Emotional Intelligence | Main page on Invalidation

The Invalidating University Student

I have been spending a lot of time with a Bulgarian university student. She came to a presentation I gave on emotional intelligence. She volunteered to help me one day and since then we have become very close. I am trying to teach her everything I have learned about feelings and emotions but I am afraid I won't be able to teach it quickly enough to save our friendship. I am also afraid I am too emotionally needy, but that is another issue which complicates things even more.

When I tell her I am afraid she will leave me, for example, she usually says something like "I won't leave you."

Here are other ways she invalidates me and some actual stories.

Yesterday when I told her I needed to feel more important to someone she said "You are very important to me." I then repeated that I need to feel more important. She then said "Why would I spend 5 or 6 hours a day helping you, if you weren't important to me?" My only answer to that is "I don't know, but I know I need to feel more important."

We were walking along and I started to think about some sad things and have some painful memories. I became quiet. She asked me why I was quiet and I told her I was thinking about a lot of things. She then said "Aargh" You are always thinking about something." Then she walked away and started talking to someone named Eva. Throughout the rest of the day she spent more time talking to Eva than she did talking to me. Later I told her I felt less important than Eva and she said "You aren't less important to me than Eva, I just wanted to get to know her."

At another point I was feeling depressed and walking slowly. She was feeling frustrated with me and this created energy in her so she was walking faster than I was. She would walk ahead of me and then stop and look back. She would wait for a moment to see if I was still following her and then start walking again. I wanted her to walk along side me and let me hug her from time to time as we had done other days walking on the city streets here. I remembered the saying that goes something like "Don't walk ahead of me and expect me to follow. Don't walk behind me and... Just walk beside me and be my friend." The further she got away from me the more afraid I felt that she would just keep walking. I was afraid she would keep walking away and never come back. She had walked off with Evan and some other people about an hour earlier, leaving me alone. All I could think about was the possibility of losing her friendship. This depressed me even more and eventually I just could not walk anymore and I stopped completely and stared in the opposite direction. She came back to me and we talked for a minute. I asked her why it was so important for her to keep walking ahead of me. She told me that she had promised Nick that we would come meet him. She also told him that I would be happy to join them, even though I had said nothing of the sort. I told her that I wouldn't enjoy being with Nick and his friends because I couldn't show them how I really felt, I didn't want to spoil things for them and I couldn't be fake about my feelings. She kept trying to tell me that it would be better for me to be with them, even though I said very clearly that it wouldn't. I told her I just wanted to spend time alone with her for a while. She said she didn't want to make them wait and I was just being selfish and I was always expecting her to do what I wanted to do. She then turned and walked away again.

Later I told her that I felt less important to her than Nick. Her response was "You are not less important to me than he is."

At another point I told her that I hadn't wanted to start talking too much to Eva because I was afraid she would get jealous. She then said "I wouldn't get jealous." She had already shown me that she gets jealous on another occasion when I was talking to someone else so my fear had an explanation. Had she asked me why I was afraid she would get jealous, I could have told her, but instead she just invalidated me. I suppose that if I had been more "assertive" and told her why I was afraid she would have said something like "But that was different."

On a different occasion when she was telling me to just enjoy the day I asked her how she would feel if her father had just died and someone told her to forget about it and enjoy the day. She got defensive and said "That is not the same thing. Did your father just die?" I felt understood 0 on a scale of 0 to 10. And rather than feeling validated and understood I felt attacked.

Looking back, I suppose I could have said I didn't feel understood when she told me to try to just enjoy the day. Maybe it would have been better to say "I really need your understanding, or someone's."

I had my reasons for feeling sad, even though the others were enjoying themselves. I want someone in my life who asks me how I feel, who listens, who shows interest in my feelings and the reasons for them, who wants to understand and who tries to help me when I am suffering. Invalidating someone maybe the least helpful thing we can do and the most hurtful since it immediately slams the door to understanding.

This is especially troubling for me since this girl is very sensitive, caring person. She has been bombarded with years of "education" but has never learned a single thing about invalidation, except perhaps how to do it. Each day I see how much we need to teach emotional knowledge and skills. But here in Bulgaria, for example, I would be a little worried about leaving the design of this training in the hands of the people who were educated themselves under the former Soviet Union system. I am afraid they would figure out how to use the courses to their own advantage. That is one reason I prefer to write things for my site. That way no one who wants to control young people can edit the original content or rearrange it to support an authoritarian, adult based system. I say "adult based" because one of my most fundamental beliefs is that life on earth will get better when we start teaching children and teenagers the names of their feelings, then really listening and then making adjustments to the system to meet the emotional needs of the young people.

S. Hein
Feb 3, 2008
Veliko Tarnovo

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Later I remembered that it would help me if she were to ask: What would help you feel less afraid that I will leave you? Then I would say "If I knew when I was going to see you again. If I knew when we would have a chance to talk in a safe place. (By safe, I mean a place where I can feel free to cry, for example.)