It can feel frustrating and isolating when others don’t want to acknowledge our emotions.
Emotional validation involves recognizing, understanding, and accepting another personsemotional experience.
Validating emotions differs from invalidating behavior, where a persons emotional experiences are rejected, ignored, or judged.
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Validation can come from other people or from within.
Self-validation involves recognizing and accepting your own thoughts and feelings.
How to Practice Emotional Validation
Emotional validation is a skill that requires practice.
Improving it can bolster your relationships with others and help you validate yourownthoughts and feelings.
Here are a few key strategies.
Identify and Acknowledge the Emotion
Acknowledge the emotion that the person is having.
For example, imagine that your loved one is behaving angrily toward you.
If they havent communicated their feelings, you might say, “You seem really angry.
Is that whats going on?”
Ask the person what is causing their response.
You might say, “What is it that’s making you feel that way?”
Validate the Emotion
Imagine that the person is able to communicate the source of the anger.
In this example, they’re angry because you are 15 minutes late coming home from work.
To you, their anger seems unwarranted or disproportionate to the offense.
You might say, “I know you are feeling angry because I was 15 minutes late coming home.
It was not my intention to anger you; I was stuck in traffic.
But I can see that waiting for me made you upset.”
You don’t need to apologize for your behavior if you dont feel you did anything wrong.
Sometimes, just acknowleding the other person’s feelings can actually defuse the situation.
“I can see how you would feel that way.”
“That must be really hard.”
“I feel the same way.”
“How frustrating!”
“I bet you’re frustrated.”
“I’m here for you.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“You should feel lucky.”
“You are too sensitive.”
“Don’t be such a wimp.”
“If you hadn’t done that it wouldn’t have happened.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
They are more likely to open up and communicate honestly when they feel they are being seen and heard.
However, you don’t have to resign yourself to being treated poorly.
If your loved one is behaving inappropriately oraggressively, removing yourself from the situation is your best option.
In any case, it probably won’t make the situation worse.
This may be one factor in the development of the emotional dysregulation characteristic of the disorder.
People with BPD typically have very strong emotional responses to events that seem minor to observers.
Takeaways
Emotional validation is an important tool that can improve your interpersonal communication and relationships.
Fortunately, it is a skill you could learn and work to improve with practice.
Emotional validation makes us feel accepted.
An emotionally validated person typically can regulate their own emotions appropriately and self-soothe when feelings threaten to overwhelm.
Listen to, acknowledge, and rephrase what the person is saying.
The point is to help them feel seen and heard, not to change or minimize their emotions.
If you reach an impasse, the person responds inappropriately, or you feel uncomfortable, leave the situation.
Say something like, “I want to talk with you, but I see you’re upset.
Let’s come back to this later.”
Galen, G.Validation: Making sense of the emotional turmoil in borderline personality disorder.
McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School.
2017;27(4):425-438. doi:10.1037/int0000044
