Acknowledgement versus Invalidation
A basic and typical mistake has been isolated, labelled “invalidation”, and defined as: refusing, denying, derogating, etc. anything someone considers a fact. If one considers that the moon is made of cheese, that’s a fact to one; whether this is true or not, that’s a horse of a different colour. If one considers that one likes cheese, that’s a fact to one as well, regardless of what other people think about cheese.
To understand invalidation, a good starting point is saying that, since one exists, one has a right to one’s own point of view. That one’s point of view has to be based on truth and subject to comparison and debate does not undermine the fact that one has a right to have a point of view in the first place, just as one has a right to exist. Incidentally, this is one of those rights vitiated by the difficulty that you must learn not to depend on anyone else to find it out or have it acknowledged, but you must learn to acknowledge and assume it by yourself.
So, one thing is saying “it is my point ov view that your point of view may stand some improvement in that this and that, as you can easily observe” – wherever it’s a matter of facts –, or that “our points of view differ on the grounds of personal inclination” – wherever it’s a matter of opinions or taste –, quite another thing is saying “I deny you the right to have a point of view”, or, in other words, “you are not permitted to exist; you are not.”
Invalidation is even clearer when compared to what can be seen as its opposite: the acknowledgement. Acknowledgement has been isolated as a key vital part of communication, and defined as: anything said or done to inform one that one’s communication has been noticed, received and understood.
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Seeing someone is receiving a communication, greeting that someone is acknowledging his or her existence. Allowing to talk, listening, answering questions, properly acknowledging what is said – a simple thing, such as a, “I see” –, all of these are forms of acknowledgement.
Imagine spending a whole day utterly ignored by your fellows, you and all your attempts to communicate, and then imagine spending the same day fully listened to and acknowledged, with all your longings to communicate successful. Imagine how would you feel in each case, and then multiply that effect over a time span of a lifetime: the therapeutic value of acknowledgement and the invalidating effect of its absence may work also by slow undetected accumulation in the long run. Lack of acknowledgement is most decidedly a form of invalidation. And unfortunately acknowledgement is one of the most scarce fundamental necessities; if you look carefully and extensively around, you can easily assess how much loneliness, despair and insanity this exact factor accounts for in society.
No matter how obvious, an acknowledge has to be such from the viewpoint of the receiver: if one begins to receive anything else in response to one’s communication, including agreement or disagreement, without being aware of having been acknowledged, no acknowledgement took place, with all its consequences.
It is very important to clarify that acknowledgement is not agreement, and that the therapeutic or invalidating effects result from the acknowledgement or its absence, not from agreement. Not only “I understand” does not mean “I agree” nor “I disagree”, but it seems that communicating with our fellows is even more vital a basic than their agreement is. It is obvious that if one handles something is because one considers handling it important, and that no one is an island, thus agreement of one’s fellows is fundamental to anyone; it is slightly less obvious that acknowledgement is even more fundamental than agreement. After all, even disagreement is a form of acknowledgement: you can’t disagree with what does not exist for you.
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After all, it has also been said that enough communication solves anything: any disagreement can be solved by just continuing to communicate until we understand each another enough. Being truth the way things are, acknowledgement has much to do with truth and invalidation with falsehood, and the therapeutic value of truth and the invalidating effect of falsehoods cannot probably be overstated. And as to the therapeutic value of self−respect, it could be said that self−respect consists of assessing first and then acknowledging the truth about self, to begin with, and to begin from.
On the other hand, invalidation has a wider scope than just lack of acknowledgement, as wide and varied as there are ways to suppress people by planting in them, overtly or underhandedly, the idea that they can’t reach, that they are less, that they are nil. To suppress means to make one less; to make one less it is quite instrumental to persuade one that one is less than one actually is, to wipe out the truth with downward misleading lies. Hence, probably the best way to confront the full scope of what invalidation can be is studying the suppressives: almost anything any suppressive does can be traced back to invalidation. The common denominator of all this being that of shrinking the people’s horizons, their scope, the sphere they are aware of, that they consider they can reach, control, influence, inhabitate. The common denominator being that of making people smaller and smaller, toward zero. It could be said as well that invalidation consists of destroying one’s sense of reality, of certainty, of self−confidence, because destroying one’s sense of reality and certainty and self−confidence is a very effective way of destroying one.
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One is tempted to say that the effects on us of acknowledgement and invalidation prove we are made to live together: acknowledgement is someone telling us, “to me, you are”, and, like a sprout in the light, we grow; invalidation is someone telling us, “to me, you are not”, and, like a sprout in the dark, we wither away. Looks like “you” must be important to “me”, then.
Invalidation is a fundamental human mistake, but while people indulge in it because they basically don’t know what they are doing, the suppressive knows it perfectly well and uses it intentionally and deliberately. People invalidates out of poor ethics, poor humanity, poor understanding; the suppressive invalidates for just one exact purpose: to suppress. And finally for a suppressive invalidating is more often the norm, rather than the exception, it is more likely the unnoticed ordinary routine than the conspicuous episodic impetus; it is more effectively carried out by daily erosion than by isolated explosions, as one eventually breaks down more thoroughly if one does it without realising why, without any apparent single reason in sight, and without even realising it. That's the trick.