Hi everyone! Welcome to the channel or welcome back. I'm Angie, your friendly neighborhood therapist here to help you out with your mental health. So let's get started. In one of my past videos, we covered validation skills and how to validate others.
This video is going to be focused on invalidation and how it affects us and how we can recover from it. And once again, I'm getting my information from this training manual. Amazing stuff. DBT therapy is amazing. Marsha Linehan is amazing.
So yeah, let's get into it. Invalidation is when your point of view or experience is completely disregarded, and it seems like the person who invalidated you, their point of view, is unquestionable. But there are moments when invalidation can be helpful, such as correcting important mistakes, maybe some of your facts got wrong, and or it stimulates personal and intellectual growth by listening to the other person's opinions, which is a bit tricky nowadays. But other than that... Invalidation can be painful.
You're being ignored, repeatedly misunderstood, misread, misinterpreted. Important facts in your life are ignored or denied. Maybe you're receiving unequal treatment. When you tell the truth, no one believes you.
Your private experiences are trivialized or denied. Then there is traumatic invalidation. This is extreme or repetitive invalidation of someone's experiences. characteristics that are important to someone, or reactions to themselves or to the world. It is a frequent violation of how the person sees themselves and their environment.
Now this can come from a very important person, group, or authority who the person is or was dependent on for their own sense of personal integrity and well-being. And it can happen only once. So say you open up to your parent about a sexual assault. They don't believe you.
You come out to your family. they deny who you are. You open up to people about the racial microaggressions you experience on the daily and they deny your experience. Now this can also be a buildup of oversights and misreadings into your emotions, motives, and actions by the important person or institution, part of or all of your family, or a very important group.
And this person, who is made to feel invalidated, starts to feel excluded or like an outsider. People who experience traumatic invalidation may start to feel insecure with themselves. They'll have intrusive thoughts or memories, continue to re-experience the invalidation.
They'll have feelings of shame, confusion, anger, and defensiveness, and an increased sensitivity to invalidation. Now there's some people who will continue to seek validation from the person that invalidated them, or they'll seek it from others. Then there's other people who will completely avoid the person that invalidated them and have a hard time trusting others. So how do we recover from invalidation? We be non-defensive and check the facts.
We want to check all the facts of a situation to see if our response is valid or invalid. And we can ask someone that we trust to validate the valid. And this is a very important first step so that way we don't re-experience the invalidation.
We acknowledge when our responses don't make sense and are not valid, admit when we are wrong, try to change our behaviors, and stop blaming. It rarely helps the situation. Drop the judgmental self-statements. You are not stupid. Remember, there are often many valid reasons to invalid behavior.
And remind yourself all behaviors are caused and you're doing your best. Be compassionate toward yourself. Practice self-soothing. Admit that it hurts to be invalidated by others, even if they are right.
We acknowledge when our reactions make sense and are valid in a situation. And remember that being invalidated, even when your response is valid, is rarely the end of the world. You want to be sure that you describe your experiences and actions in a supportive environment.
Lastly, grieve traumatic invalidation and the harm it created. Practice validation on your own experiences. Remember, validate yourself exactly the way you would validate someone else.
And that is it on invalidation. I hope you all enjoyed the video and hopefully you can start to recover from any invalidation that you have faced. Please like, comment, subscribe, and share.
And I'll see you all in the next video. Stay safe and stay healthy. Bye!