There are people in this world who prey upon others by purposely invalidating the experiences of others. Doing this constantly is called gaslighting. That was my experience with my ex-husband. I entered the relationship a strong, independent female. I left it seven years later an emotional wreck. I didn’t trust my inner voice. I couldn’t make simple decisions. I lost my trust in people having lost almost all of my friends (they all believed the lies he told them when we broke up). And while that was 6 years ago, I have not yet fully recovered today. I think I am significantly better, but I still haven’t recovered. It’s tough losing your husband and almost all of your friends in one fell swoop. I was devastated. It didn’t help that the few people I still trusted didn’t really know how to react when I told them what happened. I was met most often with sympathetic silence or disbelief. With such limited success, I stopped telling people about it. I kept to myself and stopped trusting others. I stopped making new friends and distanced myself from the few friends and family I had left to me. I lost many years to misery and snatching bits of myself back piece by piece. Each piece was a struggle and a fight.

However, there are people that just unintentionally invalidate the experiences of others. I have had some issues with a few of them lately. I confided in one of them who knew my ex-husband and I thought was “on my side”. This person told me that since my ex-husband didn’t realize what he was doing it didn’t make him a bad person and that I should really get over it already. It killed me to hear that. After all of the things that my ex-husband has done to me, it shouldn’t fucking matter if he realized what he was doing. The damage was still done. It hurt so badly that after all this time and all of the struggle this person had seen me go through trying to become the person that I wanted to be that I was still not believed or supported. It just reinforced the damage done to my trust of others by my ex-husband and those “friends” that believed his lies.

Another time something like this happened recently was when someone overheard me talking about OA (overeaters anonymous) . That’s something else that I talk about that is again met with stony silence. Nobody seems to know what to say. I can only guess what their thought processes are. I have known people who have done AA. Whenever they talk to someone about it, they have been met with sympathy and support. In this case, I was met with disbelief. I explained the exact nature of my eating issues and she claimed that everyone was like that, that she was like that. I bit my tongue because I wanted to tell her that maybe she needed to do OA too. I didn’t know this person well enough to feel she had violated my trust, but I happen to know this person is a UFO enthusiast and interested in people looking for bigfoot. So the fact that she couldn’t extend her belief to consider that some people can be addicted to certain foods in the same way others are addicted to alcohol was astounding to me.

In the first example of my ex-husband, while he may not have known what he was doing, he was certainly getting the feeling of power from it. In the second and third examples, it was clearly not intentional and I don’t think that they intended to do harm. However, when you tell someone their experiences are not what they were is invalidating them, their inner voice, and their assessment of the world. It wasn’t like we were debating facts. We were debating my life and my point of view. How do you even combat that? You don’t. It is my life and my experience. Be a good friend and show support regardless of your opinion of my experience. Or at the very least hold your tongue. This is yet another case of “If you don’t know what the other person is going through, hold your tongue.” Or “Don’t judge others. Everyone is fighting his own battle.”