Hi Mixedupemotions,

I'm glad that my thread helped you to become conscious of your feeling of invalidation. Once we know what triggers us, we can begin to look at why we feel invalidated. We can explore whether the invalidated feeling stems from our own personal feeling of being unimportant (hence, we will be on the lookout for anything that could remotely feel invalidating, and then react with defensiveness). . . or whether the invalidated feeling is the result of actual invalidation by someone else.

If the person really did intentionally invalidate us, then our feelings of hurt and anger are justified. We will need to work through those hurt feelings. We have a right to let that other person know why we are angry or hurt, and to find out why the invalidation took place. We also will need to decide how serious the invalidation was. Does the other person regret having hurt us? Can we overlook it, based on the otherwise good relationship we have with the person? Or do changes need to be made in the relationship so as to protect ourselves from possible future invalidation (emotional or physical distancing)?

On the other hand, if, upon close internal inspection, we find that the other person was not purposely trying to invalidate us, then we have a job to do. That job involves looking deeply into ourselves to find out why we are so sensitive to anything that appears to be invalidating? What causes the knee-jerk reaction of defensiveness? Have we felt invalidated or minimized by others in the past or now? Do we personally feel unimportant, so that we assume others also see us this way? If so, then we need to work on our own feelings of worthlessness and unimportance. If we can build up our own feeling of value, then we will not continue to see life through a lens of unimportance, where we react defensively to otherwise benign actions.

This is a major, Major, MAJOR problem for me, so i need to apply this advice myself whenever my unimportance trigger goes off. Unfortunately, when i'm triggered, i am not usually able to access my logical side at all or ask these questions. Usually, my emotions of hurt and anger take up the whole picture!

How are you feeling today? Does your t respond to your blog posts? Will he reply to what you said about feeling invalidated? Or would you need to wait until your next session to discuss it with him?