Unpacking “Traumatic Invalidation”
Aug 30, 2024 -Tom was a young man in his early 20’s when he first came to my office. His presenting issues were suicidality, intense social anxiety, difficulty generating and sustaining close relationships, and what I suspected were some dissociative episodes. During the intake, I asked him, as I do all of my new clients, if he had experienced any trauma during his life. He denied any trauma which seemed at odds given his symptoms.
Over the next few years as we met week after week, slowly he revealed to me that, while he had never been beaten, assaulted, physically or sexually abused, he had indeed experienced intense relational trauma. It was easy to miss until we put the pieces together and saw a pattern emerging. Tom was a victim of traumatic invalidation.
Tom (not his real name) is like many of my clients. They report childhoods that were uneventful, insistent that their parents were supportive, that there was stability, that they know their parents loved them. Yet their present day lives are deeply impacted by overwhelming feelings of unworthiness, loneliness, intense self-critics, and/or anxious attachments. Most report the beginnings of these feelings in early adolescence.
While I much prefer to come at things with a positive slant, we cannot completely appreciate the power and efficacy of validation unless we understand the devastating impact chronic invalidation has on a child’s sense of self well into adulthood. As one client reported to me, “They never had to lay a hand on me and I was undone.”
What is Traumatic Invalidation?
According to The Boston Child Study Center, invalidating interactions or communication becomes traumatic when the invalidation is ongoing and/or intense, especially if it comes from an important person, like a parent or teacher. When it is communicated to a person that their experiences, feelings, or reactions are unwelcome, unacceptable, and/or unreasonable then that individual’s understanding and embodied sense of who they are, that foundational stability upon which identity and self-worth rests, is threatened.
A wealth of research points to a person’s experiences of being chronically invalidated as a contributing factor to borderline personality disorder, self-harming behaviors, suicidality, disordered eating, many physical health problems, and chronic emotional inhibition in adults. Traumatic invalidation is crippling, and it can be made worse by invalidating the experience of being traumatically invalidated.
The Spectrum of Invalidation
Traumatic invalidation happens on a spectrum. Obvious acts of abuse are at one end of the spectrum. Less obvious, more insidious, and sometimes even more damaging are those instances elsewhere along the spectrum.
One example of this is where the words are supportive, include endearments, or the word “love” is in the interaction. It is confusing and tangly. Some examples:
“I’m doing this because I love you” as the parent engages in a shaming punishment.
“You’re not fat! I don’t want to hear you talk about yourself that way. You’re beautiful!” after the child has lamented that they are overweight or ugly.
“Honey, you’re so much more capable than this. Next time you’re going to know to try harder, aren’t you?” when a child gets a low score on an assignment and expresses feelings of stupidity.
Common parenting interactions and strategies used over the years and for more than a few generations that are still used today by many parents are extremely invalidating. I was one of these parents, and I had no idea that I was invalidating my children. Nor did I realize how invalidated I was by my own parents and the caregivers in my life. I knew I was loved; there was never a doubt in my mind. However, the pervasive sense that I was never going to be good enough lingered in my psyche far far into my adulthood. These include:
only positive emotions are acceptable and welcome,
demands that the child behave,
correcting the child on their “attitude”,
expecting the child to be respectful to their elders in spite of being disrespected by their elders,
expressions of anger are described as and responded to as being disrespectful,
expressions of anger are punished,
being told to calm down or punishment threatened when the child is in meltdown or freak-out mode,
It is the repetitive, patterned, and daily nature of the invalidation that causes the long-lasting harm. It is, indeed, a form of emotional abuse. We can dearly love our kids and still leave lasting trauma. This isn’t because we’re bad or abusive. Often it’s because we don’t even know what we are doing. Often we were invalidated as children and are not equipped to recognize it and/or change it—not until we start working on our own healing.
A person can be traumatically invalidated anywhere. Children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable as they are still dependent on significant adults in their lives. Also vulnerable are adults who were chronically invalidated in childhood and come into adulthood longing for the experience of being seen and heard and knowing that they matter. This longing then gets acted out unconsciously in unhealthy or toxic adult relationships–both intimate and professional where they then get re-traumatized.
The Root Cause of the Pain and the Powerful Antidote
In my experience, invalidation is at the root of most communication breakdowns and the demise of healthy relationships. Many clients who have experienced the thousand cuts of chronic invalidation say that it is “emotionally crippling.” This implies, then, that validation is at the root of communication repairs and the redemption of broken relationships.
I have witnessed the power of validation in my clinical practice and have used it in my personal life to repair relationships I thought could not be salvaged. Kreed Revere, parent/adult child estrangement coach and podcaster at The Estranged Heart, teaches validation and uses it in her work with great success. Many parenting coaches, like Lori Petro and Dr. Becky, teach validation communication skills to 1000’s of parents of children of all ages.
In my opinion, the potency of a validation practice is to understand the devastating impact invalidation has. Without that understanding, it’s all too easy to slip back into old ways of being with others. Knowing that chronic emotional invalidation is a form of relational abuse is a hard truth but one that we must recognize and work to correct.
Image by: r_tee