Why Validate?
We’ve
all had the experience of invalidation. We talk about how we feel, or the
details of a situation, and the other person responds with something like, “it
can’t be that bad,” “you must have been mistaken,” or, “you’re
too sensitive.” Even professional-grade reframings can come across as lack of
belief in what we’re saying. If we’ve experienced persistent invalidation, we
may internalize that, and find ourselves saying to ourselves and others, “It’s
not that bad,” “I’m making a fuss over nothing,” and doubt our own perceptions
and emotions.
The
usual responses to invalidation go one of two ways. Sometimes thoughts and
feelings get more intense. Sometimes we numb and shut down or push them away.
It’s normal for invalidation to produce increased arousal. Our emotions have
come with a message, and the message isn’t being heard. We lose trust in
someone else’s ability to listen and believe what we say. We lose trust in our
own feelings and the capacity to listen to them.
Effective
emotion regulation is a blend of accepting, experiencing and expressing
emotion, and actively regulating and changing emotion. Les Greenberg refers to
this as emotional wisdom, knowing when to be changed by emotion and when to
change emotion.
Before doing this we have to
identify and label the emotion and make sense of what its message is. Primary
emotions are like a spotlight that turns on to show us what needs attention.
When we’ve experienced pervasive invalidation, this can be a real challenge.
By using validation strategies, you
learn to recognize and use your experience of emotion. This re-establishes
wise-mind, adaptive use of emotional experiences to identify what works and is
effective. When we have clarity about emotion, the messenger doesn’t need to
keep delivering the message, and we can naturally move into, “Okay, this is
what’s going on, what can I do about it?”
Emotion processing takes time. It
can’t be rushed, but it can be helped. Confirm and focus on what is experienced
before offering problem-solving
strategies to get to the desired goals. Be guided by the intent to reduce
arousal and cue adaptive emotions.
When you validate a difficult
emotion that’s been avoided, it increases connection and acceptance of
emotional experience and expression. It may be exactly this shifting that is
key to transforming stuckness into a way forward. This is fantastic for us, and
can also deepen our connections when we use validation with others.
Validation is a key component of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Skills. It’s the V in VITALS, and
the V in DEAR MAN GIVE FAST. It’s an important skill, but if we’ve experienced
invalidation more than validation, it can be hard to know what validation looks
like and how to do it effectively.
What Do I Validate?
Validate that the problems are
important, that a task is difficult, that emotional pain or a sense of being
out of control is justifiable, and that there is wisdom in the ultimate goals,
even if not in the particular means currently being used to try to reach those
goals.
Validate location perspective.
Unless we believe that someone truly understands our dilemma, exactly how
painful, difficult to change, or important a problem is, we won’t trust that
the other person’s solutions are appropriate or adequate. Unless we radically
accept awareness of our own pain, difficulty, problem importance, and awareness
of where we want to get to, we’re not fully aware of where we ourselves are.
Without that validation of location
perspective, understanding and the ability to facilitate change get blocked. Everyone
needs to be on the same page with the experience of what the problem is and
what the goal is or we’ll be running at cross purposes, or fighting with
ourselves. It’s important to know where one is starting from, and where one
wants to go.
How?—Six Levels of Validation
Level
1: Being Present.
Holding someone’s hand when they are
having a painful medical treatment, listening with your whole mind and doing
nothing but listening to a child describe their day in first grade, and going
to a friend’s house at midnight to sit with her while she cries because a
supposed friend told lies about her are all examples of being present. Often we’re
uncomfortable with others’ intense emotion because we don't know what to say.
Just being present, paying complete attention to the person in a nonjudgmental
way, is often the answer.
Being present for yourself means
acknowledging and sitting with your internal experience rather than avoiding or
pushing it away, which is not easy when it’s intense. Being mindful of your own
emotion is the first step to accepting your emotion.
Be One Mindful. Give all your
attention to the person you are validating. Use gentle returns to keep your
focus there. Listen and observe.
Level
2: Accurate Reflection.
Summarize what you have heard from
someone else or summarize your own feelings. When done in an authentic manner,
with the intent of understanding the experience without judging it, accurate
reflection is validating. Non-judgment is where you want your focus, to avoid
doing this in an artificial, sing-song way, or when you’re self-validating,
avoiding sneaky self-judgment and criticism.
This can help separate thought from emotion.
“So basically I’m feeling pretty angry,” would be a self-reflection. “Sounds
like you’re angry he didn’t call you back,” could be accurate reflection by
someone else.
Use active listening; restate what
you have heard. Observe and describe non-judgmentally.
Level
3: Tune In and Guess.
People vary in their ability to know
their own feelings. We may confuse different types of emotional arousal, like
anxiety and excitement, or excitement and happiness. We may mask our feelings
if we have learned that others don’t react well to our sensitivity.
We may have difficulty
acknowledging, accurately identifying and tuning in with ourselves if we
weren’t free to experience and express emotion in the past. 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 name 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. You may guess wrong and
the person could correct you. It’s her emotion and she is the only one who
knows how she feels. Accepting her correction is validating.
Guess what the other person might be
feeling or thinking, from verbal information and nonverbal cues. Accept
corrections.
Level
4: Put it in Context.
Your experiences, your physical and
psychological conditions, current and past living situations, all 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 your not wanting to be around my dog.”
Another friend was raised by
alcoholic parents; she put up with constant lies and raising her siblings. She
just found out her 17-year-old was at a party drinking. You say to her,
“Hearing your outlook, based on your home environment when you were raised, it
makes sense you’d respond so angrily.”
Self-validation would be
understanding your own reactions in the context of your past experiences and
current situation.
Understand behavior and reactions in
terms of both history and current situation. Restate past and connect it to
current issue.
Level
5: Normalizing.
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 the first time
is scary for anyone.”
Express that the emotions are normal
for anyone in that situation.
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.
Be careful of making comparisons and
be mindful how much time you spend talking about your feelings and experiences.
Be mindful of the possibility of Trojan advice-giving, sneaking in discussing
how you coped. I’ve done it, out of a sheer desire to want to rescue this
person from a pain I know all too well, or rescue myself from what seems to be
the same situation over again. It’s normal to want to stop the suffering. But this
can pressure the other person to explain why your solution wouldn’t work for
them, or move out of their current experience, indicating that their feelings
and thoughts are not acceptable.
Demonstrate understanding the
emotion on a very deep level, sharing that experience as equals. Express your
truth. Focus on shared emotions more than details or similarities; gently
return your focus to the current situation and emotions of whom you are
validating.
Practice Makes Progress
Validate at the highest possible
level with yourself and with others. Practice is the key to making validation a
natural part of the way you communicate.
Accompanying handout here.
Sources/further reading:
