Invalidation: The Root Of All Evil?

[Helliepig]

For me invalidation starts at birth, when noone sees you "for you", but only for what you mean to them - someone to torture, abuse or target in some way. When your basic needs as a baby are ignored. When you are humiliated for being needy, stamped on for being angry, sneered at for being upset or ashamed. When noone backs you up and acts as if they cannot understand what you are complaiing about. When your wailing goes ignored, your nightmares and school refusal are minimsed and dismissed and your legitimate pain ignored..... so that noone has to feel uncomfortable.

As a result, you don't even know what you feel (other than corrosive overwhelming swirling shame and anger that you then suppress for fear it will destroy any vestiges of respect you have in the outside world lest you dare to let it out), and all the time you feel ashamed of the dreadfully bad things inside you.

You copy people to try and learn how to be, you watch fascinated to try and understand how to live and not dread every day. You try harder and harder to be someone, because to just be "you" is no,t and never was, an option, and in so doing you lose any chance of real connection and intimacy. Any thread of affection from outside is dismissed because is doesn't quieten your internal pain and you know if only they knew the real you, they wouldn't like you.

You pick bad people not only because they are familiar but because they are only interested in more invalidation of you and that keeps you dissociated and away from someone seeing the real dreadful confused hurting empty insides. That would feel like death itself.

You are condemmed to invalidate yourself and those unheard parts of yourself every day because you have no choice. They are but fragments of dreadful pain, head splitting headache and reality rending experiences that are raw, unintergrated and unamed and feel like the real nightmare, the real horror movie. Something beyond tolerance.

And yet all it is is one little child's frazzled brain trying to make sense of a big harsh world with contradictory evil people around and no instruction book.
Never validated, never contained. Loved? Ha! Not even in the same dimension.....

 

[sea]

I think the source of a lot of a traumatized individual's distress is also the underdevelopment of their emotions. For instance trauma endured as a child often is processed as a child and then shoved away, without maturing that processing as you grow older, you merely ignore it. When it is revisited, it is still processed in the same manner as it was when you were a child.

I think this relates to a lot of emotional development as well because long-term trauma effectively causes a person to literally shove away all of their emotions into very basic mechanisms that are only designed to cope with life. When revisited at a later time, you find that those emotions themselves are not matured because they did not grow with the adult. They remained behind. The worst part about it is that, when you are an adult and you have immature emotional responses, that in and of itself is cause for further invalidation.

And so you learn that what you feel as an adult is wrong as well, which can either feed more and more immature and angry responses, or can cause the person to merely shut away all feeling. To have access only to childish anger, misunderstanding, isolation, resentment, depression, sadness, etc. as emotional responses to begin with, and then to have others consistently demean those responses as incorrect, is just further damage.

Invalidation of emotion itself, of perception, of identity, of thoughts, to fail to acknowledge a person their right to feel and think as they wish, I think is the root of a lot of a traumatized individual's issue. Even if one were traumatized but were allowed to deal with it at their own pace, allowed to feel about it as they wish, and then rather than say "what you are feeling is wrong", to simply help that person to mature their emotional understanding in a healthy way, for their own benefit rather than because how they feel is inconvenient for someone else...

I think the trauma itself at that point isn't even very relevant. The trauma is just a seed. It's everything else that f*cks you up.

My therapist told me that I have the emotional range of someone at about the age of 3. I believe it. My intellectual capacity has grown and matured, my ability to comprehend the world around me has grown and matured, but my ability to express my emotions is very stunted. My ability to express my subjective interpretations is very stunted. Creativity is very stunted. I react with a lot of unnecessary rage and anger, despair and grief over the least concerning stimuli.

When I am in a fight with someone it is literally the end of the world. When I am confronted my first response is rage. Those are behaviors very reminiscent of children, but behaviors I have never been capable of maturing out of. My emotions were always seen as defective and wrong, so I learned not to express them and not to feel them. As a result, while I matured, the emotional part of me did not. Now, when I express my emotions even though I am safe, a lot of times I am still told my emotions are wrong because they are not rational or mature.

So even now I still feel like I can't feel "properly" the way others expect of me, so I simply don't express to anyone because I do not feel like it is safe to be myself. This is something perpetuated by other people even though I am no longer being traumatized, I still am unable to obtain the tools necessary for maturation because other people are more concerned with telling me how wrong I am, rather than allowing me to be who I am and to offer me the option of maturity.

 

[BloomInWinter]

When receiving only punishment for crying, seeking assistance, or just acknowledgement of feelings as a child, I learned that it was not safe to verbalize any emotion other than 'happy' or face worse.

To be safer, and not risk worse...it was better to invalidate those things in my head as they arose, to keep a flat, non-'needy' appearance.

My T. has told me he thinks it is the most harmful thing done to children.

Now...I agree. ...and I can't stop doing it to myself. Those abusive self-harming mental invalidations are all that seems to fill my head, or silence.

...and the silence feels like abandonment.

 

[Srain]

Invalidation: to constantly be undermined, that what you see, feel, want, need is not real or just wrong..this experience from an early age splitting a child's mind apart of the logic of reality vs. emotional needs/wants is so extremely damaging.

To have access only to childish anger, misunderstanding, isolation, resentment, depression, sadness, etc. as emotional responses to begin with, and then to have others consistently demean those responses as incorrect, is just further damage.

Repeat the process over and over with the familiarity in outside relationships, constantly fighting for validation of self and reality is like Alice through the Looking Glass as Albatross had mentioned in another post, once everything comes to a head and the mind implodes! A child will survive how he or she can with this constant onslaught of invalidation, an adult with this background can only take so much before the cup spills over.

I know what I know, validation of my reality and my feelings, respecting my right to my space and who I am, where I came from - you had better know these things are what tore me down and made me fight for where I am today.

 

[Helliepig]

Isn't it hard to have two realities, your own sense of things that works well when you're alone, and then the sudden disowning and shaming of this when with other people. Aligning yourself up to criticize yourself in exactly the same way as your original tormnetors. ....doubting the validity of what you feel and think. Stockholm syndrome... starting to think the same way as your captors..... repeating the abuse done to you because noone ever stood in your corner and taught you to fight it, only to feel ashamed and wrong.

My abuse started so early I never had chance to form a sense of my perspective before it got twisted. No wonder it is an uphill battle to learn what life means for me. It is a wonder any sense of me survives at all.....sometimes I wonder if the "me" i like when alone is actually a fantasy of how i would like to be.... then exposed to others I see the shamed weakling as I am or as I fear I am. Not yet sure what is real and what is fantasy, and who I am, although slowly beginning to realise I mist have some worth because everyone seems to have some.

Except I feel I am making it all up and drawing from nothing - no mirror, no encouragement, no approval - and that somehow everyone else has so much of a better idea of how to do it.

 

[Queen Boudica]

((((((((((((((Helliepig)))))))))))))))

You have described it so well. That is so how I feel, your description jumped out of the page at me.

Well done for putting it into words so eloquently.

 

[angel2write]

Everybody's already covered this really well, but I wanted to throw my three cents in, anyhow.

I read somewhere that small children don't think logically yet. They do "magical thinking." For little kids, cause and effect can be mysterious. They only vaguely understand that actions have consequences. And if someone tells them that they caused something bad to happen, they believe it. Kids can be very, very superstitious- even making up their own superstitions and ways of warding off evil or bad luck.

I know I had tons of rituals I did to make myself feel safe.

So when an abuser feeds a child invalidating words, they take them in directly and assume them to be true. They build an understanding of the world based on those words. They can create, like, a whole fairy-tale structure based on the lies the abuser feeds them. And when the punishments for not "believing" the abuser and playing within the rules the abuser sets are so horrible, you can see how the child absorbs them.

Children are so very, very easy to brainwash.

Then, when we start to see and hear outside perspectives, or question what we've been taught to understand, confusion arises. We doubt ourselves and our own ability to understand the world. We feel crazy and guilty and wrong. None of the pieces fit, and the abuser continues to tell us it's our fault, maybe because we're stupid, or bad, or whatever. And we're no longer sure who to believe in or what to believe. And everywhere, the structure of our understanding is crumbling under our feet...

I hope that made some sort of sense.

 

[Helliepig]

And underneath we know that no good will come of trying to be ourselves because somehow what we really feel and think is terrible and so out of step with everyone else - they seem to know how to do it and be accepted but we just don't get HOW.

Even when we are accepted we don't see it because of the conviction inside that whatever we are is wrong. So even when things go well we don't notice cos we're too busy spoiling it for ourselves.

It can feel really crazy.

Underneath I am terrified of anyone else seeing how confused, over reactive, over complicated or clueless I am - as if it's my fault I don't understand how to do any of it. My life's work has been to cover his up and pretend.... even while working through therapy I have been terrified to let the defences down lest those fears of being seen as a wretch come true again - in 2011...OMG!!

Just now I am starting to say to myself, ok so let yourself feel all those things, let's run with your worst fears about yourself and risk them being true... that means sitting with all the humilating experiences, the shame, all those negative self evaluations and fears, and slowly out pops the underneath feelings of terror and bewilderment and fear.....and I say to myself, why am I bad just because I was lost and lonely and frightened and hurting???

I am also trying to say to myself, yes perhaps I have behaved in an odd way sometimes with colleagues or friends because I am functioning as a 3 year old. Maybe I have made a fool of myself or been weird. So be it, it is not my fault, I am doing the best I can, I did not choose to be abused, I don't have to cover up the shame of it as if it's my doing. By putting myself down I am not acknowledging what happened to me, I am trying to hide it by making that part of me "go away" in shame. I am not being on my side.

We are so busy running around trying to be "ok" in some arbitary way, we are missing the chance to become real with ourselves and stop this damn invalidation NOW!

Nothing will feel ok "out there" until it is ok in there- we have to accept our own dark corners/
.

 

[Queen Boudica]

Think I gave up trying to be ok in some arbitary way a long time ago. I knew that would never happen. But accepting my own dark corners, that is really really hard.

Terror, bewilderment and fear, lost lonely and frightened

Yes that really does sum it up so well

 

[intothelight]

Did anyone ever feel invalidated to invisibility? Where "you" have withdrawn so deeply into yourself, it is hard to find yourself? Always looking for outward clues and the responses of others, because you feel vaporous?

I wish I could squarely stand on my own two feet and trust myself and stop looking "outside" for validation.

 

[James B.]

Awesome posts everyone. Reading and learning a lot. :tup: Hellipig, you might be headed for the the genius thread. :)

 

[James B.]

We are so busy running around trying to be "ok" in some arbitary way, we are missing the chance to become real with ourselves and stop this damn invalidation NOW!

That's a heaping helping of some goooood stuff! :tup: