By Adrianne Wagner, LMFT | Trauma & EMDR Therapist in Pennsylvania
You are smart. You run teams at work, manage complex family schedules, and solve problems all day long.
Yet, when it comes to your own feelings, you constantly second-guess yourself.
Someone hurts your feelings, and your immediate thought is to wonder if you are just being too sensitive. You need to make a boundary, so you poll five different friends to make sure you are doing the right thing. You constantly wonder if your reactions are normal or if you are overreacting.
This chronic self-doubt is exhausting. It is also not a character flaw. It is a direct result of growing up with emotional invalidation.
If you feel like you cannot trust your own reality, we need to look at how that reality was shaped when you were young.
The Quiet Reality of Invalidation
We often picture overt gaslighting when we hear the word invalidation. It can definitely be that. But for many women, the invalidation was quiet.
If you grew up with Emotionally Immature Parents, they simply lacked the capacity to hold space for your big feelings.
When you were sad, you were told to cheer up. When you were angry, you were told to stop being dramatic. When you were anxious, you were told there was nothing to worry about. Or perhaps, no one noticed when you had big feelings and were left feeling alone in the experience which signaled “there must be something wrong with me”.
Emotional invalidation is any message that tells you your internal experience is wrong or unacceptable.
Why You Disconnected From Your Body
Children are wired for attachment. If a child has to choose between trusting their gut and keeping their parents happy, they will choose their parents every single time. It is a biological survival mechanism.
When your environment repeatedly tells you that what you feel is not real, you eventually stop listening to your body. You learn to outsource your reality.
You learn to look outward to figure out how you should feel. You scan the room to see if it is okay to be upset. You ask for constant reassurance because your internal compass was broken by the exact people who were supposed to calibrate it.
The Symptom: Outsourcing Your Intuition
Today, this looks like a profound lack of self-trust.
It looks like staying in bad relationships because you convince yourself you are expecting too much. It looks like apologizing when you are not in the wrong just to keep the peace. It looks like analyzing a text message for three hours instead of just saying that you do not like how you were spoken to.
You are relying on logic to validate what your nervous system already knows.
How to Rebuild Your Self-Trust
Healing from emotional invalidation means slowly teaching your brain that your body is a reliable source of information. You have to become the validating parent you never had.
Here is how you can start practicing this.
- Try a Polling Freeze
The next time you have to make a decision or process a difficult interaction, put a temporary freeze on asking for advice. Do not text your best friend or your sister. Sit with the discomfort of your own opinion for just one hour. Notice how desperately your brain wants someone else to validate your stance.
- Drop the “Should.”
When you notice a feeling, stop judging it. If you feel angry about a canceled plan, do not tell yourself you should be more understanding. Acknowledge the raw feeling first. Say to yourself that you are feeling angry right now and that makes sense. Validation does not mean you have to act on the feeling. It just means you allow it to exist.
- Track Your Somatic (Body) Cues
Self-trust lives in the body. Start paying attention to your physical cues when you interact with people. Notice who makes your shoulders drop and your breathing slow down. Notice who makes your chest feel tight or your stomach clench. Your body is constantly giving you data. Your only job right now is to start listening.
The Healing Journey
Rebuilding self-trust is a slow process. It requires deep nervous system work to undo decades of conditioning. Therapy modalities like EMDR can help reprocess those early memories of invalidation so you can finally feel secure in your own skin.
You are not too sensitive. Your feelings make sense. It’s time to start believing what you already know.
Schedule a free consultation today
Looking to connect with a therapist who specializes in developmental attachment trauma, specifically trained in trauma modalities to help you do more than just talk about your past but actually recover from it?
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Adrianne Wagner is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Collegeville, Pa and the surrounding area and online in Delaware and Florida. She is trained in multiple modalities of trauma-focused healing to best support clients who are looking to feel better faster.
