The irrational ones

Don’t worry about her; she’s irrational. A bit melodramatic. She tends to over-react, bless her, so you’ve got to take everything she says with a pinch of salt. Over blown. Over emotional. Unstable.

Then, when you find her crying, you won’t take her seriously. If she gets angry, you won’t really listen because hey, she’s a bit over the top, no point adding to it. If she says she is hurt, you’ll know it’s because she’s hypersensitive.

It works the other way too: She’s an ice queen. She’s totally unemotional, cold, hard, logical and manipulative. If she cries, its only because she wants something. If she expresses emotion at all, it is just a ploy to make you do what she wants. And so again, you don’t see and you don’t hear, because you’ve already written her off.

‘Her’ in both cases, would have been me, but undoubtedly not just me. These methods for diminishing a person tend to be entirely deliberate. They serve a purpose. By invalidating a person’s emotional responses, you make it easy to treat as irrelevant anything they are unhappy about. If you want to hurt someone, this makes life a lot easier. It is so important not to buy these stories, because any time you do, the odds are very good that you’ve just enabled an abuser to carry on mistreating their victim.

Along the way I’ve met people with hair trigger responses, to tears and temper alike. I’ve met people who are touchy, moody, easily affected, and while I accept that means their responses may be sudden, unexpected and intense, this does not invalidate them. We all feel things differently. There is nothing wrong with turning out to feel more, or less than the next person does. The odds are there will always be more difference than similarity on this one.

Many abusers are able to get away with what they do precisely because they persuade so many other people to buy into their story. The victim, hearing the same thing on every side ‘you’re just over reacting, it’s no big deal’ learns they cannot trust their own judgement. You stop thinking you can tell, you doubt your own decision-making capacity, and maybe start to feel like you are going mad. You lie there, bruised and sobbing, telling yourself to pull yourself together and stop making such a fuss. It wasn’t that big an insult… just a shove, not really a punch…it was just words… maybe they didn’t mean it that way. And all the time, the abuser sharpens their knives and keeps laughing.

Be careful with other people’s stories, especially stories that invalidate someone’s feelings. They are often not quite what they seem to be.