Islamic Life Coach School Podcast

Trauma Recovery: Healing Without Validation

Kanwal Akhtar Episode 218

You ever catch yourself replaying a painful memory, wishing someone had just seen you? Wishing they had said, “That was hard. You didn’t deserve that.” But they didn’t. And maybe they never will.

That’s where so many of us get stuck,waiting for validation that might never come.

But what if healing didn’t depend on someone else finally getting it? What if you could give yourself the emotional space no one else did?

In this episode I talk about why trauma isn’t just about what happened but also about what didn’t happen and the Reception Gap—that painful space between distress and healing where no one showed up for you

Learn how to become your own emotional container, so you stop outsourcing your healing to people who don’t have the tools to support you

If you’ve been waiting for someone to validate your pain, this episode is your permission to stop waiting. You were never too much—you were just unreceived.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, dr Kamal Aftar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you.

Speaker 1:

Today we're talking about trauma recovery healing without validation, about trauma recovery, healing without validation. Trauma is a difficult experience that leaves a lot of times an invisible scar, and the way it perpetuates is you not being able to be received, witnessed or acknowledged. So let's talk about trauma as the big T trauma, which is an accident or a war or an assault, direct threat to your physical well-being, or a little T trauma like bullying, rejection, chronic invalidation. Either way, whatever trauma you're dealing with, if you're able to recover from it or not depends on what happens next, which is were you witnessed? Did your nervous system get the space, time and resources to recover? If not, then the trauma lingers, it grows, it doesn't dissolve. The trauma stays, it shapes you and it dictates how you respond to any of these future experiences. And the key here isn't just healing with time, it's being given the space to process and integrate the experience. And for human beings, the most important of those healing resources is connection with others. If the other person was able to see what you went through.

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So if a child who falls off the bike, she scrapes her knee and the pain is immediate. Now if this turns into something deeper, depends very much on what happens next turns into something deeper, depends very much on what happens next. Not 100% of the time, but to a large extent. If a parent rushes over, acknowledges her pain, helps her clean the wound, gives her the emotional comfort, encourages with warmth, then the child learns that if I get hurt, it will be okay, I will be okay, I will be received. The nervous system has the tools to process the pain, it regulates and it moves on. But then again, if it's the same child who falls, cries and instead this time she hears oh, stop crying, it's just a scratch, you're fine. Now the physical injury might heal the same way. But internally, emotionally, this child would internalize that my pain is invalid and the best way forward for me is to shut down when I'm hurt. And this is the kind of moment that, over time, lays the groundwork for unprocessed trauma. And this is why, exactly why, trauma isn't universal. Two people go through the same experience and one comes out stronger and the other one carries a wound for years and one comes out stronger and the other one carries a wound for years. One of the main differences is if they were received or not.

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We're going through this silent epidemic of emotional containment deficit. For generations, emotional expression has been dismissed as weakness. Why cry over a lost toy Because you have plenty of others? Or if you're afraid of houseflies, understanding that as a child you have a history of being stung by a bee which never had a time to process, which never had the chance to be seen. So this emotional containment deficit, the failure to hold space for distress of others, leaves people struggling with long-term emotional dysregulation.

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When emotions aren't allowed to be processed, the nervous system stays locked in in a fear-based state, unable to come back to balance. And this bounce back depends on whether someone parent, friend, mentor was ever able to hold space. And if you, as an individual, learned how to hold space for yourself, and if, as a child, nobody was available, then it's a possibility that this deficit will carry into adulthood. If, as a child, you're told to grow up against your fear of the dark this woman who grew up with this conditioning she finds herself unable to ask for help when struggling because deep down inside. She believes her pain is not that bad. When emotions don't get held, when they don't get acknowledged, they don't disappear. They just find different ways to resurface Anxiety, chronic overthinking, a sense of never being truly safe, and the body and mind will continue to keep searching for that emotional container if they never had one. So now the cherry on top of all of this is that we're told relationships will provide this emotional support. Your husband, your best friend, your parents, they should get what you're going through, and that's the promise society makes. But it is somewhat of a false promise, because it relies on the other person being perfect. It relies on the other human not having any of their own baggage.

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When you expect others to be your emotional containers, you set yourself up for disappointment more often than not, not because relationships shouldn't provide support, but because most people that are in this relationship with you were never taught themselves how to hold space for emotions. They never did it for themselves and they are certainly not equipped to do it for others. So when you're hurt and you look at your partner and your friend to validate you but they weren't given those tools or they're otherwise too busy now you have two dysregulated people expecting the other person to provide what neither one knows how to give or receive, and this is a self-fueling cycle. If you had a terrible day at work, your boss snapped unfairly or a co-worker undermines you and you feel overwhelmed, your expectation of coming home and venting to your husband looking for a solution all are valid, but if it does not come, that does not mean what you go through is invalid If you're looking for a different kind of receiving, but instead you get. Why do you always let people get to you? You should just stand up for yourself. All of a sudden, you might feel worse than you did before you even started this conversation, because now not only your frustration has not been acknowledged, you also feel like there's something wrong with you for feeling the way you do Now.

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Holding space in situations like this is very simple. It's just about active listening. This sounds really frustrating. I'm sorry you had such a tough day, but if the other person didn't learn that, for you to expect that is harmful to the relationship, and this is why so many relationships feel disappointing. People aren't intentionally withholding support or maybe they are, I don't know but in cases where they aren't intentionally doing it, it's because they just don't know what it looks like and if you're the one who's stuck in a place hoping that your relationships and the people in your life will finally get it. This is where self-witnessing is extremely important, because external validation is nice absolutely we all need to get that in order to learn that skill anyways.

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But in positions when you don't have that available for you, you don't want to build a life where your emotional well-being is dependent on someone else finally understanding you, just so you can heal. If you're waiting for somebody to finally see you, validate you, you might be waiting for a long time. This is where you become that person for yourself, and it does not mean you isolate yourself or you refuse any support. It just means that you recognize the relationships that are able to give this to you and you don't burden the ones where you continue to have unmet emotional needs. Especially when you develop the skill to witness your own experience, to acknowledge your pain, you stop outsourcing your healing, you start to take control and it will be just as simple as saying that was hard, that was unfair what I went through. I'm allowed to feel the way I'm feeling. This does not mean you never walk away from a relationship. It just means that when you do, it won't be from frustration of unmet expectations, because then you're going to go to a new relationship and start expecting the same without ever building yourself up or without ever giving yourself that skill.

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So, as a woman, if you're struggling and you feel unheard, unseen, emotionally neglected, up until now you might have seen two choices Keep trying to get them to understand and keep staying stuck in disappointment when it doesn't happen, or maybe occasionally it does happen. And the other choice might be to leave. But there is a third option, and that one is that you learn to emotionally contain yourself first, and it can only happen when you learn to validate your feelings instead of having anybody else to validate them for you. This is you becoming your own emotional container. This is where you heal the reception gap which is the missing piece in trauma recovery. A lot of times, trauma isn't about what happened. It's much more about what didn't happen. And this reception gap is the space between distress and healing, the gap where no one showed up for you and you never learned the skill to show up for yourself. Maybe your caregivers lacked emotional attunement while you were growing up. Maybe your husband shuts down when you express distress. Maybe your relationships feel surface leveled when you actually need depth. And, yes, it would have been better if all of that wasn't the case and you were received with empathy. But if you weren't, you still have other valid options, the option being you. You can still fill this gap. You will learn to witness yourself, to offer the validation you never got. And this is what it might look like.

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Let's say, you got off a phone call with an exhausting conversation with somebody who completely misunderstood you. You feel frustrated, your heart's pounding, your emotions are running high, but in the pit of your stomach you feel a familiar urge. I need to tell this to somebody. Somebody needs to validate me right now. You text a friend. They don't respond. You call a sister. She brushes it off, she's busy. Now the frustration will only grow. On top of it will be loneliness, invalidation. But what if, instead of waiting for someone to acknowledge your feelings, you pause and you say that was upsetting? Of course I feel frustrated. That was an unfair conversation and it makes total sense that my nervous system is totally on high alert right now and you practice that until you're in a place where you don't need anyone else to see this for it to be real.

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But if you do have it, alhamdulillah, and that's great. If you do have that in your relationships. What starts to happen when you do that is you close this reception gap, you acknowledge what happened, you label your emotion, you yourself, give it words you wish somebody else gave to you. And when you get better at it by time, something fascinating happens. You start to see people containing your emotions a lot better when you don't need them to. When you detach yourself from a very specific outcome, it starts to happen for you.

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Resonance deficiency means that emotions never found a place to land, and when that happens over and over, it conditions you to believe that your emotions are inherently too much, too messy or too inconvenient. And if you're stuck in that and as an, you're constantly looking at others to help hold you, then your nervous system is going to be primed for rejection. Every unreciprocated attempt at connection will feel like a confirmation of see, nobody cares, I am way too much. This is exhausting for others, but this level of resonance is a skill. Being emotionally attuned to another person comes naturally to some and it's a learned talent for others. But in all of your life, whether you're trying to teach other people this skill or not. You always have yourself to practice it on, and this self-resonance never comes from the past.

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It starts right now. The moment you recognize what was missing, you create an opportunity to provide it for yourself. You shift from waiting to heal to starting to heal. Now People that grew up with severe neglect, and then there are other people that had loving parents who were maybe intermittently emotionally absent. Regardless of the severity, the result is the same An unheld, unrecognized experience, critical for the moments when you needed acknowledgement. But the reality is that every unheld experience is recoverable. Your emotional reality is never set in stone. It always changes based on how you decide to perceive it. While you can't go back and change things in the past, you can learn to be the person who holds space for you right now, and this path of healing for you will look completely different than anyone else. It might take longer, it might take shorter, it might require different techniques, but that is the path, which is why it's different for everyone.

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And the moment you stop waiting for someone to finally acknowledge what you went through, you start taking control of it. Your only responsibility is acknowledging to yourself what was hard, not saying I should have been stronger. I shouldn't feel this way. I should have handled it better. None of that is witnessing. That is self-dismissal, that's insult to injury. Your job is to say that was painful, that was unfair, that was difficult, and I'm allowed to feel this. This is your first step towards reparenting yourself, to becoming the person who finally sees what happened to you, not to excuse it, not to obsess over it, but to accept it as real.

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When you are the one who can't witness your own pain, you're the first person who's fueling the cycle of invalidation. The rest of the world or the most important people in your life might not have held space for you where they should have, but also don't make the mistake of abandoning yourself too. In the moment you say that was real, it affected me and that's what matters, you stop gaslighting yourself, you stop pretending that it didn't exist. You let your nervous system process what it's been holding onto for years, and that's when you start to shift from ignoring your pain to integrating it, and that integration is what leads to healing. Every time you hold off on healing because you think they should have been there for me, you're trapping yourself in suppressing this integration cycle and you're going to continue to hold off on looking for any professional help or any coaching help, you will continue to postpone your own emotional processing, believing that it's someone else's responsibility to help you do it.

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You do not need somebody to apologize before you heal. You don't need anyone to understand you before you heal. You don't need a perfect conversation, you don't need closure, you don't need a resolution. You just need to stop postponing your own witnessing. You need to start choosing yourself today, because then, without waiting for permission, without needing anyone else, you give yourself permission to believe what you already know to be true.

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Now, self-healing is absolutely powerful, but there are limits to what you can do alone, especially in the beginning, because trauma and emotional dysregulation doesn't just exist in your thoughts. It lives in your nervous system, in your entire body, deeply integrated patterns that make it difficult to entangle on your own. And again, therapy, coaching, licensed mental health professionals, all other sources of professional guidance is extremely important here. A trained professional will help you see the blind spots that you can't see yourself, no matter how much you force yourself and no matter how much you allowed this healing for yourself. They will help you process your emotions in a way that feels structured, safe, effective. They will give you the most effective tools Therapy, counseling all extremely important. They rewire your mindset, they break your limiting beliefs. Licensed mental health professionals help in terms of pathology. Coaching helps in terms of integrating all of this and making an amazing future.

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And then let's always not forget the importance of Islamic guidance, which provides you the spiritual foundation that you need to anchor everything else. Healing is spiritual. Quran and Sunnah remind us that Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala, is always there, always merciful, always present, listening to us even when no one else does. In Quran, surah 50, ayah 16, it says and we have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him. We are closer to him than his jugular vein. Allah is a Shafiri, the ultimate healer. While it might have sounded like that, I'm asking you to carry your healing alone. It's never meant to be something that you carry by yourself, because Allah's guidance and mercy is always with you. If you were never held by others, always remember that you were always held by Allah. And then, when you combine this faith with the right emotional and psychological tools, you create true, lasting transformation.

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While healing of unprocessed trauma might not be all about what happened to you, a big part of it is also about what didn't happen, the space that was never held, the emotional containment that was missing. Space that was never held, the emotional containment that was missing If your nervous system stayed in distress. This podcast is an invite for you to give yourself that support that you're looking from external sources. The key to breaking this cycle is allowing yourself to become your own emotional container, regardless of what capacity you have of containing yourself. Witnessing your pain, acknowledging your experience without judgment, and no longer only outsourcing your healing, especially to people who were never taught how to hold space themselves. In light of all of that, healing still wasn't meant to be done alone all the way. Therapy, coaching, islamic teachings all of this are your essential tools to help you rewire your patterns, to regulate yourself and find deeper healing.

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Allah SWT is always holding space for you. We know that because we are always in His mercy. Otherwise we would cease to exist. Once you're well on your way to becoming a reliable emotional container for yourself, you will see that the same people who couldn't support you before are able to do so Again. That happens because when you detach from an outcome, the outcome finds you, because your mind is primed to see support instead of rejection in that case, and then, inshallah, everything will start to fall into place.

Speaker 1:

You have never been too much, you were just under received. With that, I pray to Allah, subhanahu wa ta'ala. Ya Allah, the ultimate healer, allow me to see myself as you have always seen me. Allow me to hold myself as you have always held me. Ya Allah, grant me the strength to witness my pain without judgment. Ya Rahman, fill my heart with self-compassion. Let me find peace in space you always have for me. Guide me to the right support and anchor me in healing of your infinite mercy. Ameen, ya Rabbul, ameen, please keep me in your du'as. I will talk to you guys next time.