Emotional Intelligence | Stevehein.com

Hi Steve,

Thank you for your site! 

I have been reading your section on invalidation and I wanted to express a form of it that I get from my family.  Whenever I bring up the feelings of sadness and confusion I felt when my parents divorced, my mom tells me that she did the best should could and that her childhood was harder than mine.  (Her dad was not there much, he was an alcoholic, and her mom was very tired and emotionally unavailable.) 

When I try to talk to my sister about how abandoned and sad I felt, she quickly says that mom is a great mom, that she did the best she could. She tells me that before I was born her and mom really struggled because my mom was a single parent with my sister.  The way they immediately explain how "mom did the best she could" and their lives were worse than mine makes me feel like I don't have a right to complain.

The truth to me is that I know my mom did the best she could, and I am very proud of how she overcame her own sad childhood and raised my sister and I so well. However, a divorce is a divorce and no matter how much a parent structures it, it can be a sad and confusing time for a child.  It is especially sad and confusing when a child is not allowed to express her feelings.

I needed my sister and mom to realize how shattered and alone I felt going back and forth between my parents by myself.  I was just a little kid and they did not offer me any comfort through the situation.

The amazing thing is my dad whose stoicness and lack of sympathy had driven them away, he suddenly snapped awake.  I think he realized he had to become aware of other people or they would leave him.  I was his guinea pig for caring about other people.  When I expressed an awkward feeling, he would get kind of an internal look and say "Oh!" like he suddenly felt the same thing or remembered feeling a similar feeling. Then he would look me in the eye and say something like "That must have been hard!"  He would smile out of love and I would feel so much relief that I wasn't crazy for feeling what ever I felt.  Whatever I had felt would just unravel and pass away.  Then he might tell me a story about someone else he knew, maybe his dad or my mom, who had had a hard time with something.

Because he had taken the moment to recognize my feelings before he forced some lecture on me, I was able to open up and learn so much from whatever story he was telling me.  I don't know how he learned to do this process, but it really is amazing. I wish he could have done this for my mom and sister. I am so jealous of my mom and sister's relationship with each other.  I hear them validating and comforting each other all the time.  I have listened to them complain about things, and tried to comfort them so much of my life. 

I feel like whenever I ask for comfort from them, they act like "at least you have a father and he's not an alcoholic."  They always tell me how easy my life is and how what an agreeable easygoing child I was.  Maybe my life is easier than theirs, but I feel so hurt that the women closest to me won't recognize that I have pain too.  I'm not blaming them, I'm not saying I want to wallow in a sea of pain the rest of my life.  I just wish they would let me express the pain I felt when our family divorced, and agree that it was not a terrific thing for a little girl to go through.   

Thank you.