Stop letting them invalidate your feelings
It’s time for you to stand up for yourself and acknowledge how you feel.
by: E.B. Johnson
Does your partner or spouse have a habit of invalidating you? This is a toxic form of abusive behavior in which our feelings and our experiences are ignored, dismissed, downplayed, and outright denied by those around us. Instilling us with a low sense of self-worth and a confusing sense of who we are, it’s important that we learn how to draw the lines and prevent anyone from invalidating who we are or what we want.
Why you let them invalidate you.
Invalidation isn’t something that happens by accident or overnight. We teach others to invalidate us, and we do so by showing them how little we think of ourselves. When all you know is life in which you are worthless or powerless, it’s hard to actively do otherwise. We have to acknowledge the root causes behind this behavior, though, so we can correct it once and for all.
It’s all you know
Many people fall into patterns of invalidation because it’s the only thing they’ve ever known. Having grown up in highly volatile or dysfunctional homes, they probably watched their parents invalidate one another — and were probably even taught these techniques as a means of survival and relation. A lot of people cannot question the patterns they’re handed, but it’s crucial if we want to break out of our toxic cycles.
You’re insecure
When we are insecure, we don’t feel confident enough to stand up to the people who hurt us. So we end up settling for subpar relationships in which we are neither valued nor respected. You have to have a strong base of self-esteem in order to create and maintain healthy and effective interpersonal relationships. It comes down to standing up for yourself and insisting on taking up space.
You’ve been told to
There are those among us who were raised to believe that invalidation is a natural part of a relationship. Our parents, misguided in their own beliefs, pass their hangs up and their shortcomings down to us. Coming from a good place, they can teach us that in order to keep our partners happy, we have to make ourselves emotionally small for them. This is not the key to a happy or loving relationship.
You have no choice
Are you in a relationship with an abusive person? It’s hard to stand up for yourself when you’re walking on eggshells in your own life. When they terrorize you and weaponize things like your family and your emotions against you, you can be shamed right into silence. Fear is a powerful tool that an extremely abusive or toxic person will always use to invalidate our feelings.
It’s gotten comfortable
Some people are totally aware of the toxic dynamics at play in their relationships. For them, it’s not a matter of not seeing what’s going wrong. It’s a matter of being in a place that’s become familiar. Even poor treatment can become the norm when that’s all we ever know. When we don’t take conscious steps to change the patterns, we remain comfortable uncomfortable in invalidating relationships.
Signs they’re invalidating the way you feel.
Is there a loved one in your life who invalidates your thoughts or your feelings? If you don’t feel safe to open up, or the people in your life make you feel bad for being who you are — then you are dealing with people who invalidate your feelings and the very worth aspects of who you are.
Unable to open up
Do you feel scared to open up to your partner, loved one, or friend? When sharing our feelings with someone makes us scared, it’s a sign we don’t feel secure with them. This insecurity can come from a subconscious knowing. Maybe they have dismissed you and invalidated your feelings before. Maybe they made you feel insignificant for sharing aspects of your life with them.
Feeling lowly
The way we feel around others is a good sign of how they treat us. What do you feel like around the people in your life? Do you feel positive? Do they make you feel secure? Safe? Do you feel you’re in a stable environment? If all you get is negative feelings from your partner or your friends, look around and be aware of how you’re being treated. Low self-esteem can come from a long history of being invalidated by those around us.
Told how to feel
Are there people in your life who like to control how you feel? Believe it or not, this is invalidation. Those who love us honor our feelings. They don’t tell us how to feel. That comes from a desire to make themselves feel better. When someone can’t confront the hurt they’ve caused you, they try to force you to feel differently — so they can’t avoid accountability.
Dismissal or shut out
Not all invalidation is openly malicious or event apparent. Sometimes, our loved ones invalidate our feelings by dismissing us or shutting us out all together. Does this happen to you when you are trying to address your feelings with your spouse? Do they play your feelings down or ignore them outright? Someone who walks away or refuses to engage in conversation is still invalidating your emotions and concerns.
Blame shifting
Invalidation is nothing if not a creative process. When shutting us out and dismissal doesn’t work, the toxic person often resorts to blame shifting games. They blame you for having feelings, and turn the guilt around to target you. Weaponizing this guilt absolves them of any involvement in your hurt feelings and leads to you internalize complex and negative feelings against yourself and your relationship.
How to stand up for yourself (and your emotions).
You can’t afford to tolerate invalidation in your life — not if you want to be happy. We deserve to have our feelings acknowledged, and we deserve to be surrounded by people who don’t make us feel bad about being authentically who we are. Accept what invalidation is and who’s doing the invalidation. Then you can increase your self-worth, set boundaries, and re-think the way you look for validation in the outside world.
1. Accept what invalidation is
Accept what invalidation really is and acknowledge when it’s happening in any of your relationships. It’s the first step to getting to the plateau of happiness. It’s a journey. Raise yourself up so that you can see the lay of the land where you’re at. Then you can take steps to plan out a journey and bring yourself back to a place in which you are both respected and respecting the people you bring into your life.
Learn everything you can about invalidation and accept when it’s happening in your own life. No one is above using this tactic against us. Not our parents, not our partners, and not our friends. You need to be keenly aware of the signs and knowledgeable about the ways in which someone might invalidate your beliefs and emotions.
Does your loved one regularly ignore you when you complain about something going on in your life or your relationship? What happens when you ask for support? When you try to better yourself or your life? These are all important questions to ask ourselves when we feel as though we may be feeling invalidated. Any person who forces us to feel small or as though we aren’t good may invalidate our experience. Be honest about who you’re dealing with and what’s going on so that you can take steps to fix it.
2. Increase your self-worth
Self-worth is so crucial in protecting ourselves from those who would invalidate us. We can’t keep looking to them for connection and meaning. What they offer us is superficial. Rather than watering ourselves down for someone else, we have to see our inherent value and embrace the things we both want and deserve in our lives. Our worth doesn’t come from those around us. It comes from within and is complemented by those who choose to invest our time and interest in.
Increase your self-worth. Being strong in self enables us to severe the ties that we have with outward validation. You need to believe in yourself. You know that you are valid for existing and that you are capable as you are. Focus on rebuilding your self-esteem. We teach the world how to treat us, after all, by showing it how we treat ourselves.
The best way to increase your self-worth is by acknowledging who you are and falling in love with that person. Start with your physical body and all those things you already have confidence in. Look in the mirror (or pull out a journal) and say (or write) 3–5 things you love about yourself every morning. After one month of celebrating the positives, shift gears. Learn to embrace those things you see as weaknesses and you’ll end up embracing your entire self with confidence.
3. Learn to validate yourself
You’re going to continue to run into heartbreak and disaster until you learn how to provide yourself with that validation you keep seeking in others. They can’t give it to you. No matter how pretty they think you are, or how wonderful — the validation you’re looking from comes from yourself. You want to believe that you really love yourself. Until you give yourself that inherent sense of self-love and self-worth, you won’t find it anywhere else in the world either.
Learn to validate yourself and stop looking for the outside world to do it for you. Relying on anyone outside of yourself for happiness or fulfillment is reckless. Everything outside of you is temporary. It will leave you one day. Why would you build your home on such shifting sands?
Look to yourself for that sense of belonging you’re desperate for. You don’t need someone else to tell you that your feelings are valid, worthy, or justified. You are the only one who can do that. The only person who knows yourself inside-and-out is you. Give yourself that worth. Tell yourself that you are deserving and that you have a right to take up space. Take up that space and let your emotions and your beliefs take up space too. When you tell the world that you are validated, it will in-turn, reflect that validation back to you.
4. Create better boundaries
People invalidate us because we make it clear that we do not value ourselves. One of the primary ways in which we do this is by failing to set boundaries. We let the world walk all over us, and other people take that as their cue to do the same. So they dismiss us, diminish us, and ignore us whenever it suits them. Building our self-esteem and since of self leads to one thing: creating boundaries that prevent us from being disrespected in future.
Prove to the world that you will not be invalidated by setting boundaries. These boundaries are the way in which we both communicate our expectations and our demands with the world. It tells everyone in our life how we will and will not tolerate being treated.
Sit down with a pen and some paper. Spend some time writing out how out how you want to be treated. How do you want to your futures loved ones to behave around you? How do you want to be treated by them? When we create these boundaries — and refuse to compromise on them — we create terms that don’t allow for invalidation. When we create boundaries we open the door only for the respectful to come into our lives.
Putting it all together…
Invalidation is one of the most painful experiences we can deal with in an interpersonal relationship. When someone invalidates an emotion, or a belief we hold dear, it can shock us to our core and make us feel small in unknowable ways. We don’t deserve to be treated this way, but the only way to turn this around is to admit what’s going on and take proactive steps to turn things around in our lives and relationships.
Accept what invalidation is and how it’s occurring in your life. You have to see things as they really are in order to fix things. Next, turn to giving yourself that validation you’ve been lacking. This sense of worth and belonging has to come from within if you want to find it in others outside of yourself. Increase your self-worth and boost your self-esteem. You are deserving, but you have to hold that belief in the core of who you are. Set more boundaries both with yourself and with the world. No one has a right to push you around or make you feel small. Draw the line around your happiness and make it clear you’re no longer willing to compromise. The only person who can choose to stop the invalidation is you. What choice are you going to make?
