Sanctuary for the Abused
Saturday, June 04, 2022
INVALIDATION
Invalidation denies the importance of your experiences, your feelings, your thoughts, your wisdom, and even your existence.
Invalidation. It takes many forms, but the person doing it is always communicating the same thing — your needs don’t matter!
People who invalidate you don’t want you to feel and think what you feel and think. They want you to feel and think what they do. It’s an imposition, an annoyance, or something else undesirable when you don’t.
Dysfunctional, toxic and abusive people are champion invalidators.
A father’s 3-year old son has gotten hurt skinning his knee on the sidewalk, and the father instantly pulls his bawling child up by the hand, exclaiming, “It’s not bad, you’re not hurt, what are you crying for? Look, it’s only a scrape, get up!”
But his son IS hurt, twice — once, physically, by falling, and again, by being denied his legitimate feelings by his father, the person whose job it is to teach him that his feelings always matter. Later in life, when the child becomes a man and marries a woman whose expectations of him are unreasonable and who calls him a baby if he complains, it is a reflection of his father’s bad parenting.
Children’s – and everyone’s – feelings are always legitimate. The feelings may be difficult to fully understand, however, if enough listening is done instead of merely trying to stuff down the unwanted feelings, the reasons make themselves known and can be addressed and healed, not just hidden.
Invalidation often takes the form of being told that you should not feel as strongly as you do. Other times, you’ll be told that your concerns are nothing to worry about. Some common invalidating statements are:
“You’re oversensitive”
“What are you crying about?”
“Everything’s fine!”
“Oh, you poor baby!”
“Get over it!”
“What’s the matter NOW???”
“So WHAT!”
Your wishes may also be ignored in favor of the other person’s preferences. You may feel as if you don’t have an equal voice in the relationship or in what takes place. When you explain that being ignored makes you unhappy, you’ll be made to feel as if your concerns aren’t legitimate, and you should be ashamed of yourself for making life difficult for the invalidator.
Getting invalidators to truly hear you out isn’t easy, and in many cases, is impossible. If nothing else, remember that your feelings – no matter what they are – always have a legitimate reason, and are there for a real and important purpose. You may experience invalidation by someone else, but you can practice what mentally healthy people do all the time – know that all feelings always matter, even when some people don’t understand them, and always, always… validate yourself.
Labels: abuse, adult children of narcissists, dysfunctional, feelings, gaslighting, invalidation, legitimate, narcissist, pathological, psychopath, sociopath
3 Comments:
Those that can't show sympathy in these situations. They lack empathy often because they themselves were programmed like that in their respective childhood too. There's this scene in "12 Angry Men" where the one juror proudly relates how he made a "real man" out of his son and later than breaks down since his son has never again visited after he grew of age. It works both ways up and down generations and modern chromosomal analysis even seems to show it gets memorized into our epigenetics.
My mother does this. First of all she doesn't really listen when I talk, but she often exclaims, "OH GOD!", in a very dramatic way when I am excited about something I achieved or bought. Other times I get stone silence. I honestly think she hates me sometimes because I cannot imagine if anyone loved someone else, they would respond like this so often.
That was one of the first ways I realized I was with unfortunately another abusive man; the constant invalidation. We met online ( bad idea) and he wanted instant commitment . He lived across the country and I was in a desperate situation (which now seems like eutopia compared to living with him) . I couldn't see that every action and " makeup " was to get me to drop everything including my place and stay with him and his family. He carefully selected his words to sound like he wouldn't come back and help me if I wasn't with him and that his family was in a crisis and needed help immediately which was bs. Then I " chose " to leave everything behind when it was blatant control and even reverse psychology. Now I'm surrounded with his enablers, have lost most of my benefits ( I was on disability and state assistance) and have a vehicle I bought but no license as I never had one and hoped he would help me. Please don't date online if you have a history of living with domestic abuse and avoid anyone that wants instant commitment,sex or your money OR seems physically annoyed when you talk about your goals . Thank you for your writing. I'm so Po at his enablers that can't see how fake he is and that I thought I " needed a man " to help me. It literally started with him love bombing ,acting instantly in love ,wanting instant commitment and seeming completely unconcerned whenever I was upset aka Invalidating. Make ups weren't real but an attempt to get his hooks more into my life and make me blame myself for his bad behavior and to assert Control over me.
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