Emotional support is extremely useful when healing from trauma, anxiety, and depression. Unfortunately, an individual’s treatment and healing are often hindered by their own or others’ dismissive behavior. Support can come from several sources, including family and friends, and all of them can cause significant progress to be thrown off track by the so-called “dismissive behavior”.
For individuals to heal fully, they need to feel understood, validated, and most importantly safe. With the addition of dismissive traits, a supportive environment with help break down and brush off communication, leading to substantial emoitinal issues. Let’s thoroughly explore the formation of dismissive behavior, observe its presence during recovery, and then replace it with connection, patience, and compassion.
Emotional Support’s Impact on Healing
Recovery requires emotional consideration, a factor which calls for extreme vulnerability. Individuals need to be able to articulate their fears and express hopes for the future—termed as setbacks. In order to achieve holistic healing, individuals must be reassured that their experiences are indeed valid, without forcing them to isolate.
Support networks provide that healing environment, which consist of peers, family and clinicians. An attentive and empathetic support network is crucial since it can drastically improve the chances of long-term recovery and wellness.
However, when someone’s emotional absence takes the form of dismissive behavior, a person usually walls himself off from the outside world. They might begin to frame their problems as not worth the trouble to talk about, or they’re just “too much.” This fuels a negative cycle of internally directed shame that slows down, or completely halts, healing.
What Dismissive Behavior Looks Like in Mental Health Settings
Accepting a more supportive posture does not mean that dismissiveness in mental health recovery will always look overtly cruel or tough. That is not the way it often goes. It may look like:
- Avoidance of emotionally charged discussions.
- Hearing, “You’re just tired,” or, “Everyone feels that way sometimes,” about a person’s mental health symptoms.
- Solving problems at a superficial level instead of taking time to listen.
- Mentioning anything other than the subject of distress.
- Rejection of more rational referrals or suggestions of the therapies to be used.
In treatment settings, these attitudes may lead the therapist or other medically trained personnel to lack sufficient concern for the patient. Along with this, a lack of concern from other significant persons makes it very difficult for a person in recovery to use their support network while they are trying to talk about their problems.
When the dismissive person is also the individual? That poses a different kind of challenge.
Self-Dismissiveness: The Inner Critic
During the recovery process, many people seem to carry cognitive burdens from the past, such as: “Don’t cry,” “You’re being dramatic,” or “Nobody wants to hear about your problems.” These beliefs eventually become a vicious inner critic that invalidates every emotional reaction.
This is typically referred to as self-dismissive behavior, which manifests in people:
- Minimizing the severity of their symptoms
- Missing therapy sessions
- Not reaching out for help
- Skipping self-reflection
- Experiencing difficulty with self-acceptance
Rather than treating recovery as a compassionate journey, people resort to punishing themselves for not “getting over this” quickly enough.
Where Does Dismissiveness Come From?
Patterns of dismissive tendencies often stem from history. For example, an individual growing up in an emotionally neglectful, abusive, or ridiculing environment learns to suppress their feelings. These survival mechanisms become default behaviors in adulthood.
Such attitudes may also be a consequence of trauma. Consider someone who has undergone emotional neglect or abuse. This individual may adopt a self-protective stance of emotionally shutting down or dissociating from feelings. Ironically, what was once protective becomes, at some juncture in life, a hindrance in the healing process.
The why behind someone’s dismissive actions requires some level of understanding. This is important as it aids with shifting blame towards gaining some form of insight. Reacting with compassion becomes easier in this scenario as opposed to frustration.
How Selective Attention Affects Focused Treatment Outcomes
Recovery in mental health requires accurate reporting between clinician and client. It also entails ongoing work, self-compassion, and compassion from others. When any aspect of the process becomes permeated with dismissiveness, self-created problems emerge:
1. Reflective Reporting
With clients in therapy, critical reporting can be withheld during measures focused on guessing what other people think or feel about the information being presented. In this manner, the treatment plan ends up missing other relevant components.
2. Misreading Psycho-Emotional Signals
Psychotherapists, along with those who care about them, may poorly interpret important signals such as suicidal thoughts or symptoms that are getting worse because of a more socially apathetic attitude. A lack of emotionally supportive environments leads to a state of described suffering in silence.
3. Collapse of Trust
Recovery from anything usually requires some form of trust. If people feel they are ignored or their feelings are invalidated, trust is no longer present, resulting in decreased engagement around treatment or helping behaviors during non-structured crises.
4. Increased Enforced Solitude
Feeling dismissed fosters a lack of interaction. Self-imposed or experienced social enforced down time having no interactions with others can lead to exacerbating disorders like depression and anxiety.
These outcomes can be avoided, but only if all parties understand how recovery, and in particular the journey of recovery, can be impacted by a pervasive culture of dispossession.
Replacing Dismissive Habits with Supportive Ones
The opposite of dispossession hinges on validation, presence, and empathy. Here is how we can make the change as individuals and as systems supporting them:
Listen to Understand
Withholding advice is painfully difficult for many people. Attempting to “fix” things is an ingrained social reflex, and inappropriately made “tell” statements. The best response may be something as simple as “That is hard. I am with you.”
Reflect and Acknowledge
Phrases such as “Is very reasonable for you to hold that perspective” or “I understand that” certainly reframe the conversation in a sense that it affirms the thought. Validation is a powerful healing tool, and hope is just an illusion—validation is free.
Name the Behavior
Accepting one’s tendency to shut down, change the subject, and invalidate emotions, attaches a name to this reality. For instance, “I think I was being dism missing. I am willing to do better.” This realization dampens the entrance of honesty and healing.
Slow Down
When one is in discomfort or vexation, the tendency is to act faster than usual. Instead, take your breath in, and ask what needs to be done in the moment.
Consider Undertaking Therapy
Therapy can be useful for someone who is emotionally stunted because of trauma or anxiety through caring and compassion. With open healing, the most disconnected individual can be capably taught how to emotionally respond.
When Someone Close to You is Callous
Set healthy boundaries with someone in your life suffering from dismissive behavior as they attempt to recover from the burning emotions of mental health issues. Most people have not yet dealt with their emotional injuries which makes facing mental health problems difficult.
Here’s what you can do:
- Be specific with explanations of how their actions impact you directly
- Create strategies for specific requests as a form of support
- If appropriate, recommend family or couples therapy.
- Choose to feel free to prioritize your mental health rather than keeping the peace.
You have the right to be supported and validated while undergoing the healing process. And don’t for any reason allow dismissive behavior from anyone rob you of that right regardless of who the person is.
Recovery Requires Joint Effort
Healing is not a monotonic process. Even though it is exhaustive and takes a lot of self-motivation and perseverance, the atmosphere in which the healing is done matters a lot. Claiming one is emotionally present and dismissively transforming the environment is injurious and careless. Still, the commitment to do better is what makes the difference.
Mental health recovery is not only about coping with symptoms but also comforting one’s emotions and relationships. Leaving dismissiveness out of the picture allows for real connections, vulnerability, and growth.
If you or someone you know is in the recovery phase and grappling with patterns of dismissiveness, be it giving or receiving, help is accessible. Here at California Mental Health, we provide tender, tailored treatment that respects every step of the healing process. We understand the damage that dismissive behavior can bring, and we’re here to help you substitute it with connection, courage, and compassion.
