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Her parents called it a dream
Told it was a dream
Her mother called it a dream. Her father told her to go back to bed and leave him alone. Dating coach Sabrina Zohar spent years afterward believing she made things up and couldn't trust herself. She had never told the story outside her book before.
Healing the girl
What healed it was going back and telling that girl she was proud of her, that she saved her own life, and that she was sorry she had dismissed and discredited her all this time. Waiting for her father to say she was right and he messed up gets her nowhere, because he won't, and she doesn't need him to.
Loving without pretending
She doesn't hate her parents. She loves them, and she won't pretend anymore that what they went through was normal.
How does being dismissed erode self-trust?
Psychologist Marsha Linehan, creator of dialectical behavior therapy, proposed in her 1993 work that invalidating environments contribute to emotional difficulty. In such environments, a child's feelings and perceptions are dismissed, punished, or trivialized. When a child's account of events is denied again and again, the child learns to doubt it. Linehan's therapy now treats validation as one of its core skills.
Why does retelling a memory change it?
In 2000, Karim Nader, Glenn Schafe, and Joseph LeDoux reported in Nature that a fear memory in rats became unstable when it was recalled. It needed protein synthesis to be stored again, and blocking that process weakened the memory. This is called reconsolidation. The finding suggested that a memory is partly rebuilt each time it is recalled, which challenged the older view that stored memories are fixed.
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