Comment by Aurornis
1 day ago
> 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.
My partner and I have been through this cycle. Something happens, she interprets it a certain, very specific, way and then has an adverse emotional reaction.
In the early days of our relationship I would try to explain to her why her emotion doesn't 'make sense'. That just made things worse. Much worse. When she helped me understand that she needed me to validate that what she was feeling was legitimate - based on her interpretation of the events - she was able to let go and consider other interpretations.
Note that this "letting go" almost never happened in the moment, but only after the emotions abated and she had time to process the entire situation. We're talking hours, not minutes.
You’re collapsing two distinct claims. The first, that real-world communication is messier than clinical frameworks, is obviously true but doesn’t do the work you need it to. The second, that acknowledging someone’s emotional experience is “infantile” because “nobody needs someone to agree that the emotion they experienced is the emotion they experienced,” is empirically false.
People frequently do need that. That’s basically what dismissive attachment styles and invalidating environments produce: people who aren’t sure their own internal states are real or legitimate. “I can see why that hurt” lands very differently than “that shouldn’t have hurt.” The former isn’t agreeing the other party was wrong or the reaction was proportionate. It’s communicating “your inner experience makes sense to me.”
The implicit endorsement concern is real but overstated. Skilled communicators navigate this constantly. “That sounds really frustrating. What do you think was actually going on there?” validates the frustration while opening space for reexamination. The failure mode you’re pointing at is when someone only validates and never probes, which is just conflict avoidance.
The “overly academic” framing is doing some rhetorical work here. These distinctions come from observing what actually helps people versus what entrenches them. Therapists, mediators, and anyone who’s gotten good at difficult conversations know the difference intuitively. It’s not academic. It’s practical.
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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.
> confirm that they are indeed experiencing that emotion
This is not emotional validation; nobody wants to be told something they can decide for themselves. Instead, they want to hear that it is okay to feel said emotion. When venting to someone, one doesn't want to hear "I understand that you feel that way", they want to hear "I understand why you feel that way". The former is a dismissal (taking the guise of a validation) and the latter is a validation. "I don't get why you feel $EMOTION about this" is the ultimate emotional sucker punch of invalidation from an active listener even though it necessarily implies said confirmation that they feel $EMOTION.
> They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a valid response to the situation.
Notably, "sharing" the emotions is not the only way to validate them; I do not have to feel (or even understand) one's sadness for their sadness to be valid. The second part is the only thing they're looking for and it is very unlikely to be false given the appropriate context. From another comment, "the emotional response was valid for the circumstances" is accurate when one understands "the circumstances" to include the life experiences that cause them to have such an emotional response from something that doesn't trigger the same emotions in oneself.
> overreacting to everything and having unreasonable emotional reactions all the time
There are healthy avenues for expressing such emotions as well as unhealthy ones. Validating the emotional response to something is precisely what will allow the person feeling the emotions to calm down and decide on actions that will benefit their situation. If they are invalidated, they will instead spend effort seeking that validation.
> Just going along with it.
Well, if "it" is referring to behaviors and attitudes, then there's an obvious problem (in all likelihood) but that's also distinct from emotional validation. As I said in my other comment in this thread, one can logically say "it's okay to feel that way but you shouldn't think that". I strongly doubt that is the likes of the validation being complained about here. The negatives of the situation being described do not seem likely caused merely from emotional validation. And I would bet with near certainty that the partner they met who got them to choose healthy behaviors did so by first validating their emotions.
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What do you mean by "going along with" ? Just that it sounds suspiciously like agreeing with an opinion, rather than accepting a feeling.
The emotional world is vast. From what I hear here, there is a collapsing of a couple things all under 'validation'.
Emotional processing, in my experience, is completely separate from action. I hear that your family member had her actions validated - what she decided to do.
An emotion itself can be complex, scary and counter-intuitive. In my experience, always valid - but that doesn't mean you have the right reasons. It's often very difficult to get the right environment to actively explore where an emotion is coming from - purely because of the reactions in other people - which try to suppress, deflect, minimize, etc.
Strangely, simply agreeing or validating someone's outcome is actually a way of minimizing or deflecting the scary expression. Let's not go deeper, let's not figure out where this is coming from - you just go with your gut and act.
Getting to the root of an emotion can come in waves and many iterations. It can be incredibly useful to try and completely unhook action from it.
I've had very strong emotions from events that were almost always "right emotion, wrong reason/story" and I've slowly corrected the 'why' multiple times over.
A lot of those corrections took removing people from my life that made it hard to feel or have access to those difficult emotions.
I wonder if you value that family member or just the idea of them. Value them only when they're 'stable'? Want to get in the muck with them to find where instability comes from? It's okay to not. It's less okay IMO to stay connected to someone you require change from. If you don't like behavior, say it and leave/create much space. Give them agency to choose, agency to fail, agency to be someone you don't like, agency to not be okay.
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> They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a valid response to the situation.
Which is what the whole "empathy movement" of recent years seems to emphasize. The problem is that when empathy is unmoored from the objective good, this can become scandalous (not in the sense that it causes outrage, but in the older sense that it encourages evil). Not every response is a valid response. You must be able to identify whether something is good, you must refrain from actively enabling things that are bad, but you must discern whether to correct, and if so, how to correct. Not every problem is yours to correct. Busybodies think they are.
(N.b. the Catholic Church, drawing on ethical distinctions, makes distinctions between moral principle, the objectively moral status of particular acts in light of moral principles, and the pastoral needs of particular persons. So, e.g., while prostitution as a practice is roundly condemned as a matter of principle, particular prostitutes may be treated gently. This is especially true if he/she expresses remorse for the way he/she has lived his/her life (the parable of the prodigal son comes to mind).)
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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.
> So many people are trying to project onto this anecdote
For what it's worth, I imagined a scenario very similar to the one you described in this comment.
> Yeah it sucks that <minor annoyance> happened at work
This is emotional validation.
> sulking about it for 3 days is not a good way to handle that
This has nothing to do with emotional validation. It can be said before, after, or without said validation.
> Whereas the "validating emotions" guy would just jump in and be a sounding board for 3 days straight
It sounds like the "validating emotions" person was validating the sulking behaviors (whether in addition to validating the related emotions or not) and saying that they were only validating the emotions.
Anyway, the purpose for my replies is not to get you to agree with that person or to change your mind about the anecdote, but to offer a more meaningful distinction of what's being discussed.
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.