Have You or Someone You Know Been Traumatically Invalidated?
The childhood taunting rhyme—Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me—may have been well-intended to help toughen children’s skin in the face of playground name-calling, teasing, and just plain meanness. However, there could be no words more false, and, if taken as truth, more damaging. Words spoken and unspoken can break hearts, a sense of self, and sometimes even a life.
Have you had clients who come into therapy claiming they’ve had no traumatic events happen in their life and yet there is a pervasive experience that somehow they are broken, not quite right? That there is some obscure feeling that something happened to them and yet there is no memory of such a thing? Or clients who are adamant that their childhood was normal, that their parents loved them, and yet they have low self-worth or even struggle with self-loathing? These are clues for you to begin exploring the possibility that they have been traumatically invalidated.
While we are well-versed in and familiar with extreme forms of abuse such as physical, sexual, and extreme verbal abuse, as well as neglect, this type of abuse is much less known and can be difficult to recognize at first. Especially with those clients who insist that their families love/loved them. In my experience, these clients take on the heavy burden that there is something inherently wrong with them. The grief that comes with this belief can be unbearable.
The confusion of love and invalidation
The research is out there on “perceived emotional invalidation” and its significant effects. Marsha Linehan’s comprehensive Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) comes out of the research on the biosocial theory of the origins of borderline personality disorder (BPD). The biosocial theory states that when a person with a highly sensitive nervous system is exposed to an environment that is emotionally invalidating we have a perfect storm of criteria for someone to begin displaying the challenging symptoms of BPD.
However, I have come to understand the devastating effects of chronic invalidation first hand while working with clients. The stories they share indicate a cumulative effect of years of interactions with the people in their lives that have had some authority over them in which my clients have been told that they shouldn’t feel what they feel. Their emotional lives have been met with all manner of invalidating ways, from ignoring and dismissing to rationalizing to outright shaming. And yet, most of my clients will say that their parents love them. They know this to be true.
For me, this is the most confusing and devastating experience of all—to know that you are loved and yet not feel loved or valued. Or that you matter. Here’s the thing—validation and love are not the same thing. It is possible to love someone and still be terribly invalidating. And it’s possible to validate someone and have no love for them. Love without validation is often not enough and can be even more damaging in some instances.
What is traumatic invalidation?
The best description of this particular form of interaction and communication in which someone is traumatized by words comes from the Boston Child Study Center:
“Traumatic invalidation occurs when an individual’s environment repeatedly or intensely communicates that the individual’s experiences, characteristics, or emotional reactions are unreasonable and/or unacceptable. Invalidation can be especially traumatic when it comes from a significant person, group, or authority that the individual relies upon to meet their needs.
“Traumatic invalidation threatens an individual’s understanding and acceptance of their own emotional experiences and often leads to a state of pervasive insecurity. Examples of traumatic invalidation can include emotional or verbal abuse, [physical and/or emotional neglect, being blamed or punished after disclosing a trauma, a betrayal, or the abrupt ending of a relationship.”
For simple words to be traumatically invalidating, whether they are words spoken or withheld, requires four criteria:
Frequency: There is a pattern or critical mass of invalidating behavior.
The nature of the relationship: The interactions are with an adult or group who hold a significant role in the person’s life. These may be significant positions of authority, intimacy, or spheres of influence, such as classmates.
What is communicated: Experiences, feelings, and personal characteristics are not accepted and valued.
What is not communicated: There is a distinct and consistent lack of positive, affectionate, and/or strengths-based communications.
Over and over again, the person on the receiving end of these experiences are made to feel that their lived experience does not matter. This eventually settles into the person’s psyche that they themselves do not matter. For the nervous system, this is a very real trauma. If we do not matter, we do not belong, and if we do not belong, then we are exiled. And for the animal body, exile means death.
Validation is the antidote
While this seems the simple answer, it is often not easy to accomplish. Validation can be used as a tool for the narcissistic person to manipulate another. True validation is an embodied experience in both persons, the one validating and the one validated. Learning what validation is and isn’t — it’s so easy to invalidate someone unintentionally! — and what’s involved in the validation process are invaluable communication skills that will serve you in most all interactions you will have over the course of your lifetime. It is a practice in the true sense of the word, as we will never get it right all the time, yet our attempts are well worth the effort.
Conclusion
Words shape the inner landscape of a person’s life. Over time, they teach us whether our feelings make sense, whether we are welcome in the world as we are, and whether we belong. When words repeatedly tell someone—explicitly or implicitly—that their inner experience is wrong, excessive, inconvenient, or invisible, the injury is real. Traumatic invalidation leaves no bruises, yet it can fracture a sense of self just as deeply as more visible forms of harm.
For clinicians, educators, parents, and anyone in a position of influence, this understanding matters. Naming traumatic invalidation offers clients a way to make sense of a long-held, wordless pain that they often assumed was a personal flaw. And practicing genuine validation—imperfectly, humbly, again and again—offers something profoundly reparative. Validation restores belonging. It signals to the nervous system: You make sense. You matter. You are not alone.
In this way, words do not merely have the power to break a spirit. When spoken—or withheld—with care, presence, and respect, they also have the power to help a spirit come home to itself.
Please join me on February 21, 2026, for a two hour live workshop on the practice and process of validation. Here you will learn what validation is and is not, how we can unintentionally invalidate those we love, and the 9-step process to validate not only the person you are with but also yourself! This is also the launch of my brand new validation ebook which registrants will receive for free. Find more information and the registration link here.
Photo by: Mikael