Comment by n4r9
1 day ago
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.
I disagree. I think the overly academic isolation of "validating emotions" into something that happens without endorsing the response isn't how real people communicate.
Any time you're "validating emotions" in the real world, there is going to be some degree of implicit endorsement that the reaction was valid.
The idea of "validating emotions" being synonymous with saying "I agree that you feel that way" is rather infantile. Nobody needs someone to agree that the emotion they experienced is the emotion they experienced.
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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.
I understand the academic concept, but the word "necessarily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that definition.
In real human conversation, when someone is expressing an emotion they aren't looking for other people to confirm that they are indeed experiencing that emotion. That's not even a question up for debate. They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a valid response to the situation.
The overly academic definition doesn't reflect how people communicate in the real world.
There's also a factor of consistency over time: It's no big deal to go along with someone venting from time to time, but when someone you're close to is overreacting to everything and having unreasonable emotional reactions all the time, validating those emotions consistently is going to be viewed as an implicit endorsement.
> 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.
Not in this case. Just going along with it.
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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.
So many people are trying to project onto this anecdote or substitute their own reality.
The reality is simpler: It was basically "Yeah it sucks that <minor annoyance> happened at work, but sulking about it for 3 days is not a good way to handle that"
Whereas the "validating emotions" guy would just jump in and be a sounding board for 3 days straight
Feeling a little upset over minor annoyances is valid. Having your emotional state crumble at the slightest breeze is not. Having someone around who basically validates the latter is not good.
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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.