Marsha explains in her manual that kids who are born sensitive and temperamental may actually elicit invalidating responses from their caregivers. One possible dynamic is that a sensitive kid may often trip false-alarms, so to speak, teaching the parent that the kid is overreacting (at least from the parent’s perspective). So, when the kid experiences distress, the parent is susceptible to respond as above: “Oh, honey, you’re such a baby. You always get worried over nothing.”
The problem is that regardless how unreasonable it seems to the parent, the child is truly experiencing distress. As Marsha explains, disregarding the kid’s subjective experience impairs her ability to learn how to identify her emotions. She feels scared, but you’re suggesting to her that what she’s feeling is not fear, or at least it shouldn’t be. She can become confused about what fear even is, not to mention its nuances.
If one doesn’t learn how to assess her emotions, she sure as heck isn’t going to learn how to cope with them on her own. What you end up with is a kid (and later, an adult) who has two primary options when stressed: (a) emotional retreat/isolation; and (b) tantrum/overreacting. Option (a) is often realized when the person does not feel that the world will understand (because it hasn’t so far!). Option (b) may be realized when the stress builds to unmanageable levels—the threshold for which will be relatively low in such persons. The kid (or later, adult) is going to be heard one way or another.
If these emotional examples feel a bit ambiguous, Marsha also provides an example of one of my favorite types of invalidation that may be more apparent:
Kid:
“I’m thirsty!”
Dad:
“No you’re not; you just had a drink.”
There really is a time in every kid’s life when he’s not perfectly sure what to make of fundamental subjective experiences, even thirst or hunger. Omnipotent Dad telling him that he’s not thirsty or hungry really can be disorienting if he is indeed having such an experience. And if we can be confused about thirst or hunger, imagine how easily we can be become confused about something that is inherently more ambiguous, such as scared, dizzy, or humiliated.
If you’re still skeptical, realize that kids aren’t even sure sometimes whether they have been physically harmed. I don’t spend that much time around children, but I’ve observed many times where one is running and falls, pauses, and looks up at the nearest parent to get his/her reaction before crying or not. Human behavior is usually more complicated to sum up in a phrase, but I believe that one facet to this behavior is that the kid is honestly not sure how to assess the severity of his situation. “Am I hurt? Should I be freaking out here?” And we all know that (within reason) the crying is determined as much by the adult’s reaction as it is by the kid’s physical trauma. A cheerful “Oopsie daisy! Look who busted his ass!” is much less likely to elicit crying than an hysterical “OH MY GAWWWWD!!! MY BAY-BEEEEEE!!!” Hell yeah, we teach our kids our neuroses.
Another book from my shelf that actually devotes significant time to emotional validation is Michael Hollander’s Helping Teens Who Cut. It’s a great book, but I feel the title is somewhat unfortunate for my selfish purposes here. That is, again, it may give some readers the impression that invalidation and cutting go hand-in-hand. They don’t.
In any event, in addition to not learning how to comprehend one’s own emotions, Michael adds that another “consequence of an invalidating environment is that kids feel that life’s problems should be easy to solve.”3 Most of us know that in reality they are not, although we may see other people’s problems as relatively frivolous. So, in addition to creating confusion about emotions and feelings (and how to cope with them), the kid feels inept. Inept makes her different, isolated, corroborating her suspicion that “no one understands me.” Self-esteem takes a hit, because she’s being taught that others must be more capable.
Of course, isolated incidents of invalidation are unlikely to have long-lasting effects. Everyone is insensitive to their child at times, especially during those moments when we’re preoccupied with ourselves because we’re distressed, say, because of the layoffs at work or the engine light having come on in the car today. The problem is that, in many families, these invalidating interactions don’t occur in isolation. They are often habits, ways of life, indicative of the parent’s own pathology that they inherited from their parents (via both nature and nurture, but the emphasis is on the nurture here). I should also point out that although I’ve been focusing on negative inner experiences, validation is just as important in reference to positive inner experiences. It’s not qualitatively different and can be just about as toxic when we disregard our kid’s excitement, feelings of achievement, crushes on classmates, and the like.
You don’t have to spy on a family at home to observe parents taking it up a notch; it happens with alarming frequency in public. For example, at the grocery store, I’ll hear a kid expressing what seems to be an innocuous request, but the insensitive, preoccupied parent responds by ordering him to “Shut up! I don’t care what you want; I told you that blah blah blah …” Or, even worse, the parent swats or squeezes the kid, fingernails digging in real good, enough to where pain was clearly inflicted. I saw this just the other day, the most disturbing part being that the kid didn’t even really respond. It looked like those nails had to hurt, but he seemed kinda used to it, sitting there in the shopping basket chair. I wondered what it’s like at home for that kid, as opposed to being in a crowded public place.
To take it up many more notches, off the charts, some psychologists regard incestuous sexual abuse as the ultimate invalidating experience. This is not a myth or the product of Hollywood dramatics. Often when a dad or stepdad abuses his daughter, he prepares her first by arguing that he needs to do it in order to teach her about sex or that it is otherwise “good for you.” Others tell their victims that they really want to have sex, too, but that they just don’t understand their desire yet, that sort of thing. I know sexual abuse is one of the least pleasant phenomena on Earth to think about, even academically, but it’s revealing to consider how kids of different ages might experience abuse differently. Someone in their mid to late teens is unlikely to fall for that manipulative shit the perp is arguing. Now, her victimization may be the most disturbing thing that has ever happened to her before, but the flavor of the disturbance will be different from that of a younger kid, less complex. With the younger child, the parent still has much more authority, including over the child’s own inner experience. By no means am I suggesting that the kid somehow enjoys the experience simply because Dad said she should. I am saying that the younger kid is less able to own her own feelings. Even though dad may not be able to convince her that the abuse is good, he can create an incredible amount of emotional confusion about what’s going on. An older kid or adult victim knows how wrong it is. It’s pure violation, without the added confusion about the violation—the invalidation about what’s happening.
Worth adding, the cliché in psychological treatment circles is true, that emotional pain associated with abuse can hurt worse than the physical pain. Young victims are sometimes able to conjure the courage to break their vow of secrecy with the perpetrator and go to someone else for help, like another family member, often the mother. However, with surprising regularity, the mom or stepmom or aunt or whoever will be overwhelmed with denial (or something) and react by telling the kid she has a wild imagination or even punish the kid for lying. I’m not making this up for dramatic effect: When patients or whoever are telling you these stories, they often don’t cry when they disclose the actual abuse, but they lose it when they tell you the part about mom not believing them.
Perhaps you’re on board with this business of how emotional invalidation can create an emotionally disturbed adult. Now try bearing with a little psycho-hocus-pocus for a moment: Many psychologists will go as far to argue that chronic invalidation can prevent one from developing a cohesive sense of self. Now, I’m not going to pretend I have an adequate
synopsis of what the “self” is; there are entire books on the topic, none of which I have read, at least entirely. And certainly, philosophers have as much right to define the self as psychologists. That said, one psychologist, Marsha, believes that
Emotional consistency and predictability, across time and similar situations, are prerequisites of identity development. Unpredictable emotional lability leads to unpredictable behavior and cognitive inconsistency, and consequently interferes with identity development.
So, early invalidation renders one emotionally volatile because she cannot properly assess her emotions and subsequently cope with the bad ones through self-soothing. Ergo, her emotional behavior has been erratic in the past, and will continue to be so in the future. Insofar as one’s “self” is defined by emotional, cognitive, and behavioral coherence across time, identity is indeed disturbed.
David Shapiro, in this old-timey, kinda-but-not-too Freudian book from the 1960s, Neurotic Styles, treads these waters as well, and somewhat poetically, to boot. There’s a whole chapter on what he calls the impressionistic cognitive style. Shapiro doesn’t discuss the invalidating environment per se, but I don’t think anyone was at the time. Nor do we talk so much about the impressionistic style; we call it borderline or histrionic personality or traits, depending on details.
It’s fascinating to hear him discuss how such patients cannot own their emotions, identify with them, or otherwise integrate them into their selves. For example, such individuals
do not quite regard the content of their [anger] outbursts as something they have really felt, but rather as something that has been visited on them or, as it were, something that has passed through them … [One patient,] during the period of regret immediately afterwards or later, [referred to it] as a mysterious thing, something akin to a seizure, a strange passion that had got her in its grip; in short, it was not something that she felt.4
Paradoxically, impressionistic persons may seem to present with simultaneously intense but superficial emotions. Exaggerated, but somehow shallow. Another of Shapiro’s patients had “periodic stormy, hysterical outbursts of anger,” primarily towards her husband:
On one occasion, she is astonished that he tells her that he cannot put up with it. “He really means it,” she says in amazement and adds, “But I don’t mean the things I say.”5
Shapiro is clear that impressionistic reasoning has nothing to do with intelligence, or lack thereof; everyone uses it sometimes, as they should. Sometimes, impressions are all we have. But some folks can hardly scrutinize their emotions and be skeptical of them at all, so they are readily carried away, often ruled by fleeting feelings and whim. When particularly pervasive, his or her
romantic, fantastical, nonfactual, and insubstantial experience of the world also extends to his experience of his own self. He does not feel like a very substantial being with a real and factual history.6
It’s the damnedest thing: I’ve met many people from chronically invalidating environments who assert, oddly but frankly, “I don’t really remember my childhood,” and they truly will have great difficulty telling you anything substantive about the experience. They deny having been overtly traumatized, as one might suspect, but still remain wholly unable to describe what existence was like until some time in their teens or so. These must be examples of what Shapiro was describing. I think he’s suggesting that the person has no coherent identity (or didn’t for a while) because they have always been unable to experience their emotions as part of themselves. I know, it’s very psychobabbly, but I think there’s something legitimate going on here. One can lack substance because there hasn’t been much of a common thread—that is, of emotional coherence and predictability.
It also needs to be clarified that despite using words like “self,” we’re talking about brains. During our formative years, our brains are indeed forming and therefore sensitive to early experiences. Some of the most dramatic instances of so-called neural plasticity include the brains of those who have, for example, lost their eyes to accidents early in life. In such cases, the parts of the brain that are supposed to process other senses, such as hearing, compensate by using more brain tissue than is typical, literally commandeering those areas that had been destined for sight.
It’s fair to speculate that other experiences besides hearing and vision—such as self-esteem and a sense of self—are also mediated by particular brain areas or mechanisms. And just like those brain areas/activities intended for hearing and vision, if they are not stimulated properly during development, including by the seemingly trivial interactions with our parents, they will not form correctly. (And for the record, neuropsychologists and the like now believe that the “formative years” actually extend into early adulthood, that is, the early twenties, at least in some respects.)
Of course, invalidation does not merely occur between parents and growing children, although these are the most formative instances. Adults can invalidate other adults, whether it be boss to employee, friend to friend, stranger to stranger, or husband to wife. Opportunities for invalidation (or, optimistically, validation) are sprinkled throughout our days any time we’re interacting with another person. Unfortunately, in America, invalidating the suffering of others is a pastime, right along with apple pie and Chevrolet.
Rumor has it that the town in which I live, Austin, Texas, has some of the most intense cedar pollen levels on Earth, at least during the winter months, December through March-ish. In places where it’s particularly bad you can literally see clouds of green dust floating eerily in the air, a ghostly specter, lurking for victims, like something out of a Stephen King book. The “Green Death,” I call it. After a major emission, you may find that your car has been painted green by the Death, so that you can write and draw pictures in it with your finger—if you dare. Indeed, some people, like me, react quite violently to this horrible tree’s discharge, describing it as ever bit as bad as a full-on case of the flu, incapacitating and making one fearful of cracking a window in their home, not to mention the prospect of going outdoors. A drag, because it’s not really cold here in winter.
Despite the seriousness of the problem, you will often overhear conversations such as this throughout winter:
Austin:
“Hey, do you want to go out for a couple beers later?”
David:
“Man, I’d love to; thanks for asking, but I’m feeling pretty sick today. I think I’m just gonna stay in and watch the game.”
Austin:
“Ahhh, c’mon! It’s probably just allergies!”
Instead of offering any validation or sympathy, people try to diagnose the condition, and then behave as if this somehow solves the problem. Apparently, in Austin, Texas calling it “allergies” is somehow supposed to make it hurt less. Indeed, the diagnosis seems to convey, “Well, despite how you feel, you’re not actually infected by germs. You need to buckle down and keep on the move. We have shit to do, here in the A.T.X.!”
Of course, it shouldn’t matter what it’s called—it could be voodoo; identifying it as such doesn’t change the subjective experience. How about something like “Oh; I’m sorry you’re feeling sick. Yeah, you look kinda beat-up; do you want to just stay in tonight? We could get a movie …” Personally, I’m really appreciative of this latter, more sensitive and personable reaction; just typing it like that makes me feel good! But, alas, I find it’s a bit of a pipe dream to expect others to respond as such.
Another one of the more common invalidating responses that we use a lot in America is when someone alludes to a significant experience from his past that continues to have relevance in the present:
Jerry:
“I still have a hard time being in the same room with Douglas, ever since he hit on Sara at that Christmas party.”
Daniel:
“Oh, C’mon! That was five years ago!”
I’m not encouraging the habit of holding grudges, but neither should we simply disregard violations simply because a lar
ge amount of time has passed. Maybe Jerry doesn’t trust Douglas, and maybe he shouldn’t. If I was Jerry, I would wonder if Daniel has issues himself, like if he’s afraid of conflict.
Another subtle—but significantly invalidating experience—occurs when someone tells us about an exciting experience she’s had, such as a vacation in the mountains, and our reflex is to immediately respond by sharing a similar experience of our own. Instead of sharing her story with her, we unconsciously (or even consciously) try to trump it by telling a better story of our own:
Mary:
“Hey, I just got back from Colorado; it was so beautiful. The weather was perfect and we got really close to an elk!”
Bob:
“Cool! Yeah, I love the mountains. I got to go to the Andes last year when I was touring South America. A rare spectacled bear got into our tent and ate my toothpaste! I got its picture—didn’t you see my profile pic? It looks like it has rabies! Ha ha ha!”
I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t tell your bear story; of course you should. But slow down! Consume more about Mary’s elk first. Ask if anything else interesting happened, or just how the rest of the trip was. Give her a moment to be excited about her experience—and you be excited about her experience with her—before you trump it with yours. And sure, one might even consider not trumping it at all. Bring up your story on some other occasion altogether, or maybe never! I know, that’s a pretty lofty suggestion. I bet hardly anyone ever does such a thing, maybe Ghandi or the Dalai Llama or something.
Optimistic Nihilism Page 31