Emotional Invalidation

All right, I want to cover two things didactically tonight. That's a big word meaning just information. The first is I want to talk about emotional invalidation. You all, and for those of you that don't have it, handy, let me just read to you. So I'll just randomly go through these statements and if the statement, as you said it or somebody said it to you, just make a little tick mark on a piece of paper. So these are statements around ordering you to feel differently. Smile. Hey, be happy. Cheer up. Lighten up. Get over it. Grow up. Get a life. Don't cry. Don't worry. Don't be sad. Stop whining. Stop laughing. Don't get angry. Deal with it. Give it a rest. Forget about it. Stop complaining. Don't be so dramatic. Don't be so sensitive. Stop being so emotional. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Stop taking everything so personally. And then the next box says ordering you to look differently. A couple more examples: Don't look so sad. Don't look so smug. Don't look so down. Don't look like that. Don't make that face. Don't look so serious. Don't look so proud of yourself. Don't look so pleased with yourself. And then the next one, the next box, some other ones: You've got it all wrong. But of course I respect you. But I do listen to you. That's ridiculous. I was only kidding. But that's not the way things are. That's not how things are. And we can go on and on and on and on. I've collected these and you can see I've got 4 pages. Yeah, 4 pages of these. And what I found is that the way that most people— well, first of all, how many of these did you check off? Most of them, right? Exactly. Most of them. I get 100, 100%. Yeah, A+, gold star. Yeah, when people, when people start looking at these phrases and they start recognizing how common these are in how we treat our children, how we treat our partners, our spouses, our friends, our colleagues. It is, it's absolutely epidemic. It's pervasive. And the question is, why do— well, let me ask you this first of all. How many of you have had statements like this said to you when you were upset or emotional? Me. Yeah, everybody. Me too. And what's it feel like when somebody emotionally invalidates you? Terrible. It feels crappy. Yeah, it's terrible. And yet we know that when somebody emotionally invalidates us, we feel lousy, and yet we still persist in emotionally invalidating others. We never make that connection. And the question becomes, why is it that we engage in emotional validation? And there are two reasons. The first reason is we don't know any better— three reasons really. The first reason is we don't know any better. In other words, we haven't— the second reason is we have— this is the way we've been taught because this is what our parents and siblings and childhood people around us did to us as children and so this was just part of our programming. But more importantly, we emotionally invalidate other people because we're trying to soothe our own anxiety around their emotional experience. Think about what happens when you're around people who are really emotional. What happens inside of you? What emotions do you experience most of the time? And you might, you might get reactive, you might get angry or frustrated, but often underneath all of that is anxiety. And when we're feeling anxiety The human body— anxiety is the one emotion that the human body cannot tolerate at all. Anxiety is the anticipation of a future fearful event, and so we are hardwired to take action. So basically what we tell this person is, "Go away, stop those emotions, go away. I'm not feeling good about this, it makes me feel terrible, so please stop, go away, don't do this." That's essentially what we're telling people to do. Because it's basically an unconscious strategy for soothing our own, reducing our own anxiety by diminishing the emotions of another person. Well, the sad thing is, and I do not talk about this in the video course, although when I update it I will, and that is that the ACEs study out of San Diego, Adverse Childhood Experiences study, Google it if you get a chance, The ACEs Study has been this longitudinal study of upper middle class, middle and upper middle class families in San Diego County down in Southern California. And they've looked at— Kaiser, of course, is very interested in what causes disease. Why do people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s have disease? Where does it come from? And what they found, what the researchers found, was a direct relationship between adverse emotional childhood experiences, which includes, of course, the usual stuff, physical and sexual abuse, but also emotional abuse, emotional invalidation. They found a direct correlation to when children experience emotional invalidation on any significant degree, to any significant degree, they are much, much more likely to suffer in later life from diabetes, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease, cancer, addictive disorder, alcoholism, all these, all these horrible things that happen to people out of emotional abuse, which is what emotional invalidation is. So a lot of people, if you talk to people, they will say, well, these are, this is just the way things are, we gotta, you know, buckle up buttercup, right? Toughen up. I'm sorry, that's not, that's not right, because we're, especially with the children, we're doing severe damage to them. So the antidote for emotional invalidation is affect labeling. Instead of saying something like, "Stop being so emotional," labeling somebody as a pejorative or as a negative, we would say, "Oh, you're really angry. You're really frustrated. You don't feel like you're being listened to." Whatever it is, simply reflect back their emotion and help them process their emotional experience so that they don't feel emotionally invalidated, they feel emotionally validated. And number one, they're going to de-escalate quickly. And number 2, they're not going to be abused. And number 3, you're going to soothe your own anxiety instantly because you're in a place of total and complete emotional control when you—