Have you ever been scrolling on (insert your preferred social media app) and find yourself drawn to some particular post describing what feels like an episode from your own life? And then you frantically share this with your partner/children/close friends with many laughing/crying emojis following this? Not only have I done this, but I have also been on the receiving end of them. The thing that draws us so powerfully to love and share these is that we feel that somewhere out there someone else is also experiencing something similar to us and understands our feelings and that our feelings therefore make sense. We want to feel like we aren’t alone because others understand our plight. Validation is known amongst mental health professionals to be one of the most powerful emotional regulators – feeling understood (even when the problem isn’t being fixed).
However validation can get a bad rap. You know the kind that can get your teenager feeling more frustrated than understood. It might sound like we are saying the right things, yet it ma y seem not to work. So how does it get so messed up? The key with validation is that it may not be any particular formulaic phrase, but rather communication that suggests that the person’s feelings, thoughts and behaviours make sense and that you can understand how they may have come to think, feel or act in this particular way. If you are just saying the words without meaning it, it can come across as the opposite – it may seem invalidating or an attempt to merely ‘shut them down’.
To really understand validation, we have to know what invalidation is. To be invalidating is to dismiss another person’s concerns or feelings, possibly writing it off as being ‘overly dramatic’ or ‘manipulative’ or ‘silly’, or it may be simply that you don’t provide sufficient time and interest, thus communicating that you see the issue as less important. Sometimes these communications are intentional, but sometimes they are not. Let me be clear though – we have all (us psychologists included) been invalidating to others at one time or another, or in fact many times. We can repair these mostly, however there are clear advantages in striving to understand and be interested, therefore providing validation in the first place.
But let’s point out the pink elephant in the room that many parents present to me as their main obstacle in validating their child or teen… but what if you don’t agree with them? It’s important to know validating does not mean agreeing. This is where we can get caught up many times with our children or teenagers. We may (quite understandably) feel reluctant to agree with them on a particular issue that worries/angers/saddens/frustrates them and if we don’t have a clear grasp on validation, we may feel that this looks very similar to agreement. Jill Rathus and Alec Miller, authors of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy Skills for Adolescents (2015) write in their skills manual how to do this skilfully without agreeing. Their tips can be summarised as:
- Actively listen. Make eye contact and stay focused.
- Be mindful of verbal and non-verbal interactions to avoid invalidating with rolled eyes, sighing, walking away, making light of it.
- Observe what the other person is feeling in the moment. Look for a word that describes the feeling.
- Reflect the feeling back without judgement. The goal is to communicate that you understand how the other person feels eg “It makes sense that you’re angry”.
- Show tolerance – look for how the feelings thoughts or actions make sense given the history and current situation, even if you don’t approve of the behaviour, emotion or action itself.
- Respond in a way that shows you are taking the person seriously (with or without words). The person may not be seeking solution in that moment (eg if they are crying, offering them a tissue or a hug).
The key takeaway here is not to remember specific phrases as such and pull them out of the toolkit when you can see your teen or younger child boiling over about something that might have happened with a sibling or at school or because they didn’t hand in their homework, but instead focus in on hearing what they are saying – even if what they are saying is hard to get your head around, observe the feeling and look for ways to make sense of it. Ask yourself – what is it about this situation that is so challenging for them?
Another pitfall that I have seen working with families is that parents may feel that to be a good parent, they must be able to solve the problem with their child. In some situations – this is absolutely possible, though I would caution that it is never advisable to skip the validation step – this extra pause and opportunity to make the other person feel that their feelings make sense before trying to solve it is so important. However, some situations are not immediately solvable. Some things require us to have space to mull over options for a period of time – particularly when it comes to friendship issues. What we or our young person or our partner might need in that moment is to feel like these feelings are understandable given the person’s perspective on it. For example, somebody who might have been waiting for a repair person at their home that doesn’t end up coming may have an entirely different level of feeling about it, depending on the situation that led into it. That is, if you had arranged to have the day off work and you were worried about all the things mounting up not being there and you were also juggling how you would ferry children around versus a day when you would have been at home anyway doing other things. The same event has occurred but the context will of course vastly impact on how frustrated you will feel given that same situation. When it comes to our children, these contextual factors may not be immediately evident to us and on first glance, hard for us to perceive. It is only when we bring an open and engaged mind that we can be in the best position to understand and provide validation.