He Says I'm Overreacting. I Say He's Dismissing Me

Simone had been trying to explain the same thing for twenty minutes.

Her husband Darnell kept interrupting her with variations of the same response.

"That's not what happened." "You're reading into it." "Why do you always make such a big deal out of everything?" And then, the one that finally made her stop talking entirely:

"You're overreacting."

She did not cry.

She did not fight back.

She just went quiet in a way that was different from her usual quiet. She got up, went to the bedroom, and closed the door.

When Darnell came to see us a few months later, he was genuinely baffled. He had not been cruel. He had not raised his voice. He thought he had been calm, rational, reasonable.

He could not understand why Simone had stopped bringing things to him. Why she had started texting her sister instead of talking to him. Why she felt farther away every month even though nothing had "really happened."

Something had happened.

Not in the way Darnell meant it. Nothing dramatic had occurred. But Simone had learned something. She had learned that bringing her feelings to her husband meant having those feelings evaluated, questioned, and often returned to her with a verdict: invalid.

So she stopped bringing them.

And Darnell was standing in our office wondering where his wife had gone.

This post is part of our complete guide to Communication in marriage. Read the full guide here.

What Invalidation Actually Is and What It Is Not

Emotional invalidation is what happens when one spouse communicates, whether through words, tone, or body language, that the other person's feelings are wrong, excessive, or not worth taking seriously.

It does not have to be loud to be destructive. Some of the most damaging forms are quiet. An eye roll when your spouse starts to cry. A heavy sigh when a topic comes up again. A pivot to problem-solving before the other person has finished expressing what they feel. A calm, reasonable explanation of why they should not feel what they are feeling.

The phrase "you're overreacting" is the most common version, but it has a lot of siblings. "You're too sensitive." "It's not that big a deal." "You're always doing this." "Can you just calm down?" "I didn't mean it like that, so you shouldn't feel that way." All of these deliver the same message: your emotional experience of this moment is incorrect, and you need to adjust it.

What that message does to a spouse over time is significant. When someone's feelings are repeatedly evaluated and found insufficient, they stop trusting their own emotional experience. They start asking themselves: am I overreacting? Maybe I am too sensitive. Maybe I should just let it go. And then, quietly, they stop bringing things to their spouse at all. Not because they stopped feeling things. Because they stopped believing it was safe to say so.

It is worth being clear about what invalidation is not. Disagreeing with your spouse is not invalidation. Asking for time to calm down before a hard conversation is not invalidation. Gently noting that a reaction seems bigger than the moment might call for, when done with genuine curiosity and care rather than dismissal, is not automatically invalidation. The difference is in what the statement is trying to do. Is it trying to understand? Or is it trying to close the conversation?

Why the Person Dismissing Is Not Always the Villain

This is the part of the conversation most posts on this topic skip. And skipping it means only half the couple can be helped.

Many spouses who dismiss feelings are not doing it out of cruelty. They are doing it out of discomfort. When your spouse gets emotional, something happens inside you. Your nervous system responds. For some people that response is anxiety. For others it is a felt urgency to fix the problem and make the emotion stop. For others it is a kind of shutdown, a learned response from a childhood where emotions were not welcome and calm was the expected posture.

Some people grew up in families where emotions were treated as overindulgences. Where "stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about" was a real sentence spoken in their childhood home. Where being upset was seen as weakness or manipulation. Those people did not learn to dismiss their spouse's feelings as an adult. They learned to distrust emotional expression as a child. And that learning shows up in every close relationship they have ever been in.

None of that makes the dismissal acceptable. But it makes it understandable. And understanding it is what makes it possible to address without the conversation becoming an accusation.

Proverbs 4:7 says: "Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding." (NKJV) Getting understanding about why your spouse responds the way they do, not just what they are doing wrong, is the beginning of being able to actually change the pattern.

The Cycle That Forms When This Keeps Happening

Here is what the invalidation cycle looks like in a marriage once it has been running for a while.

One spouse brings a feeling. The other dismisses it. The first spouse feels unseen and either escalates to be heard or withdraws to protect themselves. The second spouse sees the escalation and uses it as evidence: "See, you are overreacting." Or they see the withdrawal and think the problem has passed. The first spouse gets quieter over time. The second spouse interprets the quiet as peace. The first spouse is slowly disappearing from the marriage while still physically present.

This is not a small thing. A spouse who has learned that their emotional experience will not be received by their partner does not stop having emotions. They just stop bringing them to the marriage. They bring them to their friends, their journal, their mother, their coworker. And the marriage becomes a place where only the surface is shared, because the surface is the only thing that feels safe.

This is one of the primary ways emotional intimacy dies in a marriage. Not through a crisis. Through accumulation. Through the slow learning that this is not a safe place to be fully known.

The post Your Marriage Doesn't Have a Communication Problem speaks directly to why safety is the real root of most communication breakdowns. If you or your spouse has stopped bringing things to the marriage, that post gives a framework for understanding why.

And if you have been dismissed so many times you have run out of words to explain how you feel, the Heart-Level Wheels teaching at You Know You Feel Something. But Can You Name It? gives you a vocabulary to try again.

What Dignity in a Marriage Actually Requires

The ODD Conversations framework has three rules. Talk without being offensive. Listen without being defensive. Always leave your spouse with their dignity.

That third rule is the one most relevant to this conversation. And dignity in a marriage is not just about avoiding cruelty. It is more specific than that.

Dignity means your spouse leaves every conversation still feeling like they are a person whose inner life matters. That their feelings, even the ones that seem excessive to you, are worth receiving rather than correcting. That the way they experienced something, even if it differs from your version of events, is not disqualified just because you see it differently.

Romans 12:10 says: "Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another." (NKJV) The phrase "giving preference" in the original Greek carries the idea of going first in giving honor. Not waiting for your spouse to earn it. Not giving it after they have managed their emotions to your satisfaction. Going first.

That is what receiving your spouse's feelings looks like in practice. It is going first in honoring their emotional experience before you do anything else with it. Before you explain, correct, defend, or solve. Before you evaluate whether the feeling makes sense to you. Going first means: I see that something is happening inside you, and that matters to me.

You do not have to agree with how your spouse feels to receive how they feel. Those are different things. You can say: "I hear that you felt dismissed when I did that. I didn't intend it that way. And your experience of it still matters to me." That sentence holds both truths at the same time. It does not require you to admit to something you don't believe. It just requires you to honor the person in front of you.

How to Break the Pattern From Both Sides

This is the practical section, and it needs to speak to both people in the marriage.

If you are the spouse who has been dismissed:

The first thing to understand is that your feelings are not a referendum on your character. Being told you are overreacting repeatedly does not mean you are. It means there is a pattern between you and your spouse that needs to be addressed. And addressing it starts with naming it, not in the middle of a conflict, but in a calm moment when both of you are present.

Try something like: "I want to talk about something I've noticed. When I bring up how I'm feeling, I often feel like it gets minimized. I don't think you mean to do that. But it's starting to make me not want to bring things to you. And I don't want that for us."

That sentence does three things. It names the pattern without attacking the person. It extends good faith by assuming they do not intend it. And it names the cost of the pattern continuing: you are starting to withdraw. That cost is often the piece of information that gets a dismissive spouse's attention when nothing else has.

If you are the spouse who dismisses:

Start by getting honest about what happens in your body when your spouse gets emotional. Not what you think about it. What you feel. Is it anxiety? A pull to fix it? A sense of overwhelm? Something that shuts down? Getting curious about your own response is the first step toward changing it.

Then practice one new response before you use any of your old ones. Before you explain, correct, or evaluate: try one sentence of acknowledgment. "That sounds really hard." "I can see that landed badly." "I didn't realize that affected you that way." One sentence. Delivered first. Before anything else.

That sentence does not mean you are admitting fault. It does not mean you agree with everything your spouse feels. It means you are choosing to honor their experience before you do anything else with it. And for a spouse who has been waiting to feel received, that one sentence can change the entire atmosphere of the conversation.

For the full framework on how to have the hard conversations this pattern has been avoiding, the ODD Conversations post walks through all three rules in detail: The ODD Conversations Framework That Stops Marriage Fights.

Where to Start This Week

This pattern did not form overnight and it will not resolve in a single conversation. But it can begin to shift this week with three intentional moves.

Step 1: Name the pattern, not the person.

If the invalidation cycle has been running in your marriage, one of you has to name it out loud. Not as an accusation but as an observation. Choose a calm moment, not the middle of a conflict, and say something honest: "I've noticed that when I try to share how I'm feeling, it often ends with me feeling more shut down than when I started. I want to talk about that."

• Ask your spouse: When I share something that's bothering me, do you feel like you know how to respond in a way that helps me feel heard? And be honest, because I want to understand what's hard for you too.

Step 2: Practice receiving before responding.

This week, the next time your spouse brings you a feeling, try something different before you do anything else. Before you explain, defend, or evaluate: say one sentence that acknowledges what they brought. "That sounds like it really got to you." "I hear you." "I didn't know that's how it landed." Just that. Then wait. Let them tell you more before you say anything else.

• Ask yourself: When my spouse brings me a feeling, what is the first thing I do? And is that first thing making them feel more heard or less?

Step 3: Agree on a signal.

One of the most practical things a couple caught in this cycle can do is agree in advance on what happens when one person feels dismissed mid-conversation. A word, a gesture, a signal that means: "I'm feeling like my feelings are getting corrected right now, and I need a moment."

Not to end the conversation. To pause it long enough to reset. When both people know the signal and agree to honor it, it removes the pressure of having to fight to be heard in real time.

• Ask your spouse: Can we agree on something we can say or do when one of us feels like the conversation has shifted from connection to correction?

Not Sure Where to Begin?

Most marriage issues are not the real issue. The fighting, the distance, the unresolved arguments are symptoms. Underneath all of them is one of 5 root causes.

Take the free 5-minute 5 Marriage Mandates Assessment to find out which root needs the most attention in your marriage right now. No right or wrong answers. Just honest ones.

Or book a free 15-minute session at couplespursuit.com/talk and let us help you find it together.

Join a community of couples choosing to pursue each other at facebook.com/groups/couplespursuit.

The names and personal details in the stories throughout this post have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. Any resemblance to specific persons is coincidental.