Every Single Emotion is Valid
Don’t let anyone invalidate or minimize how you feel.
Everyone’s emotions are valid.
If you feel something, you feel it and it’s real to you.
Nothing anyone says has the power to invalidate that, ever.
No one else lives in your body.
No one else sees life through your eyes.
No one else has lived through your experiences.
And, so, no one else has the right to dictate or judge how you feel.
Your feelings are important and you deserve to be heard.
Your emotions are inherently valid and they matter.
Don’t let anyone make you believe otherwise.
“In modern life, we are encouraged to listen to our hearts, listen to our inner voices, and listen to our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully and with intent to other people.”
Validation is the act of helping someone feel heard and understood.
It has the power to boost the other person’s positive emotions and reduce the painful ones.
It will also make the other person much more open and receptive to your advice.
Validating someone’s feelings means acknowledging and accepting their emotions as real and understandable, regardless of whether you agree with them or not.
This can involve listening to their concerns without trying to change their mind, offering support and empathy, and recognising that their feelings are valid and important to them.
By validating someone’s feelings, you show them that you care about their well-being and are willing to listen and understand their perspective.
So, how do you identify someone else’s emotions?
Start by imagining being in a similar circumstance.
Ask yourself, “Have I been in a situation similar to this in some way?” If no, “Can I imagine being in that same position?”
Based on what you know about the person, ask yourself, “How do they likely think and feel?”
We can usually put ourselves in the other person’s position and imagine what thoughts are going through their head, or what feelings they have. Then we can articulate those feelings and check that we’re understanding things correctly.
HOW TO VALIDATE SOMEONE’S FEELINGS EVEN IF YOU DON’T AGREE
Validation comes in three forms; Emotional, Behavioural, and Cognitive.
1. Emotional Validation
Emotional validation involves validating without escalating the emotion. The way to do that is by focusing on the primary emotions the other person is experiencing.
Emotions, such as anger and anxiety, are secondary emotions because they’re easier to recognise. Primary emotions, such as sadness or hurt, are more difficult to recognise.
So, when validating, try to identify those underlying emotions. This will help de-escalate their emotional response.
Validating anger is helpful, but validating the underlying hurt can shift the other person’s emotions and allow them to pay attention to the nuances of all of the different emotions that they’re experiencing.
The emotional validation you give by listening and identifying emotions, also allows the other person to express themselves more openly. That can be validating in itself.
2. Behavioural Validation
Behavioural validation involves validating the other person’s behaviour by communicating that they’re behaviour is understandable, regardless of whether these behaviours are helpful or not.
Simply repeating back what the facts of the situation are, will help the other person feel heard.
3. Cognitive Validation
Cognitive validation is when you recognise and identify the underlying assumptions and beliefs of the other person, and then articulate them.
In a way, this involves mind-reading. Based on what you know about the other person, or even based on what you know about human beings in general, look at any patterns they might have.
For example, if you know that the other person struggles with feelings of shame, you might verify with them by asking, “Did you feel like you didn’t deserve being with that person?”
UNDERSTANDING DIFFERENT LEVELS OF VALIDATION
Everyone’s trauma is valid.
Even if other people have experienced ‘worse’.
Even if someone else, who went through the same experience, doesn’t feel debilitated by it.
Even if it ‘could have been avoided’.
Even if it happened a long time ago.
Even if no one knows.
Your trauma is real and valid, and you deserve a space to talk about it.
It isn’t desperate or pathetic or attention-seeking.
It’s self-care.
It’s inconceivably brave.
And, regardless of the magnitude of your struggle, you’re allowed to take care of yourself by processing and unloading some of the pain you carry.
Your pain matters.
Your experience matters.
And your healing matters.
Nothing and no one can take that away from you.
Understanding Different Levels of Validation
If you care about someone who is emotionally sensitive, validation is one of the most important and effective skills you can learn.
Or, if you're an emotionally sensitive person, then learning to validate yourself will help you manage your emotions effectively.
Level 1 - Being Present
There are so many ways to be present.
Being present means giving all of your attention to the person you are validating.
Being present for yourself means acknowledging your internal experience, and sitting with it rather than ‘running away’ from it, avoiding it, or pushing it away.
Sitting with intense emotion is not easy. Even happiness or excitement can feel uncomfortable at times for some people if they’re not used to it.
Often, one of the reasons other people are uncomfortable with intense emotion is that they don’t know what to say.
Just being present, paying complete attention to the person in a nonjudgmental way, is often the answer.
For yourself, being mindful of your own emotion is the first step to accepting your emotion.
Level 2 - Accurate Reflection
Accurate reflection means you summarise what you have heard from someone else, or summarise your own feelings.
When done in an authentic manner, with the intent of truly understanding the experience and not judging it, accurate reflection is validating.
Sometimes, this type of validation helps the emotionally sensitive person sort through their thoughts and separate them from their emotions. “So, basically, I’m feeling pretty angry and hurt,” would be a self-reflection. “Sounds like you’re disappointed in yourself because you didn’t call him back,” could be accurate reflection to someone else.
Level 3 - Reading a Person’s Behaviour and Guessing What They Might be Feeling or Thinking
People vary with their ability to know their own feelings. For example, some confuse anxiety and excitement, and some confuse excitement and happiness.
Some may not be clear about what they are feeling because they’ve never been allowed to experience their own feelings, or have learned to be afraid of their feelings.
Often, emotionally sensitive people mask their feelings because they have learned that others don’t react well to their sensitivity.
This masking can lead to not acknowledging their feelings even to themselves, which makes the emotions more difficult to manage.
Being able to accurately label feelings is an important step to being able to regulate them.
When someone is describing a situation, notice their emotional state. Then either label the emotions you hear or guess at what the person might be feeling.
“I’m guessing you must have felt pretty hurt by her comment,” is Level Three validation.
Remember that you may guess wrong and the person could correct you. It’s their emotion, so they are the only one who knows how they feel.
Level 4 - Understanding The Person’s Behaviour in Terms of Their History and Biology
Your experiences and biology influence your emotional reactions.
If your best friend was bitten by a dog a few years ago, she is not likely to enjoy playing with your German Shepherd. Validation at this level would be saying, “Given what happened to you, I completely understand you not wanting to be around my dog.”
Self-validation would be understanding your own reactions in the context of your past experiences.
Level 5 - Normalising or Recognising Emotional Reactions That Anyone Would Have
Understanding that your emotions are normal is helpful for everyone.
For the emotionally sensitive person, knowing that anyone would be upset in a specific situation is validating.
For example, “Of course you’re anxious. Speaking before an audience for the first time is scary for anyone.”
Level 6 - Radical Genuineness
Radical genuineness is when you understand the emotion someone is feeling on a very deep level.
Maybe you have had a similar experience. Radical genuineness is sharing that experience as equals.
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