Validation: Fostering Connection

Repost from 04/13/18

One of the greatest strengths we have as humans is our ability to connect with others.  A necessary aspect of this is showing others that we are listening and have heard them.  It’s pretty tough to feel connected to someone if you don’t feel like they’re listening or hearing you!  That’s where validation comes in.  Validation helps us to show that we understand or are trying to understand another person’s experience, even if we don’t agree with the results of that experience.  This can be a vital aspect of managing your relationship with a loved one as he or she is engaging with recovery from an eating disorder.

Have you ever been in a highly emotional state and felt like your words weren’t coming out of your mouth the way you wanted them to?  It’s really common for us to feel like we’re having trouble expressing ourselves when we’re highly emotional, and the experience of treatment is often quite an emotional one.  It’s important to recognize another person’s perspective in order to lower the emotional intensity of interpersonal interactions so that you can stay in conversation.  When you feel unheard, how likely are you to remain engaged in an interaction?  Most people will shut down or get defensive when they feel unheard.  Decreasing the emotional intensity also allows you to be more connected to the rational part of your brain so that you can express yourself more accurately and effectively.  That also makes it easier for other people to recognize and validate your emotions, and the cycle continues.

So what is it?  Validation communicates to other people that their feelings, thoughts, or actions make sense in a certain situation.  It’s always important to not trivialize other people’s experiences and to let people know that you’ve heard them.  It also helps us to show others that we’re listening, that we understand them, and that we’re not judging them.  It helps to show that you care about your relationship.

A lot of people ask me about validating if they don’t agree with someone’s point of view.  Isn’t that lying?  The good news is that validation does not equal agreement.  It simply shows that you understand where someone else is coming from.  In the case of someone who struggles with an eating disorder, “It makes sense that you exercise for hours before eating because it sounds like you feel unworthy of having food otherwise.”  It’s always possible to add an “and” to the end of that statement.  So, for the example above adding, “…and you’re missing class/sleep/time with your friends and family because you’re working out so much.”

How to do it

Validation can be as simple as engaging in active listening.  Think about the last time you were having a conversation with someone and then realized that he was looking at his phone, or reading the newspaper, or seemed to be somewhere else mentally.  That likely didn’t feel very good, and I would imagine you didn’t feel heard.  To show someone you’re listening, give her your full attention.  Maintain eye contact, nod at times, and be mindful of your reactions whether they’re verbal or non-verbal.  It’s helpful to reflect what you’re hearing or what the other person may be feeling here.  Think of saying something along the lines of, “I see that you’re really sad about this”, or “Given what’s happening, it makes sense that you’re disappointed.  You want to make sure that you show people that their feelings are valid, even if their behaviors may not be.  You can validate someone’s anger with themselves around a relapse without validating the behavior that led to it.

It can be really challenging to validate if you don’t agree with someone.  Perhaps you’re discussing the potential to enter into treatment with your loved one, and she does not want to do so.  You don’t agree with her decision because you’re worried and you want her to get help.  You can reflect what you’re hearing and join your own voice to that reflection with “and”.  So, “I hear that you don’t think you need to go into treatment right now, and I’m really concerned about your anxiety and your relationship with food.”  You can validate emotions even if they don’t make sense to you.  This doesn’t mean that you need to hollowly say “I understand”, but rather saying, “I see that this conversation is really hard for you”, or “It seems like you’re angry right now.”  It’s so much easier to have a connected conversation if both parties feel heard.

Self-Validation

The same way that it’s helpful to validate others, it’s equally important to validate yourself.  This means that you can apply the same skills above to the way you speak to yourself internally.  Doing this can help to take the judgement out of your own emotional experience, and can also help us to engage more effectively with others as it helps us to reduce our emotional and physical arousal that can lead to difficulty communicating.  It can help us to access parts of ourselves that are typically harder to reach when we’re experiencing high emotions.

Challenges

I don’t want to pretend that validating others and yourself will always be easy.  It can be especially difficult to validate someone when you’re trying to send a strong message or really get your point across.  It can also be easy to slip into thinking that validation is simply reassurance or praise.  Validation doesn’t happen when we try to connect with someone by sharing our own experience in a way that ignores theirs.  While it can feel like connection to share your own experience with grief when a friend is struggling, it can also feel like that pain wasn’t heard.  Finally, it can be easy to get into problem-solving mode when you’re trying to validate.  Often, this means that we focus on the problem or behavior rather than the emotion behind it.  If someone says that they feel guilty because they skipped therapy, it’s feels easy to tell them to go to their appointment next time rather than saying, “That makes sense because you behaved in a way that bothers you.”

The Main Point

Validating others and ourselves can be really hard.  It’s also incredibly important.  Validation helps to make sure that people are truly connecting and that we feel heard in our relationships.  It helps to keep emotional arousal at a lower level which helps us to access both our emotional and logical selves.  These skills are helpful, and can take a lot of practice.  Like anything new, it can feel awkward and clunky to try them at first, and they are worth it.