Episode 240: Clinician's Corner - Chronic Invalidation

In today's insightful Clinician’s Corner episode, Clarissa Kennedy and Molly Painschab delve into chronic invalidation as a trauma response, exploring its origins, impacts, and practical healing strategies. This episode offers clinicians compassionate insights and actionable tools for supporting clients on their healing journeys.

Key Highlights:

Understanding Chronic Invalidation

• Chronic invalidation occurs when emotions, needs, or perceptions are consistently dismissed, causing internalization of critical voices.
• Common invalidating statements include "You're too sensitive," "It's not that bad," and "Don't cry."
• Chronic invalidation often results in perfectionism, emotional suppression, people-pleasing, and using food or substances to cope.

Origins and Impact

• Invalidating behaviors can originate from caregivers' inability to handle their own emotions.
• Chronic invalidation can manifest in adulthood as strong inner critics, emotional numbness, hyper-vigilance, and difficulty identifying personal emotions and needs.
• Invalidated individuals often experience significant relationship challenges, attachment issues, and ongoing self-doubt.

Healing Strategies for Clients

• Awareness: Encourage noticing and naming the inner critic as a first significant step toward healing.
• Curiosity and Compassion: Recognize the inner critic as a protective mechanism developed to cope with past hurts.
• Co-regulation and Community: Seek safe, validating environments where clients can experience relational repair through community support and co-regulation.

Therapeutic Modalities for Addressing Chronic Invalidation:

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): Helps clients identify and reframe invalidating thoughts.
• Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT): Provides emotion regulation and distress tolerance skills.
• Internal Family Systems (IFS): Validates all parts of self without shame.
• Somatic Experiencing and Polyvagal Theory: Body-based approaches to regulate the nervous system and safely reconnect clients with their bodies.

Clinician Guidance and Reminders

• Avoid invalidating language (e.g., labeling clients as resistant or not having hit "rock bottom").
• Validate client experiences before offering problem-solving approaches.
• Model self-validation and demonstrate relational repair in therapeutic interactions.
• Encourage distress tolerance skills among clinicians to prevent rescuing behaviors driven by personal discomfort.
• Embodied Practice (Somatic Experiencing Exercise)

Clarissa leads listeners through a gentle, somatic experiencing practice designed to:

• Identify areas of stored emotional tension.
• Invite compassionate awareness and gentle inquiry into bodily sensations.
• Facilitate nervous system regulation through grounding, breathwork, and affirmations.
• Closing Insights

Healing from chronic invalidation is a gradual, individualized journey. Encourage clients to begin with the strategies and modalities that feel safest and most accessible.

Remind clients and clinicians alike that healing is not linear but is profoundly supported through compassionate awareness, relational repair, and community.

Join us next month for more empowering insights on Clinician's Corner!

The content of our show is educational only. It does not supplement or supersede your healthcare provider's professional relationship and direction. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified mental health providers with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition, substance use disorder, or mental health concern.