them, but because finding the kernel of truth in someone else's storm takes fuel. And if you find you can't validate because you're too depleted to find the kernel of truth in anything, that's not a skills failure. That's a signal that you need support too — which is what the next section is about.

And name the grief. Many parents and partners are quietly mourning — the relationship they expected, the milestones that look different now, the ease other families seem to have. That grief is real, it is not disloyalty, and it deserves room. For many people, acknowledging it rather than pushing it down is what finally lets them show up steady.

Support for you

The person doing the validating needs somewhere to stand. Some options, starting with the free ones:

• Family Connections — a free, 12-week, evidence-based skills program for family members, run by trained peer leaders. Offered by the Ottawa Network for BPD, Sashbear (GTA and online), and NEABPD (online, international). Demand is high and waitlists are common, but it is worth the wait.
• One-to-one skills coaching — if you want to work on your family's specific patterns now, individually, that's what my Family Skills Coaching program does. It's coaching, not therapy, and it isn't a substitute for the free programs above — for many families, Family Connections is the right first step.
• Therapy for your own wellbeing — if the caregiving has become depression, anxiety, or burnout of your own, that deserves clinical care from a registered professional. I practise as a psychotherapist at Precision Psychotherapy; many other Registered Psychotherapists in Ontario also work with family members, and choosing any of them is a good outcome.