I have just had a breakthrough .and it has NOTHING to do with my husband’s affair.В Well, that is not completely true.this discovery has provided me with answers to so much in my life, that it will have tremendous impact on my marriage moving forward, my relationships, my self-image, the way I see the world.
I posted a few weeks ago about some huge fallout that happened while my family and I were away on vacation.В Within a one week period, I lost my lawyer, was angrily dismissed by a long time family friend, and estranged from my aunt’s life completely.В It was as if a bunch of people close to me were all killed in a plane crash at the same time.В POOF, they were gone.В I also learned that my mother was capable of a deceit I didn’t believe could be possible from a mother.
I’ve been to therapy 4 times since the last post.В Twice with my individual therapist, and twice with my marital therapist.В Before I’d even set food in their offices, I had started researching the internet for mother-daughter relationships.В I wanted to know more about the deceit that can happen, the betrayal, the pain, the complexities.В What I came across was something absolutely amazing В I came across a site that talks about emotional invalidationВ , a form of psychological abuse whereby someone continuously invalidates the feelings and experiences of another person, denies that events happened, recreates history for them, minimizes their pains, their hurts, and makes them feel faulty for having felt them in the first place.В It is one of the most vicious forms of emotional abuse, and I’d never heard of it, and yet I have lived it my wh*le life.
When I say that stumbling upon that site was amazing, it is an understatement.It was completely transformational for me.В In reading all of the ways that people can be invalidated, so many of them were familiar to me.В My parents were both that way, my mother most of all.В Throughout my life and childhood, I’d heard about 85% of the things on the list, things like: «you are so overly dramatic», «why can’t you just be like _______», «why do you always have to be so hard to deal with?», «that never happened», «you have a very vivid imagination».В В All my life, I’ve had this tense relationship with my mother, and I didn’t know why.В I knew there was something odd, and I knew she was never wrong, but now I have a term for what has been happening.В Ladies and Gentlemen, I have been invalidated emotionally my entire life.В There, I said it, and it felt great.
Well that is just the tip of the iceberg.В Knowing that this has been happening, I started to feel angry.В I started to feel sad.В «Why would she do that to me?».В I started to feel sorry for myself, «Why can’t my mother love me for who I am, and accept my feelings?».В I’ve always lived with a hope that maybe someday, she would see.В Maybe someday, I would be able to find a way to talk to her that would turn things around.В I just needed to find the magic method of making her hear me.
Sitting in my therapist’s office yesterday, with my husband at my side, I told him about what I had learned about в
