What We Lose When We're Not Believed

There's a kind of tired I want to talk about, because I don't think it gets named enough, and because I've lived inside of it, and because the people who walk into my office almost always know exactly what I mean before I finish the sentence.

It's the tired that comes from being the one who notices.

It's exhausting being the one who feels the shift in the room, who registers the tightness in someone's voice before anyone else does. To be the one who knows the conversation went sideways even though everyone is acting like it didn't. The one whose body keeps saying something is happening here while everyone around them keeps saying no it isn't.

I've been thinking lately about how often this is where the wound starts. Not in some single dramatic event, but in the accumulated weight of being the only person in the room who seems to be paying attention to what's actually going on. And then being told, gently or sharply or with that particular smile that's somehow both, that we're imagining things.

Sometimes we try to say it, and that's often where we end up feeling more alone than ever.

We rehearse the sentence in our heads. We pick our moment. We soften the edges. We open our mouths and offer the most honest thing we know how to offer, and we watch it get rephrased in the air between us into something we didn't say.

Oh, so you're saying I'm a bad person.

Oh, so you're saying I never do anything right.

And then we're spending the next forty minutes defending a position we never took, and somewhere underneath it all, there's a small voice in us going wait, that wasn't what I meant, but I think I have to fight for that version now, because that version is the only one anyone else seems to be hearing.

I think this is one of the ways a person quietly disappears.

Not all at once. Just a little at a time. We learn that what we said isn't what gets heard. We learn that what we meant isn't what gets repeated. We learn that the version of us living in other people's mouths is a version we don't recognize, and we can't quite get back to the original, and after a while we stop trying. We get smaller. We get quieter. We start saying I don't know when we actually do know. We start saying I'm fine when we're not. We start agreeing because disagreeing costs too much. We start to wonder, somewhere private and terrible, if maybe everyone else has been right and we've been wrong all along.

I want to say something to you, dear reader, and I want you to read it slowly.

The trouble was never your perception.

The trouble was that you were perceiving something real in a place where accurate perception was intolerable to the people you were engaging with. And the people for whom it was intolerable handled their shame, the shame you never intended to evoke, by handing it back to you.

This happens in marriages, in friendships, at work, at school. It happens in offices and waiting rooms and in our own kitchens. It's happened at the kitchen tables we grew up at, when we were still small, before we had words for it. It happens in the conversations we've tried to have about our own bodies, our own feelings, our own pain. It happens, in the largest sense, on a cultural scale, where reports of what's true keep getting met with the same kind of oh, so you're saying we've been hearing in our living rooms for years.

I'm not trying to make this bigger than it is. I'm trying to say that it's bigger than we've been letting ourselves admit.

Here's the part where, if I were being a good clinician, I'd talk about the research on betrayal trauma, or what happens to a person when they're wronged in their capacity to know things, or polyvagal theory, or any number of frameworks I love and use and trust. Those frameworks are real, and they matter, and I'll probably point you to them eventually. But what I want to say first, before any of the language, is something simpler.

If you're tired. If you have a low hum of dread you can't place. If you've lost the ability to feel sure of things you used to feel sure of. If you've been wondering, with a small and persistent ache, whether you're too much, or not enough, or whether your way of seeing the world has just always been a little off. I want you to hear me.

You weren't too much. You were precisely as much as the situation required you to be, and the situation kept telling you to be less.

We're coming back from this, the people I sit with and me. Slowly. Inelegantly. With a lot of crying in cars and a lot of texting friends at strange hours. We're coming back by writing things down before someone has the chance to talk us out of them. We're coming back by saying small true sentences in low-stakes moments, just to remember what our own voice sounds like coming out of our own mouth. We're coming back by finding even one person who can hear what we said and reflect it back to us unaltered, because that experience, when we haven't had it in a long time, is its own kind of medicine. We're coming back by letting our bodies finally rest the way they've needed to rest, and by letting our bodies finally move the way they've needed to move, and by trusting that the tired and the shaky and the uncertain aren't signs that something is wrong with us. They're signs that something happened to us, and our body was the only one who refused to look away.

This is some of what can be done in therapy, and in safe relationships. The witnessing. The dignifying. The slow, careful work of understanding what we said just the way we said it.

If you're reading this and something in you is nodding, even quietly or tentatively, I want you to know there's room for you. In therapy, in friendships, in your own life. There's a way back to you, and there are people who will help you find it.

I hope you know you deserve to be held with compassion, curiosity, and care. I hope you know that if you don't feel that way now, it's not a sign that you never will. It's just a sign that you haven't experienced enough safety from the right people yet.

We're not meant to feel safe alone. But if solitude feels safer right now, it's okay to connect through the words of others you're not ready to meet in person just yet. It's okay to begin your healing journey from the safety of your own home and to accept the medicine of words from strangers who feel like friends you've never met. It's okay to let the people writing the words your soul needs to read be a kind of chosen family, even if they never know.

However you find yourself feeling, I hope you learn to honor it for the genuine merit it holds.

Wholeheartedly with you, Karen