Carter - Nasty People: How to Stop Being Hurt by Them without Stooping to Their Level

Revised Edition

Jay Carter, Psy.D.

Copyright 2004 by Jay Carter. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-143585-7

MHID: 0-07-143585-9

The material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this title: ISBN: 978-0-07-141022-9, MHID: 0-07-141022-8.

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Dedicated to our great-great-grandchildren

Many thanks to the following people for their help with the book: Linda Aglow, Dr. Astrid Jimenez Alvarado, Sandra DiSantis, Stanley Dudkin, Lotis Gudez, Dr. Monica P. Hottenstein, Dr. Sanford Mintz, Art Parker, Dr. Orest M. Pawluk, Stacy Prince, Jan Radabaugh, Sheila Sen-Carter, Dr. Margaret Verhulst, Nickie Williams, Anne Marie Zagnojny, Dr. Loretta Halpine-Martin, Dr. David OConnell, and all my students. A special thanks to my literary agent, Sherrill Chidiac; to Dave Leiter for his encouragement; and to Barbara Karesh-Stender.

I first met Jay Carter through his Communications Workshop at a local adult evening school. I signed up for the course to help in my never-ending search for better-spoken expression. The course helped my speaking, but it was really about something else. It was about people, and how they think and act. In other words, it was a course in practical psychology.

As part of this course, Jay taught us about invalidation. Invalidation is what I used to call putting other people down to bring yourself up. But even though I had discovered the phenomenon of invalidation on my own, I didnt know where it came from, why it existed, how it really worked, or what to call it. Most important, I had no idea how deadly it could be to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What I learned in Jay Carters class about invalidation has changed my life. Now, at the very least, when invalidation is used in my presence, I know it instantlywhether it comes from someone else or from me (blush). I do my best to educate those involved about the mechanics of invalidation. To do this, I passed out copies of Jays paper on invalidation.

After a while, though, copying and distributing those pages got to be a lot of work. Besides, at that rate, only about one person in ten million will ever learn what invalidation is all about. Its too important to keep it a secret.

So Ive nagged, bullied, and generally pestered Jay into writing this little book on invalidation. I think youll be glad I did.

L. David Leiter

Every book has a story behind it, and I thought you might like to know the story behind this one. My motivation to gather the information presented here came from my own situation. I felt unhappy and didnt know why. I felt as if I were stuck in some sort of trap that I couldnt identify.

While I was pursuing my graduate degree in psychology, I kept a journal in which I wrote about my personal experiences, meetings with clients and professionals, and course readings. After a while, I began to notice that some of the dysfunctional features I was reading about were evident in people I knew. Then one day, while I was away on business and out of my daily environment, it hit me. I realized, objectively, that I was being invalidatedconstantly.

When I first acknowledged how much I had been invalidated, I was enraged. It took me months to work off this anger. I wrote a lot of negative things about invalidators. I ran hard and fast. I purchased a punching bag. I chopped wood with a vengeance. I screamed obscenities when I was alone in my car. I passed my writings around to people so they could help me agree what terrible, no-good people invalidators are. I hated invalidators. I was out to get them.

Then one day, I shared my writings with a good friend at work. I had always admired this man. I called my collection of writings The Invalidator.

He came back to me in tears saying, Im an invalidator. Ive been making my mother miserable for years.

I was taken aback! I didnt want to believe him. He asked me, How can I stop? I stumbled over myself; I had nothing to tell him. My whole agenda had been to attack invalidators, not to help them. Driving home that evening, I realized that I had become an invalidator. I thought of my friend and his plight, and I cried. How could I have been so unaware? I had only written half a book! What about the invalidators themselves? How could they be helped?