You were told — so many times, by so many people — that what you felt wasn't real. Eventually you started telling yourself.
It probably didn't look like abuse from the outside. Maybe it still doesn't. There was no single event to point to. There was just a lifetime of being told you were too sensitive, too dramatic, too much. That you were remembering it wrong. That other people had it worse. That you needed to calm down, toughen up, stop making everything about you.
And so you did what you had to do — you got very good at talking yourself out of your own experience. You learned to check yourself before anyone else could. You learned to pre-apologize for your feelings, to frame your needs as optional, to shrink before anyone asked you to. The voice that tells you you're overreacting? It used to belong to someone else. Now it's yours. That's the wound.
How it shows up inside of you
You feel something — hurt, anger, disappointment — and immediately wonder if you're being irrational before you've even checked
You apologize for having emotions, even in therapy, even here
You have a memory of something that hurt you and you still aren't sure if it counts
You downplay your needs so consistently that you've stopped knowing what they actually are
When someone treats you well, it makes you nervous — because it doesn't match the story you've been told about yourself
You feel rage sometimes — a rage that scares you with how big it is — and then shame immediately after, because you were taught that your anger was the problem
You've been in therapy and left feeling like even your therapist didn't quite believe the full weight of it
What working together actually looks like
The first thing we do here is establish something you may not have had before: a consistent experience of having your inner world taken seriously. Not managed, not redirected, not gently reframed into something more comfortable. Taken seriously. That sounds simple. For most people who grew up in invalidating environments, it is not simple at all. It is the thing that changes everything.
We use DBT's framework for understanding how emotional sensitivity plus an invalidating environment created the patterns you're living with now — not because something is wrong with you, but because something was wrong with what you were given. We work on rebuilding your ability to trust your own perceptions — to feel something and let it be real before you audit it. We work with the parts of you that still carry those old messages, and we work on the rage too, because it belongs here and it makes sense and it has been waiting a long time to have somewhere to go.
A note on being neurodivergent and invalidated: for autistic and ADHD clients, invalidation has a particular shape. When your nervous system processes the world differently and every environment tells you that your experience is wrong — not occasionally but systematically — the wound goes very deep. Many of my clients didn't receive an autism or ADHD identification until adulthood, which means they spent years being told the problem was their character, their effort, their attitude. We work with that too.
What becomes possible
You feel something and you don't immediately put it on trial.
That sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing. When you stop being at war with your own inner experience, everything shifts — how you move through relationships, how you make decisions, how much energy you have at the end of the day because you're not spending it all on self-management.
Clients who do this work describe being able to say "I'm hurt" without a three-paragraph justification. Feeling angry and knowing it's okay that they're angry. Setting a boundary without a week of guilt afterward. Trusting a memory. Trusting a feeling. Trusting themselves. That's what's on the other side of this.