Comment by n4r9
1 day ago
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.
> Instead, they want to hear that it is okay to feel said emotion.
That's not the definition the others are using, but this seems to be a game of whack-a-mole with everyone's different ideas about what it means.
That said, I think your definition highlights the problem: By telling someone it's okay to feel the emotion, you've implicitly endorsed the response.
The situations I'm speaking about involve people developing inappropriate emotional reactions that lead to self-harm. When they surround themselves with people who do this "validate emotions" game, they're implicitly gathering consensus that it's okay to react that way. The cycle continues.
It's clear that a lot of people have picked up this idea of "validating emotions" being virtuous and good, but some times what people need is for people around them to explain that their reaction is not actually appropriate or okay.
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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.
> I hear that your family member had her actions validated - what she decided to do.
A lot of people in this comment thread are trying to rewrite this situation. That's not what happened.
The problem was that she would have a strong emotional reaction to something and her partner would go along with it: Validate her emotions, offer comfort, not question the validity of responding that way.
This is the problem with the overly abstract notion of validating emotions without endorsing them. If you consistently "validate" the way someone is feeling even when it's obviously harming them, you're not actually helping. You're implicitly agreeing and condoning.
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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.
> 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).)
This is a bit of a difficult stance to take if, like me, you don't think that there is an objective good or an objective moral status.