Invalidation: The Professional Edition
The last blog was a general introduction to our experience of invalidation and its impact on us. Today I am writing about the “professional” invalidation we may experience when we engage the world of professional counsellors, therapists, coaches and mental health practitioners.
In most cases we are already traumatized by discovering the false reality in which we have been living. We learn our husbands have an secret life developed and protected that puts us and our children at risk physically, financially, spiritually, socially and psychologically. Invalidation by friends, family, spiritual leaders and community, co-workers, etc. confirms the message from our spouse that our lives are not worth respecting. But then the “professional” experience of invalidation can erase any remaining hope for our lives to ever be worth anything.
It isn’t supposed to be that way. In fact, the road map for effective trauma care for us is already known.
Since 1992, when Dr. Judith Herman published the game-changing book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Violence to Political Terror, we have known a simple and effective a pproach to treating traumatized people. Her three-phase model includes:
Safety and Stabilization.
Remembering and Mourning.
Reconnecting with Community
Then, in her 2023 book Trauma and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, Dr. Herman’s ongoing research adds a crucial next phase to her model. This phase focusses less on the perpetrator of primary trauma and more on a trauma survivor’s isolation from the silence or harmful words and actions of “bystanders” to their traumatic impact. This is a secondary trauma of harm done by invalidation.
I believe this secondary trauma is key to understanding the layers of “repair” required after the experiences we have with those who invalidate the facts and the traumatic impact we have endured. Today it’s the group of treatment professionals we consider in that invalidating injustice.
So why am I saying it’s an “invalidating injustice?”
In describing Dr. Herman’s 1992 published work in this field I laid out the availability of a therapeutic model for treatment professionals to use that had research and practice underneath it. To deliberately use another approach since that time that did not begin with providing safety and stabilization resources to a woman presenting basic symptoms of traumatic impact may be understood (for examples) as negligent by some, incompetent by others, or simply misogynist by still others.
When women imagine they are finally safe to share their traumatizing experiences and their impact upon them because they are with a mental health professional, they don’t expect to be tone-policed, gaslit, blamed, shamed, diminished, accused, insulted, criticized, punished and perhaps more invalidating tactics. But there are women who, feeling completely overwhelmed by their discovery or his disclosure, went for professional help and heard something like this:
What did you do or not do for him to lose interest in you?
Everybody cheats, why do you think your situations is special?
Your anger makes it difficult to help you.
Why won’t you forgive him?
Have you wondered if your anger drives him away?
Come on, it’s not that bad. Do you want to lose a marriage over it?
I can’t help you if you think he’s the only problem here.
You sound like a codependent person.
It takes two people to break a marriage.
Have you asked him why he isn’t attracted to you?
You sound hysterical.
What are you responsible for in this mess?
Have you “let yourself go?”
What do you do to keep up his interest in you?
What is your part in the marriage breakdown?
How can you support him more?
Please get a hold of yourself.
Are you a controlling person?
Let’s not be so negative. How can this make your marriage better?
Could it be that you are exaggerating what this means?
If he has sex addiction that makes you a co-addict. You need to own that.
Why did you pick someone like this?
Come on now, don’t tell me you didn’t know. You knew.
Are you getting tested for STD’s in order to shame him?
Are you available when he wants sex?
Are you a sexually “conservative” lover and he is more open and wants to explore other activities?
You seem very concerned about how much money he has spent on getting his needs met.
You need to go to a 12-step program for codependence
I can’t help you if you don’t accept you are codependent.
I’m certified for treating sex addiction, and that makes you part of the problem.
You are sicker than the addict.
Are you just a woman scorned?
If you don’t commit to the program he’ll get better and another woman will reap the benefits instead of you.
You don’t need to be concerned about the children. It’s between you and your husband. It’s your problem.
So, he likes porn and gets off on it. Why don’t you?
He has a lot of work stress. You like the lifestyle it buys. Is it fair to be uspet about a “fling” now and then?
You need to get over it.
It appears to me that invalidation is a key building block for the treatment industry in dealing with traumatized women. The first phase of effective trauma response that is providing safety and stabilizing resources is not what many women get. Luckily, even in my traumatized state, I could expose the standard treatment model as an expression of misogynist blameshifting through research and critical analysis. (Don’t be too “impressed.” It’s not that hard.) Eventually I won my therapist over to rational understanding that this was abuse. But others are not so lucky. Their therapists are intellectually limited, deeply misogynist, trapped in the cognitive defeat of confirmation bias in decision-making, or maybe just lazy. There’s just nowhere to go with them except into the black hole of classic treatment models that protect him, sacrifice you, and pad the practitioners’ wallets—with no positive results showing any publishable statistical significance. IMO.
Recently I met another brave woman worn thin by lies, gaslighting, criticism, blameshifting, isolation and abandonment. She was advised by her husband’s male therapist to join a 12-step program to treat her codependence so he could do marriage counseling.
It’s 2023. That’s 14 years since Dr. Barbara Steffen’s research blew that label out of the water. I guess “professional” invalidation just feels so good to some treatment practitioners that they aren’t giving up the opportunity to beat down another women’s belief in the value of her own life. I wish this work of advocating for the value of a woman’s life was over.
Professional Invalidation. There’s no excuse for it—just a bunch of bad reasons.
With you,
Diane.