Comment by Aurornis
1 day ago
> they're actually trying to process those feelings: to understand where the feelings are coming from, to be validated, and to be able to take a broader perspective.
If you’re speaking to a rational person with good intentions and good self-management this can help a lot.
If the other person doesn’t have good emotional regulation and is prone to catastrophizing, exaggeration, or excessive self-victimization then validating and reinforcing their emotions isn’t always helpful. It can be harmful.
I know this goes against the Reddit-style relationship stereotype where the man must always listen and nod but not offer suggestions, but when someone is prone to self-destructive emotional thought loops behind their emotional validator can be actively harmful. Even if validation is what they seek and want.
It can be a challenging skill to apply, and you need to use your judgement to discern whether the other person is in a place to engage with what you say.
One comment I'd make is the difference between "valid" and "rational". Emotions and feelings are always "valid", in the sense that they are a natural consequence of events and prior conditioning. But feelings are rarely "rational" - they often don't reflect the complete truth of a situation. For example, suppose someone says "Jennifer sent me this short snippy reply today, I swear she's upset with me about something and won't tell me what it is". It is perfectly legitimate to validate that you can see where that fear comes from, but nevertheless offer alternative possibilites: maybe Jennifer is going through a tough time personally, or has a really tight work schedule at the moment. You don't have to fully buy into someone's thoughts and feelings in order to help them process them. In fact this is rarely going to help.
> Emotions and feelings are always "valid", in the sense that they are a natural consequence of events and prior conditioning.
If “validating” someone’s emotions comes down to simply saying that, yes, I agree you felt that way, then I suppose that’s true.
But when people talk about validating other people’s emotions it implies that they’re saying the emotional response was valid for the circumstances.
I have someone in my extended family who has a strong tendency to catastrophize and assume the worst. When she was in a relationship with someone who constantly validated her emotions and reactions it was disastrous. It took someone more level headed to start telling her when her reactions were not valid to certain situations to begin stabilizing the behavior.
There’s a hand wavey, feel good idea where we’re supposed to believe everyone’s lived experience and emotions are valid, but some people have problems with incorrect emotional reactions. Validating these can become reinforcing for that behavior.
I’m not saying we should start doubting every emotional reaction or white knighting everything, but it’s unhealthy to take a stance that validating other people’s emotions is de facto good.
You’re making a reasonable point, but I think you’re arguing against a somewhat strawmanned version of emotional validation.
You’re treating “validation” as synonymous with “agreeing the emotional response was proportionate and correct.” But that’s not really what validation means in a therapeutic or even colloquial sense. Validating someone’s emotions typically means acknowledging that the emotion is real and understandable given how that person perceived the situation. It doesn’t require you to endorse their perception as accurate.
You can say “I get why you’d feel terrified if you believed X was happening” while also gently probing whether X is actually happening. That’s still validation. What you’re describing as helpful for your family member isn’t really “invalidation” so much as reality-testing, which is a different thing and can coexist with emotional validation.
Your anecdote is doing a lot of work here. We don’t know what “constantly validated” actually looked like in practice, or what the “level headed” person was doing differently. It’s possible the first partner was just conflict-avoidant and agreeing with distorted interpretations of events, which isn’t validation so much as enabling. And the second partner may have been effective not because they said “your reaction isn’t valid” but because they offered a stable outside perspective while still being emotionally supportive.
Your broader point about reinforcement is worth taking seriously though. There are absolutely cases where excessive reassurance-seeking gets reinforced by certain responses. But the solution isn’t to tell people their feelings are wrong. It’s to validate the feeling while not automatically validating the catastrophic interpretation driving it.
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I quite like the definition on Wikipedia:
> Emotional validation is a process which involves acknowledging and accepting another individual's inner emotional experience, without necessarily agreeing with or justifying it, and possibly also communicating that acceptance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_validation
It sounds perhaps like your family member's former partner was going further than validating the emotions, and trying to justify or prove them right. But this is quibbling over semantics; I think we both agree that challenging someone is sometimes the kindest thing to do.
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> It took someone more level headed to start telling her when her reactions were not valid to certain situations to begin stabilizing the behavior.
I guess at the risk of splitting hairs, I think it's more likely they stopped misappropriating more than they started invalidating. I see a difference between "you shouldn't feel that way" and "I disagree with that conclusion" such that one can logically say both (well, the former being "it's okay to feel that way") in the same breath.
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Valid feelings and validation are unrelated.
The good kind of "valid" is about whether (a) your process of measuring reality might be broken to your detriment. And by extension (b) whether your communications channel with the person you are talking to is working.
Chris Voss's mirroring is basically TCP ACKs.
Then there are the people who say that they lack validation and are just narcissists looking for yes-men. Big difference on how much of your time is being wasted.
Other people have given good insights, so I'll instead describe one of my pet theories.
Given by how we talk about emotions, I think they are "rational", but operate under a different set of rules than we normally apply to "rational" thinking. In fact, feelings are deeply intertwined with our supposedly "rational" thinking, to the point where I don't think there is a significant boundary. The lack of information is prevalent when feelings are in play, and I believe the same is true in general. Even physics feels far different than pure mathematics, after all. Instead of deferring to conventions in how to act when feelings are involved, as if they belong to a wholly different and mysterious world, we can make sense of the entire world. But of course, empathy, kindness, and good judgement are not exempt. None of this conflicts with what you're saying, but I think a subtle shift in mindset will be fruitful in applying it.
Yes, I'd agree with that. The way I think of it is that emotions are somewhat "mechanistic". I don't directly control them, but they follow certain principles. For example, fear often arises in response to a perceived threat (physical or otherwise). My boss calling me to an unexpected meeting might make me panic. And even once the peak of the fear subsides, I am more vulnerable to experiencing it again for some time. E.g. I get home and my wife's car is gone, then suddenly I'm scared that she's been in an accident or something. None of this is a rational response. There are some hand-wavey evolutionary-psychology arguments for why they operate that way. But the main thing is that there are principles that make sense out of it, and those principles are (perhaps) surprisingly consistent across humans.
Indeed, the more strong the feeling, the less rational it can become, even though the feeling is there for good reasons. A pure rational solution won't help, pure empathy as well not.
Being able to separate these situations out is part of ‘emotional problem solving’. Just like any problem solving, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for all cases.
I think the important bit is to recognize that emotions are separate from (although related to) the situation itself. The problem many people have is approaching emotional problems as simply symptoms of the underlying practical problem, and that the way to solve the emotional problem is to simply go directly to solving the underlying practical problem.
Now, sometimes this is the correct approach. However, many times it isn’t. Sometimes the practical problem is not solvable by you or the person you are talking to. Sometimes the practical problem is actually not really a problem and is simply triggering something else. Sometimes you just need someone to share some pain, or some joy, or just need a connection with someone.
A good emotional problem solver can navigate all of these situations.
> then validating and reinforcing their emotions isn’t always helpful
I think you might misintrepet what "validating someone's emotions" is/should do. It's not "You're absolutely right for feeling completely sad and broken down because the cafe wasn't open", but more "That must be such a horrible feeling, to feel so sad and broken down", without saying "yes/no" to if you think it's "justified or not".
The point is that the person is feeling what they're feeling, that's what the validation and acceptance comes in, not about what they're feeling those feelings about.
In the end, you can validate someone's feelings without validating what they're feeling those about, by just saying "that sucks".
I agree with your descriptions of the terms, but I think there's often a divergence between empathy (which I find great) and reflecting people's feelings (which I find good with caution). I want people to understand and help each other. But in some situations, reflecting people's feelings encourages them to make poor decisions. I should always provide a space for people to speak without scorn and with understanding, but I don't want to give a false impression of my concerns. Acknowledging that someone's life sucks is subtly different from acknowledging it aloud, and sometimes the subtlety is crucial.
Reflecting peoples feelings is sometimes called "showing sympathy."
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To me the confusion is the word "validate". Sounds like what you're talking about is more acknowledgement than validate. I hear / see how you're feeling and I empathize.
Dictionary definition of validate are things like:
- check or prove the validity or accuracy of (something).
- demonstrate or support the truth or value of.
Which don't seem like the intent of "validating" the emotion in this context.
> In the end, you can validate someone's feelings without validating what they're feeling those about, by just saying "that sucks".
If you say "that sucks" the other person is going to assume you're agreeing with them that the thing they're angry about sucks. They're not going to think you're saying "that sucks" that they have an emotion, as an isolated feeling that happened for no reason.
This is where the overly academic concept of "validating emotions without endorsing them" falls apart in the real world.
In actual human interaction, people don't debate if the other person actual feels an emotion. Angry people don't need other people to agree that they feel angry. They share the emotion because they want other people to agree that the emotion is right and justified.
Nobody actually says "I agree that you are feeling that emotion but I neither endorse it nor disagree with it" (in less formal wording). If you're going along with someone else's emotions, you're implicitly endorsing their reaction as justified.
You described one of my misgivings better than I could (I made a sibling reply to parent), but I don't agree with this in all cases. Anger is easy to perpetuate blindly, but I think introspective feelings sometimes can die out if they aren't affirmed. Someone struggling with an internal conflict may reject a feeling that seems to resolve the conflict, and not take time to properly deal with the feeling. Affirming the feeling should affirm that the person may have felt and be justified in the feeling, without assuring that the feeling is definitely justified. Maybe taking that road is indeed foolish, but it would be too hasty to dismiss doing so just because it feels foolish.
> Nobody actually says "I agree that you are feeling that emotion but I neither endorse it nor disagree with it" (in less formal wording). If you're going along with someone else's emotions, you're implicitly endorsing their reaction as justified.
Yes, actually, lots of people have healthy partnerships where they disagree with how their partner got into the situation, but can still recognize that the partner's feelings about that situation is valid, regardless, since it's an emotion their feeling, it doesn't have to be rational or logical and it's certainly not up to you to decide if it is/was neither.
This is what emotional support is, not validating their actions, but validating the emotions they're feeling, regardless of why. And not seeing some emotions as more "correct and valid" than others, they're all valid and correct, since we're humans after all.
> They share the emotion because they want other people to agree that the emotion is right and justified.
This, in your words "falls apart in the real world", because people don't speak with others always with the same intention, sometimes people want to vent, sometimes people want to manipulate, sometimes people are looking for help, and a whole other rooster of reasons. Most of the time, people speak with others about their feelings because they want connection.
I think you're stuck in trying to separate "valid, rational and logical emotions" from "the rest of emotions" while that distinction matters less than you think, and you'll be seen as very emotionally cold/distant if you aren't able to accept people's emotion because they aren't "rational" (or whatever reason you use).
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This is super important. I'd argue that a huge part of learning to process feelings healthily is being and able to tell the difference between how one feels (which is an involuntary reaction that isn't controllable) and the actions taken as a result of that feeling (which require explicit choice to take). It seems obvious in the abstract, but I think it's almost a universal human condition for the line between them to get blurred. People will often say something like "I'm sorry I got mad" as if being angry is something that can be controlled, when what they should instead be apologizing for is the actions they took while mad (e.g. "I'm sorry for yelling"). There's a reason that "anger management" is a known term rather than "anger prevention", after all. If someone asks why you did something, "because I was mad" is not a healthy explanation; it removes your choice from the equation and paints yourself as a helpless victim of your emotions rather than someone with agency and the ability to act better even in the face of extinuating circumstances.
While it might seem like these are just linguistic quibbles, I've seen so many cases of people genuinely thinking that trying to suppress their emotions is the correct way to handle tough situations, and I don't think that ever works well in the long run. At most, it's sometimes beneficial to avoid expressing strong negative emotions immediately in certain situations, but that's only a short term tradeoff to avoid exacerbating whatever is currently going on, not a long term solution to avoid consequences of taking actions under the duress of heavy emotions. I believe that people would learn to act better by mentally framing their emotions separately from their choices and allowing themselves to feel them fully and ideally express them in a healthy way. Venting to a sympathetic family member or friend can be a good way of doing this, but that's also why therapy is something that would be benefit pretty much everyone in my opinion; having a trained, neutral professional to be able to talk through emotions without having to worry about overburdening them or worrying about having to interact with them in any other part of life is hard to beat in terms of a strategy for dealing with tough emotions in a healthy way.
It really matters how self-destructive the talking person tends to be.
I think you missed the bit where they suggested being curious and offering perspective - it really does work out differently