From Kathleen - About her invalidating mother

Letter about mother and sister who invalidate

Explanations as invalidation

Letter from Cindy

From Simon

Today I wrote something for a support list I moderate. I am including part of it to help you understand because we have been discussing your article and it is helping many of us. The question was posed - what is the difference between invalidation and a reality check?

First -- I thought of two sentences Jerry might say to me.

1) You are over-reacting. Why can't you just be logical about it?

2) Do you think there's a chance you might just be over-reacting a bit?

Both sentences acknowledge that I am having a powerful and likely overwhelming emotion reaction to something. The first one is an invalidation. I am a fighter by nature. This sentence makes me feel immediately and aggressively defensive. I react with anger. Anger is always a secondary emotion - a response to fear or pain. This sentence hurts my feelings and it makes me feel fear - fear that I am alone, that he doesn't understand and he never will, fear that he doesn't/can't/won't love me. I can literally hear myself saying just those things to him - in anger. His reaction - because he feels my reactions are wrong and totally unjustified and so they hurt him - reacts back in anger - and we are rapidly deteriorating to a real mess.

The second sentence acknowledges that I am indeed having a powerful, and probably what feels to me like an over-whelming emotional reaction. But it is a reality check. He is not saying my reaction is wrong. He is asking me if it is really valid for the situation. Now I am not having to defend myself. Now I am thinking - and wondering - is my reaction really all about what is NOW - and how much of it is being fueled by things that happened in the past?

He has now moved my reaction from the emotional or limbic area of the brain to the cognitive or reasoning area. He not only has not invalidated me, he has shown me he understands and he has helped me to regain my emotional balance.

I came up with an idea to explain it that I would like to run by you... I have done a whole lot of research, studying and introspection for these last weeks. Now I'm going to try to draw it all together. I am no psychologist, I have no special training. So if I am way out in left field, please let me know. Let's see if we can figure it out together.

When we hurt someone, we feel guilt. Why guilt? Because guilt is based on what we do or fail to do. Self-confidence can be defined as a sense of competence and mastery in performing tasks and solving problems independently. In other words, self-confidence is trust in one's abilities. Having self-confidence does not mean a person will be able to do everything, but people with a healthy sense of self-confidence have expectations of themselves and their abilities that is realistic.

Guilt eats away at a person's sense of self-confidence. Self-worth is the feeling of being loved and accepted by others.

When we are hurt by others, especially when we think we may have invited the hurt, we feel shame. When our caretakers allow others to abuse us or when we allow others to hurt us without defending ourselves, we internalized the message: I am not worth defending. I am worthless.

The amount of self-confidence we have plus the amount of self-worth we feel we have together add up to our self-esteem.

We can think of shame as being the same as a lack of self-worth. But here is where it gets interesting. No one gives us self-confidence. It is something we earn or acquire by successfully doing and accomplishing. This is not true of our sense of self-worth.

(Both men and women suffer from these problems, but for the purpose of our discussions, I am going to focus on women.)

As we read in the article for men, a woman's sense of self-worth is determined by what she believes others, especially her man, think of her. In this sense, men, you literally hold your lady's self-worth in your hands.

I have come to think of it like a bank account. A zero dollar balance is no self-worth. Every time you validate your lady, you make a deposit in her self-worth bank account. Each time she is a invalidated, it is like a withdrawal has been made.

So -- a bank account can be overdrawn. A woman can have less than no self-worth. She can literally have negative self-worth. Similarly, she can feel ashamed, but she can also live with toxic shame.

If a woman's man validates her -- makes a deposit in her self-worth account -- then makes two withdrawals by invalidating her twice, she has less overall self-worth than when she started.

The dicey part of this is -- it does not matter if the invalidation was deliberate and intentional or if the man did it completely unaware. Either way, the withdrawal was made.

Men are basically do-ers and women are be-ers. So, men, if you want to help your lady grow in self-worth, this is what you need to do. You need to make sincere deposits, sincere validations, and work very hard at not making withdrawals or invalidations.

Since every serious emotional problems we have looked at -- from depression and suicidal tendencies to self-harm and lack of ability to enjoy intimacy all seem to have at their root a lack of self-worth, it would seem to be something worth a loving husband's attention and effort.

Steve - again I ask - what do you think?

Your article is helping so many of us. Thank you!!

Sue

My reply to Sue

My reply to Sue

Hi again Sue,

I have given some thought to your message. There is a lot in it to think about! I still want to think about it some more, but the first thing I feel obligated to say is that even in the second example you give, where the person says, "Do you think there is a chance you are over-reacting" I myself would still feel invalidated and judged and not understood.

To me, what this person is saying is " I think you are over reacting."

Pretty much whenever someone says "Do you think..." or "Don't you think.." they are really saying that they think something and they want you to agree with it.

For emotional people, I believe it is always better to respond first, if not always, with a reply which validates their emotion and the intensity of it. Next, if they are afraid you are over-reacting, or they perceive you to be, or think you are or however you want to say it, then they could express their feeling, rather than their thoughts.

For example, instead of saying "Do you think you might be over-reacting" they could say, "You feel pretty strongly about it, huh?"

Then I would suggest they give you time to talk about your feelings some more.

When someone is feeling so strongly about something, it is going to help them most, I believe, to talk about their feelings for a while, not to be immediately be talked out of them or led away from them with a response that moves them to a more "rational" place in the brain.

I would suggest the listener say something like, "What bothers you the most about it?"

Then what ever they say, I suggest the listener just say "yeah." This is what one of the best listeners I know does.

After hearing a response like, "yeah" a person who is highly emotional will probably just keep talking. Most highly sensitive people have a huge unmet need to be listened to and validated in this invalidating society. This is especially true for a person who has been abused, since their feelings have not been respected or even acknowledged. This is the fundamental problem in abuse – no regard for the feelings of the victim. When our feelings are not respected we are being used, and therefore abused.

If the listener also feels strongly that the speaker’s reaction is going to cause some negative consequence, like the speaker says, "I am going to kill that person!", I suggest the listener express their own feelings with a feeling word statement. When I do this I sometimes first ask, "Can I tell you how I am feeling about this?" Then if the person says yes, I might say something like "I am afraid that you feel so strongly that you might get yourself in trouble" or "I'm afraid you might do something to make the situation worse if you act upon those feelings." But usually most people who are listened to calm down by themselves and no restraint of them is even necessary.

Basically, I recommend that the listener identify their own feelings, then state them and avoid telling the person what they "think." We have far too much thinking in our society, or so I believe at least. We need more expressions of feelings. There is a place for thinking, to be sure. But when a highly emotional person is in a highly emotional state, I find it works best to keep connected at the emotional level.

On the other hand, I am probably especially sensitive to comments like either of those you thought your husband might make. For some people, who have not been as emotionally abused and hurt as I have for so many years, and who are not resentful about being invalidated, then the second response might not trigger a defensive reaction.

Thanks for writing.

Steve

More comments

When I thought about this some more I decided I needed to say some more about the term "over-reacting." This is a term that is very subjective. What is "over-reacting" depends on the person doing the defining of the term. Or we might say it is a judgmental term and depends on the person judging the reaction. A person reacts according to a combination of their genetics and life experiences. All reactions for them are natural for them at that moment in their life. Generally, then, I don't think it is helpful to tell someone, or imply, that they over-reacted.

It might help us if we think about our own reactions and it might not hurt to say "I over-reacted in that situation", but I think it is more helpful to try to understand our reactions than to judge them. Understanding our reactions is based largely upon understanding our emotional needs and their lack of fulfillment. And I think it is always helpful to be conscious of both of these.

Also, I suspect that someone who thinks that the second response by the husband is not invalidating her and not judging her is a person who probably invalidates herself and has been taught that it is always better to be logical. And I would guess that they lived in a family and culture where emotional honestly, feelings are not highly valued, but appearances and "not falling apart" are.

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Emotional Honesty