In the Therapy Room: Emotional Invalidation and Gaslighting in Relationships

The Presenting Problem 🔍

I remember Tessa sitting across from me, doing that thing people do when they’re trying to convince themselves more than you—the forced smile, the quick “I know it sounds bad, but…” qualifiers. She’d just spent ten minutes describing how her boyfriend made a joke about her intelligence at a dinner party, and when she pulled him aside later, he told her she was “being insecure again.” The kicker? She apologized to him.

Tessa came to therapy because she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was deeply wrong in her relationship, even though she couldn’t quite name it. Her partner—someone she’d been friends with for five years before dating—had developed a pattern of making condescending comments disguised as jokes. When she tried to address it, he’d flip the script entirely, suggesting her hurt feelings were evidence of her personal issues, not his behavior.

The technical term some therapists might use is gaslighting, but let’s be more precise: Tessa was experiencing a systematic erosion of her emotional reality. Every time she brought up a concern, it got repackaged as her problem to fix. What made this particularly insidious was the five-year friendship foundation. She kept thinking, “But I know he’s a good person.” As if good people can’t also do harmful things.

The Invisible Architecture of Dismissal 🏗️

Here’s what fascinated me about Tessa’s situation: she wasn’t just dealing with isolated incidents of disrespect. She was trapped inside an emotional frame—a lens constructed from hundreds of small interactions that had fundamentally reshaped how she interpreted her own perceptions.

Each time her boyfriend dismissed her feelings, he was essentially encoding an emotional message into her system: “Your emotional responses are unreliable. Your hurt is manufactured. Your needs are excessive.” These messages accumulated, becoming predictive models that fired before she even consciously processed an interaction.

By the time she sat in my office, Tessa’s ability to identify what she actually felt and needed had been systematically undermined. She’d start sentences with “I think I’m being too sensitive, but…” because she’d internalized his narrative about her insecurity.

The really elegant cruelty was how it targeted her relational needs. Humans need availability, responsiveness, and emotional support from partners. When Tessa reached for any of these, she got back a message that the reaching itself was the problem. Not exactly a recipe for secure attachment.

The Conversation That Changed Everything 💭

About a month into our work together, I asked Tessa a question that seemed to genuinely piss her off: “What would need to be true about you for his version of events to be accurate?”

She sat with it. Then she said, “I’d need to be fundamentally broken. Overly emotional. Unable to perceive reality correctly. Basically, I’d need to be the problem.”

“Right,” I said. “And is gathering evidence that you’re fundamentally broken something a person who loves you should be invested in?”

The silence that followed was the sound of an emotional frame cracking.

We spent the next several sessions examining the invisible structures propping up this dynamic. Tessa realized she’d been operating within an unspoken rule system where bringing up hurt feelings was positioned as an attack, and his defensiveness was framed as justified self-protection. The power imbalance wasn’t just about who got to be “right”—it was about who got to define what was real.

Research on relationships with chronic emotional invalidation shows they don’t improve through better communication techniques. They improve when the person doing the invalidating decides that their partner’s emotional reality matters. Tessa couldn’t communicate her way out of a situation where her boyfriend had a vested interest in not understanding her.

The breakthrough came when Tessa stopped trying to convince him she wasn’t insecure and started asking herself a different question: “Even if I am insecure sometimes, does that mean I deserve to be treated this way?”

She started developing what I think of as meta-emotional intelligence—not just managing her emotions, but understanding the system that was creating them. She could see how her emotional scripts (“accommodate, apologize, minimize”) were actually adaptive responses to a partner who punished emotional honesty.

What Tessa Actually Needed ✨

Tessa didn’t come to therapy to learn how to leave her boyfriend, though that’s eventually what happened. She came to reclaim her capacity to trust her own perceptions. The relationship ended not with dramatic confrontation but with a quiet recognition that she’d been trying to extract emotional attunement from someone who experienced her needs as burdensome.

In our last session, she told me something that stuck with me: “I kept thinking that if I could just explain it the right way, he’d finally get it. But the not getting it was the point. He needed me to be wrong so he didn’t have to be uncomfortable.”

That’s the thing about emotional invalidation that doesn’t get enough airtime: it’s not usually about confusion. It’s about convenience.

The work we did wasn’t about fixing Tessa’s insecurity or improving her communication skills. It was about helping her see that she’d been solving the wrong problem. She’d been trying to make herself smaller, clearer, less needy—when the actual problem was a partner who required her to be diminished to feel comfortable.

Your feelings aren’t evidence that you’re broken; sometimes they’re evidence that the situation is.

— Sophia Rivera, currently reminding herself that “no nonsense” doesn’t mean “no empathy,” though I’m still working on the balance