DescentBB

http://www.eqi.org/invalid.htm wrote:Invalidation is to reject, ignore, mock, tease, judge, or diminish someone's feelings. Constant invalidation may be one of the most significant reasons a person with high innate emotional intelligence suffers from unmet emotional needs later in life.(1) A sensitive child who is repeatedly invalidated becomes confused and begins to distrust his own emotions. He fails to develop confidence in and healthy use of his emotional brain-- one of nature's most basic survival tools. To adapt to this unhealthy and dysfunctional environment, the working relationship between his thoughts and feelings becomes twisted. His emotional responses, emotional management, and emotional development will likely be seriously, and perhaps permanently, impaired. The emotional processes which worked for him as a child may begin to work against him as an adult. In fact, one defintion of the so-called "borderline personality disorder" is "the normal response of a sensitive person to an invalidating environment" (2)

Psychiatrist R.D. Laing said that when we invalidate people or deny their perceptions and personal experiences, we make mental invalids of them. He found that when one's feelings are denied a person can be made to feel crazy even they are perfectly mentally healthy. (Reference)

Recent research by Thomas R. Lynch, Ph.D. of Duke University supports the idea that invalidation leads to mental health problems. He writes "...a history of emotion invalidation (i.e., a history of childhood psychological abuse and parental punishment, minimization, and distress in response to negative emotion) was significantly associated with emotion inhibition (i.e., ambivalence over emotional expression, thought suppression, and avoidant stress responses). Further, emotion inhibition significantly predicted psychological distress, including depression and anxiety symptoms.) (Reference)

Invalidation goes beyond mere rejection by implying not only that our feelings are disapproved of, but that we are fundamentally abnormal. This implies that there is something wrong with us because we aren't like everyone else; we are strange; we are different; we are weird.

None of this feels good, and all of it damages us. The more different from the mass norm a person is, for example, more intelligent or more sensitive, the more he is likely to be invalidated. When we are invalidated by having our feelings repudiated, we are attacked at the deepest level possible, since our feelings are the innermost expression of our individual identities.

Psychological invalidation is one of the most lethal forms of emotional abuse. It kills confidence, creativity and individuality.

Telling a person she shouldn't feel the way she does feel is akin to telling water it shouldn't be wet, grass it shouldn't be green, or rocks they shouldn't be hard. Each persons's feelings are real. Whether we like or understand someone's feelings, they are still real. Rejecting feelings is rejecting reality; it is to fight nature and may be called a crime against nature, "psychological murder", or "soul murder." Considering that trying to fight feelings, rather than accept them, is trying to fight all of nature, you can see why it is so frustrating, draining and futile. A good guideline is:

First accept the feelings, then address the behavior.

One the great leaders in education, Haim Ginott, said this:

Primum non nocere- First do no harm. Do not deny your teenager's perception. Do not argue with his experience. Do not disown his feelings.

We regularly invalidate others because we ourselves were, and are often invalidated, so it has become habitual. Below are a few of the many ways we are invalidated:

* We are told we shouldn't feel the way we feel
* We are dictated not to feel the way we feel
* We are told we are too sensitive, too "dramatic"
* We are ignored
* We are judged
* We are led to believe there is something wrong with us for feeling how we feel


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http://www.eqi.org/invalid.htm

It's an emotionally UNHEALTHY part of our everyday lives and a part of a horrible caustic social culture that we for some reason just accept.

Duper wrote:...To cause the kind of damage that the author is implying on the scale sugested would pretty much make a vast majority of the populas catatonic.

Duper wrote:And I have to dissagree that feelings are reality. Just because you feel a certain way does not make it accurate. Feelings and emotions are largely detirmined by preception. Now, to say that our preception is absolute so to dictate reality is absurd. Feelings are vapor, they change.

Many times when I was a child, I became upset over various things... REALLY upset. Looking back on those circumstances, I see that I was wrong to feel and act the way I did. I could only reason and understand as a young child at that time and, of course, were bound to live in that situation. Did I feel that way? yes. were my feelings jsutified? no. My perception of reality was schewed by my age. Do we debais a child for throwing a fit because you can't afford the 3 million peice Lego set? no. Bring discipline if needed, but try to bring undertstanding and love.

It's an emotionally UNHEALTHY part of our everyday lives and a part of a horrible caustic social culture that we for some reason just accept.

There has never been anything other BUT this ...ever. But we are not all scared beyond repair are we? No.

This all being said, I guess it makes me a bad damaging person. :roll