Invalidated Trauma - When They Tell You It Isn’t Real

The world is in flux right now. Events are happening at what feels like a dizzying pace. And social media is the double-edged sword of keeping us informed and connected, but also feeling on the verge of sanity. Some traumatic events are collective - war, bombings, mass attacks, mass firings. And some are individual - assaults, abuse, physical and sexual. Or more insidiously, they may be verbal. I work with people directly, so I see how distress imacts people directly.

Is every distress traumatic? Not necessarily. But as a therapist, I don’t focus too much on what we call an experience. I’m more interested in how it impacts a person and what they need to get support, clarity, and relief. Sometimes that involves one part education, three parts reprocessing. I consult with people on what they are struggling with. When it is helpful, I give them information about what may be going on. For example, a mom who has been struggling with general burnout comes to me for help with this feeling. I do a consultation and assessments to hone in on her “pain points”. If there appear to be issues that are consistent with ADHD, I may give her resources and education about this. But always, I try my best to stay focused on where her distress is and what her goals are.

Some people come in because a stressful event, be it long-term, remote or recent, is affecting their mood, there ability to function and be present in their own lives. And they just know they want to feel better. Again, I do consultation, assessments, and work with them to reprocess what happened. This does not mean that I evaluate how “big” or “small” a deal it was. If it impacted them and has their attention, it is important. I am a firm believer in being person-centered and remembering to honor people’s goals and process. And if what they want is something that I cannot offer, I try to be transparent about that.

Oftentimes, people have felt invalidated by their distress. In Traumatic Incident Recovery work, we often work with the concept of “wrong messages”, either those that we give ourselves or others, or those that others give us. They are sometimes hard to find, but they have impact.

Another way to think about this is as “traumatic invalidation”. For example, a child is bullied and tells their teacher, who says “don’t be a tattle tale”. Or, a young woman is sexually assaulted, and her doctor tells her that she “needs to have better boundaries”. Or moral injury: We are told it is wrong to kill people, but a soldier in battle shoots an unarmed person because he was directed to do so. Then they go home and are seeing the image of that scene in their head, and they feel they cannot talk about it. People might say, “I don’t want to know”, or “you were just following orders”. People may be well-meaning (or not), but they are not validating what the person is going through. That is why you don’t try to heal trauma on your own; you seek help from someone who can hold space for you and where you are with things.

If traumatic invalidation happened early on, you may have made the decision, at some level, that people cannot be trusted to help you. And that decision, at the time, was protective in a way. You learned not to put yourself out there, if you were only going to be hurt, shamed, or misunderstood.

Or, your community, your tribe was hurt, and you were labeled or given a point of view that did not hold space for your experience. (For the sake of being inclusive and not adding further harm to any particular group, I will leave the specifics of what your community or tribe might be.) That is something that I see happening at a collective level, too. And people are feeling it so deeply due to what they have suffered that any expression of empathy or good will to another group hits like a traumatic invalidation.

I try to remember what a close friend and colleague said today: “Empathy is not a zero-sum game”. It doesn’t have to mean that you feel for one group and by default, that means you don’t care about another. But when people start being this polarized, there is often an experience of invalidated trauma. Easy for me to say, I know.

I’m not here to tell people what they should or should not feel. Especially not in a therapy space. I am here to start where you are and hold space for where you are. And to work through whatever is making you feel stuck, to the best of my ability.