213 The Trauma of Emotional Invalidation

In this episode we explore what it's like when your 'felt sense' isn't believed especially in childhood and how this impacts our health and our menopause.  We look at how subtle, repeated invalidation shapes the quality of our attachments, why women often become the emotional regulators of their families, how functional freeze develops, and why menopause can feel like all of this unravels at once.  We also examine the difference between attunement and optimisation — and why healing begins with being met, not fixed.

It's a good one for anyone who feels there's more to menopause than 'just' hormones.  

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Work with me 121:  www.sallygarozzo.com

Join Becoming Waitlist:  www.sallygarozzo.com/becoming 

Transcript

Sallygarozzo@hotmail.com (00:00)
There's a particular kind of trauma that really affects women's health, but it flies very much under the radar. It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't arrive in a single explosive event. It doesn't leave debris. It doesn't come with a very neat beginning, middle, and end.

Sallygarozzo@hotmail.com (00:20)
Some trauma, on the other hand.

Sallygarozzo@hotmail.com (00:22)
is like a storm, a big old storm. It has a date, it has a peak, it has a cleanup, and you can point to it and you can say, whoa.

that really changed me. But some trauma is more like a climate, an environment, a marinade. And climate is much harder to recognise. It's insidious and it sounds something like this. What have you got to be stressed about? You wait till you're an adult and then you'll know what stress feels like.

my god, other kids have it so much worse. What are you complaining about? ⁓ you'll manage. You're strong. I don't need to worry about you. You're reading too much into it. Are you starting to see a pattern here?

Sallygarozzo@hotmail.com (01:14)
If you hear these phrases often enough, they start to become background atmosphere that you adapt to without even realizing you're adapting.

Sally Garozzo (01:26)
You stop noticing humidity. You stop noticing air pressure that subtly alters how you breathe. It's like this slow shift in temperature that determines what grows and what withers. There's no single dramatic moment. It's just this ongoing adjustment to the atmosphere. And today I want to explore the trauma of not being believed through that lens and what it does to women, especially.

So I'm not talking about the storm. I'm talking about the climate, the environment, the marinade. Now me personally, I don't have one defining story of not being believed. It was definitely more like an atmosphere in my life. But I do remember being in Sicily as a child, being very overpowered and made to go out in the evenings with my cousins when I really didn't want to at all.

I'm not an evening person. I've never been an evening person. I don't mind going out occasionally in the evening, but you know, at this tender young age, especially when I didn't speak the language, the whole thing was really traumatizing for me. I was a sweet, sensitive soul and these Sicilians, God bless them, were very overpowering. I felt awkward. I felt exposed. I felt tired. My whole body was screaming no.

but all the overpowering voices in the room, they were saying, yes, go, you'll enjoy it. Go be with your cousins. And of course it wasn't violent or cruel. It was just expectation. They all meant well. They all wanted me to have a good time. And that's what they thought I wanted. Even when I said no, they put their expectations onto me. And when you're young and the voices in the room are bigger than you,

You adapt, of course you do. You start believing that there's something wrong with you for not wanting to do the thing that's being asked of you. I also remember feeling quite low sometimes as a child or a teenager, know, energetically and mood wise and just being encouraged to feel more energized, to perk up, to be different than I was. Again, nothing malicious.

It just felt uncomfortable enough in my body that something subtle started beginning to happen. And this is the mic drop moment that I want you to hear. I learned that my internal state wasn't important. Adjustment was adjustment so that I could essentially belong to my tribe, to my family.

So when your little child body says one thing and the environment insists on another, your brain has to make a decision. It has to choose between belonging to the tribe and the truth of your inner world. When your perception was denied, your brain had to choose between belonging and truth. And most of us, rightly so at the time, choose belonging.

because belonging keeps us safe in that moment. Our nervous system is wired for attachment, for inclusion, for not being cast out because our survival totally depends on it. So if your internal compass says, this doesn't feel right, but the social field says, you're fine. Eventually you start watching and scanning the external field.

instead of trusting your own internal compass. And all our subsequent behaviours start getting shaped by this external field, so much so that we don't realise it, but it does become this hypervigilance. And when we start finding it hard to adhere to the external climate, we label it as weak. Of course we do, but it's not weak, it's adaptation.

Because here's the truth bomb, the climate shapes you more quietly and way more profoundly than any single storm does. Storms are much easier to name because they're more visceral. They can be changed with mindset work, swish patterns, NLP, but climate shapes you quietly, slowly.

imperceptibly over time, like the frog being boiled slowly to death in a pan that it doesn't realise is heating up.

So okay, take a breath with me because I wanna slow this down even further.

Because this isn't just a metaphor, okay? Being disbelieved registers physiologically in the brain as a threat. It's not just this metaphor, as I said. Did you know that the circuitry that processes social rejection, which is what essentially happens when we're disbelieved, overlaps with the circuitry that processes physical pain?

So when your internal weather report is dismissed, even subtly, your brain changes. The amygdala tags the interaction as salient, which just means important or noticeable. The anterior cingulate, which is the bridge between emotion and cognition, that registers something. It registers a rupture. Cortisol rises.

And if this happens repeatedly, not necessarily dramatically, but repeatedly, our baseline sympathetic activation shifts. Now it doesn't necessarily shift into crisis, but it does shift into vigilance, into carefulness, into editing. We begin to scan the room before we speak. We subtly check tone. We modify our language. We over explain, we self correct.

before anyone else can. It's basic climate adaptation.

And there's another layer to this interoception, which is your ability to feel and trust what's happening inside your body. This depends on those bodily signals and sensations really being acknowledged, really being felt into your focus going down into your body.

relating to the tight chest, the anger, that sinking feeling, that dread, that disjointed feeling, the discomfort. And if those signals are repeatedly minimized or constantly refrained, something subtle happens. You start to doubt the signal. You start to ask, is this real? Am I exaggerating? I'm just being dramatic. I should fix this. I should overcome this.

Does it remind you of anything? Mindset work perhaps?

Maybe you just dismiss it altogether, come out of your body and go into your head. And that internal questioning, that repression, repression is what we do unconsciously, suppression is what we do consciously, that costs energy. And over time it increases cognitive load. It makes you work so much harder just to orientate yourself outward.

And so you find yourself not just living, you're constantly recalibrating, adjusting to the climate. So no wonder your vital force gets low. And that's when we start seeing those pathologies arise, those autoimmune issues. Now here's where I want to widen this. Because in many families and in many cultures, women are positioned as the emotional regulators, the shock absorbers.

and some men too, of course. But generally speaking, it's the women who are the ones who smooth over the tension, who metabolize all the projection being thrown at them, who absorb the volatility. They are the ones who make things manageable for everyone else. And if you're the shock absorber, your internal state is not just yours.

it becomes the infrastructure or like a washing line for everyone else to hang their inner world on.

Which means when you say this doesn't feel okay and you're not believed, that's not just a dismissal of you. It's an energetic load transfer. It's physics. It moves onto you.

And if that happens once, that's a storm. If that happens daily for years, that's a climate. And if that happens once, that might feel like a micro storm. But if that happens daily for years, that becomes a climate, maybe a very windy one. And climate accumulates. That washing on your washing line that other people put there just overcomes you and soon

You don't realize what a burden you're carrying, especially if one person just puts one piece of clothing on you one day and then another piece of clothing the next day. It just builds over time and you don't even notice it. So what does that do to a nervous system over decades? What does it do to a body that has learned to metabolize for others? Maybe even it doesn't metabolize. Maybe it just stays in the system and builds.

What happens when belonging to the tribe required you to override your own signals and your own truth again and again? And what happens in later life, particularly in midlife, when the biological buffering that allows you to tolerate that climate and the weight of those clothes on the line begins to thin? That's where we're going next.

Because to understand the trauma of not being believed, have to go deeper into physiology, into shock absorption, into freeze, into GABA, and into what happens when the body can no longer silently regulate for everyone else. So let's go there.

If climate accumulates, the question becomes who absorbs it? Now in many families across many cultures, women are positioned as the emotional regulators. And if they've never actually been asked to do this job, there's no informed consent involved. They don't sign a contract and knowingly understand what they're getting into. It just happens. It's expected. It's structural.

They're expected to smooth the waters, to constantly anticipate, to soften edges, to carry the projections of other people, to carry other people's tension, literal energy absorbers or shock absorbers. And so if you are placed either subtly or overtly, I mean, it's rarely overtly, but if you're placed in that role, your nervous system then becomes the infrastructure for everyone else to build their crap on.

So let me describe something that I see clinically. A daughter standing between a highly dysregulated mother and a sibling. Yeah. The mother is volatile, projecting, screaming, overwhelmed by her own pain. And the sibling maybe is younger or requires a care in one way or another. And the daughter positioned in the middle.

Add to that a cultural rule. You do not challenge your mother. You do not disrespect her. You do not separate from her emotionally. You must be grateful to her. You must uphold her no matter what. So when the daughter feels that righteous anger, that resentment, those feelings are not allowed. They're interpreted as you're ungrateful, you're dramatic. You don't understand how hard this is.

that's gaslighting but it doesn't always look theatrical and overt sometimes it's simply the consistent reframing of someone's emotional reality that gets embedded in there

And the poignant word in that is consistent. It's that over time thing. Over time, something very specific happens neurologically. The nervous system starts encoding attachment as obligation. And then individuation becomes dangerous. Freedom starts to feel like betrayal. And here is where this becomes really important because nothing then gets metabolized.

The mother's distress doesn't get processed, it gets transferred. The daughter absorbs it daily, quietly, again and again. And again, it becomes the climate, this invisible humidity that curls your hair without you realizing. Now, what does that do physiologically? Well, first we get hypervigilance. The amygdala becomes...

finely tuned into micro shifts in tone, in posture, in breath. The prefrontal cortex develops these control strategies, maybe even developing into OCDs. You become highly competent, over-functioning perhaps, highly articulate, really good at insights. Maybe you have high standards.

high values that demand a lot of you.

Maybe your moral compass becomes over expressed, but underneath that competence, the autonomic nervous system might be oscillating between sympathetic overdrive and dorsal vagal inhibition, which looks like external high functioning, but internally stuck. And this is what we often call functional freeze.

not necessarily total collapse maybe sometimes but more freeze layered over competence or competence layered over freeze. The body says if I move towards myself if I fully individuate if I really do change if I become who I want to become I risk losing that attachment.

that unconscious pattern. So no wonder it inhibits mobilization towards our authentic selves, towards freedom, towards lightness, towards that ⁓ feeling.

And we don't consciously restrict ourselves. It's implied. These memories are implicit. They're in the body. They're in the nervous system. The past is still running in the nervous system, in the neurology, and it shows up as behaviors in things like procrastination, in scattered thinking, in overwhelm, in addiction, in doom scrolling, in fears, phobias. I mean, the list is long.

So this is the crucial point. These patterns do not operate in linear time. If attachment was encoded in beliefs like, must absorb chaos to stay safe, that code doesn't expire just because you turn 35 or 45 or even 55 or even 65. It just continues to run until you out it, until you consciously

change it until you reveal those patterns and then do something about them, which we'll get onto later. And if you've been a shock absorber for decades, the body has been quietly regulating not just your own emotional weather, but everyone else's, which brings us to midlife. So let's take a breath here because now we're going to talk about GABA.

During reproductive years, progesterone metabolizes into something called allopregnenolone, which you might have heard of. Allopregnenolone is just a metabolite of progesterone. Allopregnenolone is a powerful modulator of GABA receptors. And we need GABA. GABA is inhibitory. GABA dampens that ⁓ neuronal firing.

GABA provides breaking capacity to the nervous system. helps us with our vagal tone. It allows us to tolerate micro stress without spiking into full activation. In other words, we have this wonderful neurochemical buffering and you can override discomfort without it being too much of a problem when

we have that buffering when that buffering is present. We can adapt. We can go along with it. Of course we can easily repress or suppress. We can absorb other people's crap. It's not a problem. We usually get glimpses of it during the luteal phase though. That's something to remember if you're still having periods. But during perimenopause and menopause that progesterone buffering

declines, allopregnenolone declines, GABA modulation reduces, that breaking system thins, especially if we have had a lot of emotional bypassing in the past. And suddenly micro invalidations feel sharper. You notice them like you didn't notice them before. These attachment strains

maybe with your children or your husband or your colleague or your friends or your partner or whatever, your boss, these attachment strains, they feel louder. Emotional labor feels heavier. The climate you adapted to for decades starts to feel intolerable. And this isn't because you've suddenly become irrational, but it's because the buffering has dropped.

If you've been a shock absorber in a high pressure emotional system and the GABA cushioning thins, the nervous system becomes exposed and exposure feels like I just can't keep doing this.

And that brings me to something that happened to me this week, actually. There I was at my computer, hyper-focused, high cognitive load, that slight electric, buzzy feeling in my brain that comes with sustained sympathetic activation. And then out of the blue,

wave of dizziness and nausea hit me and I thought my god, I'm so done. I am just done. Not existentially, you'll be glad to know, but like I just kind of crossed this physical threshold. My allostatic load was suddenly like broken. It was a neurochemical threshold. There was high dopamine focus, reduced

inhibitory breaking, cumulative load from exercise and probably low blood sugar and underneath it something else. A brief scan into the field. Who can hold this with me? Mum? No. Dad? No. Friend? Might get messy. Husband? He's carrying his own stuff right now.

And in that moment there was a quiet recognition, I am going to have to metabolize this myself. And it felt empowering because I knew I could do it because I have the skills, but it also felt heavy. And heavy because the sensation was real. The dizziness was real. The overwhelm was real. It wasn't in my head.

But the first narrative, I can't go on like this, was amplified by that threshold physiology. I didn't dismiss the signal, but I didn't overinterpret the story either. I didn't make myself broken. I slowed down, I changed rooms, I externalised.

this looping language out loud and wrote some of it down, but mainly out loud in a very ⁓ kind of way. And as my nervous system reorganized itself, as my thoughts and my cognition started to reorganize themselves, that charge reduced, energetic charge in my body reduced, that sympathetic overload reduced, not because I fixed anything.

because the threshold passed.

And that moment gave me a very clear embodied example of what happens when climate, load, attachment and neurochemistry all intersect. If I had spent decades absorbing tension, if my GABA buffering was thinner, if I had been constantly overriding internal signals for belonging, that threshold might have tipped further.

This is why midlife can feel like a storm.

But when this comes up, we often think of this as a new storm, something new happening. But it's not a new storm, it's climate exposure. Suddenly, we're out in the cold without a coat, The shock absorber has thinned, the braking system has reduced, the nervous system is no longer willing or able.

to metabolize for everyone else to take on all this stuff.

And if we don't understand that physiologically, we end up pathologizing it. We call it mood instability. We call it reactivity. We call it hysteria or depression or anxiety. But from a nervous system perspective, it's literally just thermodynamics. It's energy that wasn't metabolized and it surfaces

because energy cannot be created or destroyed, it only gets transformed or it stays stuck. So it shows up as attachment programs that were never updated. And the body says, we can't continue in this climate without putting a coat on.

So we have to do the work, the deep inner work. That midlife crisis is real. It's not just this funny thing that happens.

Now this is where balance becomes really important because not every intense feeling is suppressed trauma. Not every dismissal is intended to cause harm. It often comes from a well-intentioned place. But when you understand the ecology, the shock absorption, the freeze pattern, the gabithinning, the attachment coding, you begin to see that what looks like overreaction is often accumulated physiology.

meeting biography, meeting your story. And that changes the conversation entirely because it becomes less about fixing the surface symptoms and more about working through that invalidation. And once we've done that, then optimization becomes a lot easier.

and in the final part of this episode, I want to talk about what healing invalidation actually looks like so that we can get to that optimization. Well, first of all, it looks like attunement, which we've spoken about a lot in these solo episodes, because invalidation is fundamentally an attunement injury. It's an injury of attunement.

It's not just that you weren't agreed with, it's that your internal state wasn't met, it wasn't regulated with. So healing doesn't begin with reframing and overriding, it begins with being met. And often that has to start internally, learning how to attune to yourself, learning how to notice a sensation without immediately

correcting it or overriding it or overcoming

about feeling anger without judging it. It's about recognising overwhelm without catastrophising it. It's about saying this is here rather than this shouldn't be here. And that sounds simple of course, but in reality it's really counterintuitive because it's asking you to lean into pain.

And if you grew up in a climate that discounted pain, you're not going to want to lean into it. It's going to feel wrong.

It can actually feel selfish or even dangerous because unconsciously it threatens the family system and the family structure, which is why inner child work is not sentimental. It's actually neurological. It's updating the part of you that still believes attachment depends on suppression. It's showing the nervous system through love, through repetition and through conscious effort.

maybe effort's the wrong word, but conscious will, that individuation does not equal exile, that your anger will not cost you love. As an adult, you don't need to be connected to your tribe to sustain your life

and that your needs will not collapse the system. And if it does, that's okay. We trust the order always follows chaos. Now that process is very difficult to do alone, especially if your original wound was relational, because the injury happened in relationship, so it can only heal in relationship.

And that's where one-to-one work, that relational work becomes so powerful because the relationship provides a mirror for you to actually understand, for you to see the system in action. It helps you to understand the roles that you played, understand how guilt and shame were wired into you. One-to-one work helps you see clearly where you became the infrastructure.

where you became that washing line for everyone else to hang their clothes on. We slowly start to take those clothes off peg by peg, piece by piece. And gently, repeatedly, we reveal the pattern. We reveal those blind spots and we update it. We update it through attuned presence, through nervous system safety.

through someone holding the climate steady while you learn what it means to individuate.

got this image of someone holding on to a tree or a pole as the winds blow and revealing like this kind of secret doorway for you to step through.

And that door, that doorway is the doorway to you, to individuation, to becoming you. That's deep work. That's not optimization. Optimization comes later. And this is where people often get it wrong. They try to optimize first. They try to go to better routines, better productivity. They start with better boundaries.

They start with the mindset work, maybe even biohacking. But if the underlying attachment program is still active, optimization just becomes another one of those performance pieces,

another one of those over-functioning adaptive coping mechanisms, another layer of competence over freeze. And ultimately it fails because the climate hasn't changed. Now here's the interesting thing. When I had that dizzy spell this week, I was able to optimize fairly quickly.

I changed rooms, I slowed down, I named what was happening in my body, I externalized the looping language, I reorganized the narrative. But the reason I could do that quickly is because I've spent the last 10, 15 years doing foundational work.

my attachment layer has been updated. My nervous system recognizes that the past is not still happening. So optimization didn't have to override invalidation. It followed attunement. The signal was acknowledged first, then the strategy adjusted

That's the sequence. Attune first, understand the pattern, update the attachment coding, then optimize. For some women, that deep relational recalibration happens best inside one-to-one sessions, the type of sessions that I do,

where we examine family ecology, the shock absorber role, the guilt architecture, the freeze patterns. and for others, once that foundation is in place, or even alongside that foundational work, there is a real power in doing this in community, in my new membership becoming. That's what that's all about.

This is where individuation is practiced in real time, where you stop being infrastructure. You stop being that washing line for everyone else where energetic emancipation isn't dramatic rebellion, but it's nervous system recalibration happening gently over time where you are witnessed.

whilst you metabolise, not left alone to absorb and to wonder what the hell is going on.

invalidation is repaired through attunement and attunement over time changes the climate to something that makes you go and relax.

So there we go. I really hope you have enjoyed today's episode as much as I enjoyed creating it. And if you want to work with me on a one-to-one basis, of course, just head on over to salliegarozzo.com to book in a 15 minute connection call with me. And if you're interested in putting your name down on the wait list for my new membership, Becoming, just go to salliegarozzo.com forward slash becoming.

and the waitlist for that closes on the 27th of March. And of course, all those links will be in the show notes. So thank you for being with me and I'll see you next time.