How Everyday Interactions Go Off the Rails: The Transactional Model
The transactional model (aka “the two step model”) tells us how interactions between people can lead to emotion dysregulation – or prevent it. This is obviously key for anyone whose loved one is struggling with dysregulated emotions. If you understand and apply the transactional model, you can improve your relationship with your loved one, reduce conflict, and help them better manage their emotions and build new skills. Sounds great, right?
So what is the transactional model? The transactional model illustrates how ineffective interactions between people can feed emotion dysregulation. It also shows us how to improve transactions (DBT jargon for interactions) and reduce dysregulation. It overlaps heavily with recent content we’ve covered on validation…and it’s bears reviewing on its own to highlight the way in which emotion dysregulation unfolds in interpersonal settings.
Ineffective Transactions: Inaccurate Expression and Invalidating Responses
Inaccurate Expression: When emotions are high, it’s really hard to express yourself clearly. We switch into fight or flight, emotions jump into the driver’s seat, and we say all kinds of things we don’t mean. If this is confusing, pause and think about a time when you might have said something you didn’t mean… Then think about how you were feeling at that time. Chances are, your emotions were elevated.
Let’s take an example:
A parent says “no” to a sensitive teen: “No, you can’t take the car to see your friends today, because I already told your brother he could use it.”
The teen then feels incredibly disappointed and hurt. Maybe they’ve been feeling left out of their friend group already and are now aware that their friends will be going to the beach without them. Maybe they didn’t sleep well last night. Maybe they are predisposed to draw comparisons between themselves and their brother… (Pro tip: we call these factors that set us up to have bigger emotions, “vulnerabilities.”)
Whatever the specific vulnerabilities, the teen, who is feeling so acutely hurt and disappointed, yells, “That’s not fair! I hate you!”
This is clearly confusing to the parent, who knows their child doesn’t actually hate them and might think the teen is just trying to get them to change their mind. We call this emotion-driven communication, inaccurate expression. By inaccurate expression, we mean any type of emotional expression that is not a clear and accurate description of the individual’s emotional experience in the moment. Inaccurate expression can include:
Hiding/masking emotions (e.g., saying “I’m fine” when you’re not)
Downplaying the intensity or duration of an emotion
Lying
Communicating through behavior in the absence of clear verbal expression (i.e., “showing” rather than “telling” how you’re feeling)
Threats
Judgments/interpretations
Withholding important information about your experience
Any other way of showing/expressing emotions that does not clearly convey your true feelings in the moment in a way that others can easily understand
Often, when we engage in inaccurate expression, what we’re saying/doing feels true to our experiencein the moment, because our emotions are so high. But, when the emotions come down, we realize we said something we really didn’t mean. This can often lead to a lot of guilt, shame, and regret. Nobody wants to be dysregulated.
Invalidating Responses:
Inaccurate expression leads directly to invalidation. To illustrate, let’s go back to the example of the teen who was told “no,” to using the car and responded with, “That’s not fair! I hate you!”:
The parent, confused, possibly frustrated/annoyed, and trying to be helpful, says something like: “It’s okay,” “don’t say that,” “that’s not true,” “calm down,” “your brother asked me first and you got the car yesterday. It’s his turn. You can use it tomorrow,” or, “you know the rules.”
All of the above responses are reasonable and, as noted, intended to be helpful. However, to the highly sensitive teen, the implicit message is: “your response is too big, doesn’t make sense, isn’t understandable, and in fact, is the problem.” We call this, invalidation.
I want to pause here to highlight how confusing this can be when you are regulated and someone else is dysregulated (i.e., their emotions are running the show). When we see others react emotionally, it’s a natural human response to try to encourage them to calm down or to see reason… the trouble is that when you’re the one who is experiencing intense emotions, (almost) nobody wants to be told to calm down or to be met with problem solving. In that moment, most of us just want to feel heard and understood. While often intended to be helpful, invalidating responses make the individual (especially a highly sensitive individual) feel moreupset and isolated in their experience.
A Chicken and Egg Situation:
The more upset a person feels, the more likely they are to engage in inaccurate expression. The more inaccurate the expression, the more likely they are to be met with invalidation (because their response is so inaccurate). You can see how this quickly becomes a truly vicious cycle. And, when a teen has been chronically dysregulated, patterns of inaccurate expression and invalidation become deeply entrenched so that the inaccurate expression and invalidation can become automatic conditioned responses. In other words, a sensitive teen might react to a parent like they’ve said something invalidating, even when they hadn’t, because they’ve just come to expect that. Similarly, a parent might react to the sensitive teen like they’ve said something inaccurate, even when they haven’t, because they’ve come to expect that.
This pattern of inaccurate expression and invalidation means that interpersonal situations can become dysregulated and ineffective in the blink of an eye.
So, what can you do about this vicious cycle?
From Ineffective to Effective Transactions: Accurate Expression and Validating Responses
I’m so glad you asked, because this is (virtually) the entire point of DBT family therapy (and a big goal of individual DBT as well!)
The good news is that the transactional model gives us three primary ways we can improve interpersonal interactions and reduce dysregulation.
Manage heightened emotions: This, of course, is a key focus of individual therapy and group skills training in DBT. The more regulated each person is, the less likely transactions are to become ineffective and the more likely they are to be effective. Regulated people are more likely to express themselves accurately and less likely to invalidate others. Key point: regulating emotions is important for both parties in every transaction. If either person stays regulated, the transaction is far less likely to turn ineffective.
Practice validation: When someone expresses an emotion to you (accurately or inaccurately), notice the urge to respond with invalidation, reassurance, or problem solving. Instead, practice validation.
Examples of how to validate include listening actively, reflecting back what you hear, or conveying that the other person’s make sense and why.
Remember that there is always something to validate in the other person’s experience – even when it isn’t immediately obvious what that is. We call this the kernel of truth. When in doubt, you can always validate an emotion. Even if an emotion doesn’t fit the objective facts (i.e., isn’t “justifiable,” we can still make sense of it based on the other person’s experiences and history. For example, in the car example from above, the parent could start by saying to the teen, “I can tell you’re really upset/disappointed.”
Sometimes, the best thing to do is to just avoid being invalidating. This is the DBT version of, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” If the other person is really dysregulated and you’re not sure how to be validating, it’s okay (and can even be super helpful) to avoid saying anything.
For more, see our full post on validation.
Practice accurate expression:
Accurate (emotional) expression is describing (nonjudgmentally) your emotional experience so that others can easily understand it. This type of clear description facilitates understanding, compassion, support, and of course, validation. In order to express your emotional experience, you have to first observe and identify it. If you’re not sure what you’re feeling, consider consulting Emotion Regulation Handout 6: Ways to Describe Emotions for a list of the 10 primary emotions and their characteristics.
Note: In parent-child relationships, parents typically do more of the validating, and kids do more of the accurate expression. While the ratio isn’t 50/50 in these relationships, accurate expression is important for everyone to practice.
For more, see our full post on accurate expression.
You will not believe how powerful accurate expression and validation are for de-escalating conflicts, improving relationships, and working through sticky situations. Practice noticing when you are in the midst of an ineffective transaction – when that happens, pause and look for instances of inaccurate expression and/or invalidation.