Do you know what disconfirmation is and how it differs from other relational problems? Today I talk about this concept and others and their consequences on the individual who suffers from them.
Surely you have seen the movie “castaway” at some point in your life. In it, its actor, Tom Hanks, spends a long time absolutely alone on a desert island, with the only company of a ball. As a survival method, a traveling companion, Wilson, is built with this object. Throughout the film, the actor interacts with his partner Wilson, has dialogues with him and acts as if Wilson were a person. Why do you think he resorts to this? Has he gone crazy? Well no, what the character does is precisely something that allows him to be sane and connected to reality. It does this because all people need communication and social relationships. Without relationships we repeatedly feel invalidated and have a hard time feeling alive. Loneliness depresses us and makes us feel worthless.
We all know that the loneliness It makes us uncomfortable, but what happens when we are surrounded by people and yet we feel alone? Normally this happens because it is as a consequence of dysfunctions in communication and relationships with others.
The psychologist Paul Watslawick explains that the relationship one has with other people influences the self-definition of the “self”, that is, of oneself. We define ourselves not only by what we believe about ourselves but also by what we contribute to others and by what others contribute to us. It is what is called confirmation of self Up to this point there is no pathology in the communication. The problem comes when aspects such as rejection, devaluation, disqualification or disconfirmation occur:
We talk about rejection when you have an attitude of contempt or denial towards the other person. Rejection can hurt, but sometimes it can even be constructive, because they tell you things they don’t like about you, but at least you know what’s happening. For example: you call a friend to go out for a drink and he tells you that he doesn’t want to meet with you anymore because he considers that you are a bad friend since he has found out that you have tried to flirt with his ex-girlfriend.
When we talk about devaluation, this refers to a reduction in the value given to the other person, it is valued below what it is, and that can also frustrate or hurt, even make you lower your self-esteem or increase your self-demand. For example: you bring your grades home satisfied with the work you have done and your father tells you that you should have gotten everything excellent, that those are mediocre grades when you have excellent grades and some notable ones.
Refering to disqualification, the person downplays everything the other person does or is, that is, they are completely invalidated. For example: you have managed to emancipate yourself and you are renting, but when your parents see the apartment they tell you “you could have already bought an apartment, renting is stupid, you are wasting money.”
Both in rejection and in devaluation or disconfirmation, they are mistakes in relationships with others that can hurt us and cause damage to our psyche, but they do not necessarily affect identity and/or self-concept.
Now, when we talk about disconfirmation things change. Disconfirmation would be what we colloquially call “nothing” and it is the most obvious form of the indifference When someone disconfirms another person what he is doing is making as if the other did not exist, he is not called, he is not heard, he is not taken into account, basically it is as if he were a ghost. While in the other communication errors that I have mentioned, the person shows the other person “this is how I see you or that is what I think of you”, in disconfirmation that does not happen and the person has to imagine and give it. return to the thousands of possibilities that may be leading the person next to you to ignore you.
If disconfirmation is something that occurs from childhood, by the most important people in your environment (parents) or over a prolonged period of time, it is the form of relationship that is most damages identity of the person.
The person feels abandoned, worthless, without rights he does not know who he is or what he has to do so that others pay attention to him, in short, he feels without identity and if this continues over time, serious psychological damage occurs that can end up triggering serious psychological illnesses such as schizophrenia.
Therefore, it is important to take into account the harm we can cause to others if we practice disconfirmation, especially if those people are our children. It is one thing to ignore a problematic behavior so that the child gets tired of doing it and pay attention to the positive things he or she does, and quite another thing is to act as if our child did not exist in a systematic and prolonged way over time. If, in addition, this is carried out by both the father and the mother, the damage caused to the child may be irreversible.
I would like to end with a sentence that summarizes today’s article:
“There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference” Juan Montalvo
