Silently Invalidating

The concept of validation and the dangers of an “invalidating environment” are things that pop up in mental health treatment over and over. From what I’ve picked up over about four years of therapy, being invalidated is really bad for your mental health. In fact, in DBT the theory is that a predisposition to mental illness requires an invalidating environment to development into a full-fledged problem. Invalidation in that framework is actually one of the precipitating causes for mental illness.

 

What is so negative about invalidation? Invalidation tells you that your emotions are wrong or fake, and thus undermines your identity and your confidence. It can lead you to distrust your emotions, feel ashamed or guilty, or even begin to think that you’re not in touch with reality. It asks you to ignore the very real messages your emotions send you, and tells you that your emotions are inappropriate. Unfortunately, emotions are always real and valid: the actions they cause may not be. The emotion may not fit the facts appropriately, but it is always real.

 

In my personal life, I have always found this a bit confusing. I haven’t seen my life as something that involves a great deal of invalidation. My parents never told me my feelings were wrong, my teachers have generally been intensely supportive of me, and I’ve had some fairly fantastic friends. There have been a few negative relationships in my life where I was told repeatedly that I had no right to feel the way I did, but overall other people have just let me feel how I feel. So how was it that I had ended up with mental illness without any invalidation at all? How did this apply to me?

 

I have recently come to realize that there are some incredibly insidious ways of invalidating another person that don’t look like invalidation right off the bat.

 

Imagine this: you are having the worst day of your life. Your depression is on high, your anxiety is through the roof, and you’re panicking every other minute. You feel overwhelmed, you feel sad, you feel lonely. You just want someone to give you a hug or listen for a minute, someone to tell you that you aren’t losing it completely. You’re sitting at school, and friends and acquaintances walk past. Some of them glance at you and smile, but keep walking. Some pay you no attention. No one notices that you look like you’re on the verge of tears, or if they do they say nothing. You begin to wonder if you really are crazy, if everything is just fine. Finally, someone stops and says hi, and you bravely smile back at them. You have a pleasant, brief conversation. Nothing of importance is said. They mention that a class is stressful and you agree that you’re really stressed out right now. They brush over what you said and say they have to run to class. Nothing has been said of the dark circles under your eyes or the fact that you can’t quite get your mouth to turn up properly. Now you’re convinced that you’re crazy. Your emotions can’t be right or real if no one else even notices them.

 

This is its own kind of invalidation. When people simply ignore your problems, they by default tell you that what you’re feeling isn’t real: it seems as if you’re hallucinating whatever is wrong because no one else will react to it, or even react to your reaction. It’s confusing. It leaves you less and less certain that you can even mention your problems, more trapped inside your own mind. There’s a reason that giving someone the silent treatment is considered mean.

 

Another example of this is one that happens with kids all the time. One technique that parents use fairly often if their kids are throwing a temper tantrum is to ignore them. When kids throw a tantrum what they’re looking for is attention, so don’t reward the negative behavior, right? Well this method works up to a point. It works to get the child to calm down. What it doesn’t do is then tell the child that their desire for attention is real and important, or that whatever was bothering them deserves attention and care. This kind of method for child-rearing may not seem invalidating, but it tells a child that even if they are bawling, their emotions aren’t worth anyone’s time. It’s important if we don’t want to reward someone’s negative attention seeking behaviors that we find a way to go back and invalidate their feelings, talk it out, or recognize their feelings. This can happen after the fact.

 

Being silent to someone who is in pain or who has strong emotions of any kind is really the fastest way to tell them that what they’re feeling or doing is wrong. Imagine when you’re extremely excited about something and you bounce up to a friend, eager to tell them all about it and they just stare at you. Nothing bursts your bubble faster.

 

It’s a terrifying and horrible feeling when you’re invalidated in that way, but it is understandable why many of us ignore others’ problems. It’s overwhelming and tiring to always be checking in with people, and listening to everyone. Unfortunately, this is part of being a friend or family member: you should be willing to validate the people you care about and you should expect validation in return. We rarely hear about ways to potentially prevent mental illness, but if all of us spends more time listening and validating the emotions of those around us, we could really do some good in the world.

Will Follow Rules for Rights

“FOLLOW OUR RULES AND YOU WILL HAVE YOUR FREEDOM” IS THE BIGGEST LIE OPPRESSED PEOPLE ARE TOLD IN THIS COUNTRY

 

This morning I was looking at the twitter explosion over the Texas abortion bill and ran across this tweet from @rare_basement. I don’t know how to explain what this tweet means to me or my neuroses. I don’t know how to explain how this sums up all the intersectionality of my gender and mental health. But I’m going to do my best.

 

This is the lie I’ve believed all my life. No, I am hardly the most oppressed person in the world, but I grew up in the 90s, when girls were told that “you can be anything if you believe and work hard!”, despite the fact that sexism is still alive and well and making life incredibly difficult for women. But boy did I fall for that line. I still believe it, despite trying to make myself grow up over and over again. Because you want to know what happens when you buy into a cultural myth that disappoints you repeatedly, one that tells you that you’re responsible for your disappointments? You begin to think you’re the problem.

 

The line that oppressed minorities are fed is that hard work will get them whatever they want, including the rights and freedoms that have been denied to them in the past. This is the myth of meritocracy. Unfortunately, it’s not true, and minorities simply are denied rights and freedoms, as well as opportunities, because of their status as oppressed. But the myth puts all of the responsibility for these problems back on the oppressed: it tells them that they haven’t followed the rules appropriately or they have not worked hard enough.

 

This is the worst form of victim blaming because it can make everything an individual’s fault, and it can obscure from the individual the larger forces that are at work. And in my mind, the most insidious part of it is that it essentially sows the seeds for mental illness. One of the traits of many people with mental illness is personalization: thinking everything is either your fault or aimed at you. This myth directly tells you that everything is your fault. It builds personalization from the ground up and repeats it over and over until it’s been hammered into you. What’s worse is that it doesn’t just wait around until something bad happens and then tells you it’s your fault. It points to structural inequalities that already exist, and when those begin to affect you it tells you that you should have known better and followed the rules so that you didn’t make these problems for yourself. It retroactively blames you for problems that were there before you were born, so you are suddenly responsible for a disturbing amount of things.

 

An additional problem with this is that the “rules” for oppressed populations are contradictory and impossible to follow. No matter what you do, you’re doing something wrong and thus don’t deserve rights and freedoms. An example of rules for women: Be good looking but not shallow, and definitely not overly sexy, and definitely don’t flaunt your body but don’t be a prude either.

 

Is it any surprise that we have a generation of girls who have grown up thinking that they are constantly not doing enough, not right, or need to be perfect? A generation of girls who catastrophize everything? If you were told throughout your whole childhood that you’ll be treated with respect, dignity, and liberty if you follow the rules and then are NOT treated with those things no matter how hard you tried, doesn’t it seem logical that you would conclude that you had done something wrong? What amps up the anxiety of this is that you don’t know what it is you did wrong. You can’t figure out what went differently between the times when you got what you wanted and the times you didn’t (hint: the difference was probably not you, it was the circumstances outside of your control), so you get paranoid that at any point you might be doing something horribly wrong and you don’t know it. You might be messing up the rules which can have disastrous consequences. And if you don’t follow the rules exactly perfectly, if you don’t get straight As and no detention ever and dress modestly and act politely, then it’s your fault if you get raped or harassed or if you get denied a job.

 

This is an enormous amount of responsibility and guilt for any individual to take on. It leads almost directly to a paranoia about one’s actions, to a sense of personalization about everything, to perfectionism and to anxiety. For a while I wondered why nearly every girl my age was a budding anxious perfectionist, but this quote makes it so clear to me: we are because we know we have to be in order to be deemed acceptable and in order to try to keep ourselves safe.

Another problem with this message is that it tells minorities that their feelings are not valid or right. When your rights are denied, you have every right to be angry and upset, but this myth tells you that feelings of anger are always wrong because you are always at fault. You don’t get to be angry ever, except with yourself, because society can never do you wrong if you play by the rules. This undermines so much of an individual’s identity, confidence, and emotional understanding that you can be left with no conception of what an acceptable feeling is. In DBT when we talk about the circumstances that can trigger a mental illness, an invalidating environment is one of the first things that comes up every single time.

 

It’s no surprise that oppressed populations have some mental health problems different from those of privileged groups: they’ve been put into a situation where perfection is expected of them, everything is personalized, and their feelings are invalidated. It’s the perfect storm, and yet we sit around wondering why women feel so bad about themselves. This is somewhat akin to leaving tripwires everywhere and then asking why people keep falling.

 

We as a society need to start discussing and addressing the mental health effects of these expectations of women and other oppressed individuals because they are creating mindsets that are rife for mental illness. They are creating expectations of perfection in individuals, they are telling individuals to personalize everything, they are heaping guilt and responsibility on individuals who should be looking at the societal discriminations for their difficulties.