How You Invalidate Your Experience Due to Trauma
What is Self-Invalidation?
Self-Invalidation is when you reject or invalidate your own emotions and experiences. You may also judge yourself, or feel guilty for having these thoughts & feelings you find unacceptable. You also may ignore your feelings that are upsetting or painful.
Self-Invalidation occurs when you're expressing your feelings, or talking about an experience, and have been often invalidated by others because they are unable to process that person's emotions in that moment.
Being Emotional Invalidated has an Impact.
The repeated exposure & trauma of being emotionally invalidated can lead to a person internalizing this process and playing out the invalidation narrative within themselves, even when no one is present.
Invalidation can affect anyone at any age, and can be uspetting and painful. Emotional Invalidation can lead to feelings of worthlessness & self-isolation. It can lead to holding onto negative emotions, and mental health issues. These feelings can impact your daily lived experience- at work, home, and in your relationships with other. But most importantly, it impacts your relationship with yourself.
How does Self-Invalidation Look?
People who self-invalidate may tell themselves "Your feelings don't matter. Your feelings are wrong."It can make you feel unimportant or irrational. Such as telling yourself "It wasn't that bad, I am overreacted."or "It's my fault that they treated me this way, I deserved it."Or it can look like gaslighting yourself. "That didn't happen the way I think it did."
This can also take the form of toxic positivity. By placing the negative emotion in the grander scheme of things, we avoid being present and dealing with the current emotion. This can look like "Everything happens for a reason. It's a lesson I needed to learn." This is the second part of self-invalidation, which is rationalizing your own invalidation. Because if it makes sense then you can continue to avoid your own experience. We learn to self-invalidate as a coping mechanisms for repeated traumaitc experiences. This can look like a child crying to their parent and their parent ignoring them or shaming them for their emotions. Being punished to feel is an experience you want to avoid. so we begin to do the process automatically in ourselves, rather than have someone else hurt us in the same way.
Symptoms of Chronic Self-Invalidation
Problems managing emotions
Issues with personal identity
Poor Boundary Setting
Retraumatization Narratives
Depressionand Anxiety
Chronic feeling of emptiness
Problems with self image & sense of self
How Can You Begin the Process of Emotional Validation
Part of healing from chronic self-invalidation is begining to change the inner narrative of the part of yourself who has integrated this negative self pattern. While this process is best paired with therapy to process the traumatic experiences with support. A simple CBT practice to start today is incorporating validating phrases to combat the invalidating ones.
Instead of: Consider This:
"It could have been worse" "It happened, and I was scared"
"It wasn't so bad". "It was difficult for me"
"I'll get over it" "I am upset about it & thats okay"
"It doesn't matter" "It does matter, because I matter"
"I'm overreacting" "I'm triggered for a rightful reason"
"I'm being a crybaby" "I'm hurt, & its normal to cry"
"I'm making it a big deal" "It is a big deal, because it's effecting me”
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