There is a form of invalidation in high-performance environments that can be difficult to recognise because it often sounds reasonable, supportive and even psychologically informed.
A dancer might hear, “Try not to take it personally,” “She only pushes you because she believes in you,” “Maybe you misunderstood what she meant,” or “Try to look at it from your teacher’s perspective.”
Sometimes these are useful things to say. Perspective-taking is an important psychological skill. Resilience matters. Emotional regulation matters. Learning to tolerate discomfort, disappointment and difficult feedback is part of developing as a high-performance dancer.
Where I think we need to be more careful is when positive reframing happens before we have actually understood what the dancer experienced.
I have spent more than four decades inside dance environments, first as a dancer and then as a teacher, studio owner, adjudicator and performance coach. One thing I have become increasingly interested in is what happens when a young person raises discomfort and the adults around them immediately start making sense of it for them.
Often, I think this comes from a good place. We want young dancers to be resilient. We want them to understand that people make mistakes, teachers are human and difficult experiences do not automatically mean something harmful has occurred.
Yet there is another capacity we need to protect at the same time: a dancer’s ability to notice their own experience and trust themselves enough to examine it.
When perspective-taking overrides experience
Imagine a dancer tells a teacher, parent or studio director that something made them uncomfortable. Perhaps a choreographer humiliated them during rehearsal. A teacher repeatedly withdraws attention after a disappointing performance. They are frightened to disclose an injury, or someone has made a comment about their body. Perhaps they have noticed inconsistent attention or approval and are trying to understand what is happening.
The dancer raises the concern and immediately hears, “I’m sure they didn’t mean it that way.”
The intention behind this response may genuinely be reassuring. The problem is that we have already moved away from the dancer’s experience and towards explaining the intentions of the person whose behaviour is being questioned.
I think curiosity needs to come first.
What happened? What did you notice? How did that affect you? Has this happened before? Is there something about the interaction that felt particularly uncomfortable?
These questions do not assume the dancer’s interpretation is objectively correct. They simply allow us to understand the experience before we begin explaining it.
This distinction is important because young dancers are still developing their understanding of relationships, authority, boundaries and themselves. If we continually tell them what an interaction meant before helping them examine what they experienced, we may inadvertently teach them to defer to someone else’s interpretation of their own experience.
Intent and impact give us different information
A teacher can deeply care about a dancer and still shame them. A parent can genuinely want their child to become resilient while responding to distress in ways that leave the child feeling unheard. A choreographer may believe that yelling creates urgency while creating an environment in which dancers become reluctant to communicate openly.
Human relationships are complicated. Good intentions do not automatically produce good outcomes, and a negative impact does not automatically establish malicious intent.
This is why I am interested in holding more than one piece of information at once.
What was the intention? What was the impact? What was happening within the relationship? Is this an isolated interaction or part of a pattern? What is the broader context?
For me, psychologically informed leadership requires the capacity to stay with those questions without rushing towards a conclusion.
Power matters in dance
This becomes particularly important in dance because these relationships rarely involve equal power.
Teachers, directors and choreographers can influence casting, opportunities, approval, attention, advancement, recommendations and a dancer’s sense of belonging within the group.
Hierarchy itself is a normal part of training. Expertise matters, leadership matters, and high-performance environments need clear expectations and accountability. At the same time, power changes the relational landscape.
Consider a fourteen-year-old dancer questioning the behaviour of the teacher who determines casting. Technically, she may be free to speak. Relationally, she may also be wondering whether speaking will affect how she is seen, whether she will be considered difficult, or whether an opportunity could disappear.
Research within sport has similarly identified the importance of psychological safety and athlete voice within coach-athlete relationships. Jowett and colleagues found that psychological safety was associated with the quality of the coach-athlete relationship, with communication and the ability to navigate interpersonal difficulties playing an important role.
So when we tell dancers to speak up, I think we also need to ask ourselves a harder question: What happens when they do?
When positivity starts doing something else
Positive reframing has a legitimate place in performance psychology. It can help dancers recover from mistakes, challenge catastrophic thinking and develop flexibility around setbacks.
Its usefulness depends partly on timing.
A dancer says, “That frightened me,” and hears, “She was probably just trying to motivate you.”
Another says, “I felt humiliated,” and is told, “You know how much your teacher believes in you.”
A dancer says, “I don’t feel comfortable telling him when I’m injured,” and hears, “He would never want you to feel like that.”
I am interested in what happens psychologically in those moments.
The adult may believe they are helping the dancer develop perspective. The dancer may hear something quite different: perhaps my perception of this situation cannot be trusted.
If that happens repeatedly, the internal question can gradually move from “What am I experiencing?” towards “Am I allowed to experience it this way?”
For young people developing agency, that matters.
Invalidation and gaslighting are different
I also think we need to be careful with the word gaslighting. It has entered everyday language so thoroughly that it is sometimes used to describe almost any disagreement about an experience.
Someone disagreeing with you is not necessarily gaslighting you. Neither is offering another perspective or remembering an interaction differently.
Invalidation is much broader. We can minimise, dismiss or reinterpret someone’s emotional experience without deliberately trying to manipulate their understanding of reality.
Gaslighting describes something more specific. Scholarly work examines the systematic undermining of another person’s perceptions or credibility, and sociologist Paige Sweet’s work is particularly relevant because she places gaslighting within relationships of power and inequality.
This has obvious implications for dance.
When a young dancer and an authority figure disagree about an interaction, the authority figure usually holds considerably greater relational and institutional credibility. If a dancer is repeatedly told what happened, what somebody intended, why their interpretation is incorrect and how they should feel about it, there is reason to pay attention to that pattern.
This does not make every invalidating interaction gaslighting. Precision matters here.
Validation does not mean deciding the dancer is right
This is another area where conversations about psychological safety can become unnecessarily polarised.
A dancer may misunderstand an interaction. They may have incomplete information. Previous experiences may influence how they interpret something. Another person may genuinely remember the event differently.
We can explore all of that.
Validation can begin with something as simple as, “I can understand why that landed that way for you.”
That statement does not determine guilt or establish objective truth. It creates enough relational safety to become curious.
From there, we can explore what else might have been happening. We can ask whether there is another possible interpretation, whether relevant information is missing, or whether a conversation with the person involved might help.
I think this is where genuine psychological flexibility develops. A dancer learns that they can take their own experience seriously while remaining open to information that may change their understanding of it.
That is very different from compulsory positivity.
High performance requires discernment
After decades inside dance, I think this is one place where our industry can sometimes misunderstand resilience.
High-performance dance is uncomfortable at times. Dancers will receive difficult corrections. They will become frustrated. They will lose auditions, dislike casting decisions, confront technical weaknesses and hear feedback they would rather not hear.
Removing those experiences would do little to prepare someone for a professional career.
The deeper skill is learning to discern what kind of discomfort you are experiencing.
Being challenged and being humiliated can feel very different. So can accountability and coercion, rigorous correction and contempt, high expectations and relational unpredictability.
Young dancers need opportunities to develop that discernment. They need to be able to ask themselves what is happening, examine their own response, consider other perspectives and decide whether new information changes their understanding.
If adults continually do that interpretive work for them, we risk weakening the very capacity we claim to be developing.
Developing dancers who can trust themselves
What I ultimately want for young dancers is not certainty that their first interpretation is always correct. I want them to develop enough self-trust to take their perceptions seriously and enough psychological flexibility to question them.
I want dancers who can hear another perspective without immediately abandoning their own. I want them to understand that a teacher can care deeply about them and still get something wrong. I want them to recognise that difficult feedback is part of high performance while retaining the ability to identify behaviour that deserves closer examination.
That requires more sophistication than simply teaching young people to think positively.
For those of us who lead dancers, there is also something worth reflecting on. When a dancer brings us an uncomfortable experience, what happens inside us? Do we become curious, or do we immediately begin explaining? Do we ask what happened, or reassure them about what somebody probably intended? Are we helping them examine their experience, or subtly teaching them what the more acceptable interpretation should be?
Sometimes the language of resilience, gratitude and positivity can unintentionally give greater authority to the person with more power to define what an experience meant.
I believe we can ask more of dance education.
We can maintain rigorous standards while allowing dancers to question. We can teach resilience alongside discernment. We can encourage perspective-taking while protecting agency. We can help dancers become psychologically flexible without asking them to disconnect from themselves.
For me, that is part of developing a high-performance dancer: someone capable of receiving difficult feedback, thinking critically about their environment and trusting themselves enough to notice when something deserves a closer look.
Research and further reading
Jowett, S., Nascimento-Júnior, J. R. A., Zhao, C., & Gosai, J. (2023). Creating the conditions for psychological safety and its impact on quality coach-athlete relationships. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 65, 102363.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.
Shenk, C. E., & Fruzzetti, A. E. (2011). The impact of validating and invalidating responses on emotional reactivity. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 30(2), 163–183.
Sweet, P. L. (2019). The sociology of gaslighting. American Sociological Review, 84(5), 851–875.
Zielinski, M. J., et al. (2018). The Perceived Invalidation of Emotion Scale (PIES): Development and psychometric properties of a novel measure of current emotion invalidation. Psychological Assessment, 30(6), 705–719.