Holding onto our emotional truth, knowing clearly what we see feel and know are not givens and depend a lot on pressure put on us to conform, especially if we are dealing with a numbed out or abusive person who may have an investment in us not knowing the psychological truth of what we endure in our relationship with them. Being told we are bad or wrong for reacting as we do to certain things that an abuser is using to shut us down or control us removes from us the option of fighting back and holding onto our emotional reality. It leaves us disempowered and weak questioning our own implicit reality.
There is something deeply alienating and traumatising about having a sad or angry reaction to something someone has done and then being shamed or ridiculed or sidelined for this response. If we already had a lot of self doubt going into the relationship and are isolated due to past trauma we are in an even more vulnerable position. And the saddest thing is that until we can find healthy people to validate and value how we actually do feel and think, we may be trapped for years in a prison of pain and doubt because often the problem we really have is that at no time in our past were we fully validated for what we were feeling but rather made to feel bad or wrong for feeling it.
I recently came across a quote from trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk in which he said the hugest price of trauma is both a fracturing and split relationship with our reality. In my own life I have only been able to make progress in overcoming crippling self doubt due to past emotional abandonment and invalidation after finding my last therapist. I have aborted other therapies where the whiff of abandonment reared its head with therapists who later proved to be trustworthy and untrustworthy. My fear of abandonment made me gun shy and I ran and at times it was difficult to trust what I felt or knew deep inside.
In this latest therapy there is not one time I have been emotionally invalidated. I am aware that in the past I was aware deep down in my bones when something was off and I was being abandoned or lead astray. Questioning my own genuine feelings and reality has been a huge legacy of my own emotional abandonment and neglect. Validation of our internal reality is essential for emotional health.
Therapist and child abuse advocate, Alice Miller has said that our minds can be lied to but our bodies always know the truth of what we have endured on some level. In difficult cases the body has to tell its truth via symptoms or illness because so long ago we were led to become deaf, dumb and blind or unable to translate what we knew and felt deep inside our skin and bones.
Healing our schisms in this regard means we need the presence of those who lead us home to truth and our bodies know this instinctive especially if we are highly sensitive, deeply attuned and empathic Having our empathy dismissed is nothing short of cruel and it severs us on levels which cause us great pain and exact an enormous price upon us in the long run.
Emerging From The Dark Night 