It can be a challenging skill to apply, and you need to use your judgement to discern whether the other person is in a place to engage with what you say.

One comment I'd make is the difference between "valid" and "rational". Emotions and feelings are always "valid", in the sense that they are a natural consequence of events and prior conditioning. But feelings are rarely "rational" - they often don't reflect the complete truth of a situation. For example, suppose someone says "Jennifer sent me this short snippy reply today, I swear she's upset with me about something and won't tell me what it is". It is perfectly legitimate to validate that you can see where that fear comes from, but nevertheless offer alternative possibilites: maybe Jennifer is going through a tough time personally, or has a really tight work schedule at the moment. You don't have to fully buy into someone's thoughts and feelings in order to help them process them. In fact this is rarely going to help.

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Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Emotions and feelings are always "valid", in the sense that they are a natural consequence of events and prior conditioning.

If “validating” someone’s emotions comes down to simply saying that, yes, I agree you felt that way, then I suppose that’s true.

But when people talk about validating other people’s emotions it implies that they’re saying the emotional response was valid for the circumstances.

I have someone in my extended family who has a strong tendency to catastrophize and assume the worst. When she was in a relationship with someone who constantly validated her emotions and reactions it was disastrous. It took someone more level headed to start telling her when her reactions were not valid to certain situations to begin stabilizing the behavior.

There’s a hand wavey, feel good idea where we’re supposed to believe everyone’s lived experience and emotions are valid, but some people have problems with incorrect emotional reactions. Validating these can become reinforcing for that behavior.

I’m not saying we should start doubting every emotional reaction or white knighting everything, but it’s unhealthy to take a stance that validating other people’s emotions is de facto good.

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n4r9 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I quite like the definition on Wikipedia:

> Emotional validation is a process which involves acknowledging and accepting another individual's inner emotional experience, without necessarily agreeing with or justifying it, and possibly also communicating that acceptance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_validation

It sounds perhaps like your family member's former partner was going further than validating the emotions, and trying to justify or prove them right. But this is quibbling over semantics; I think we both agree that challenging someone is sometimes the kindest thing to do.

	▲	Aurornis 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I understand the academic concept, but the word "necessarily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that definition. In real human conversation, when someone is expressing an emotion they aren't looking for other people to confirm that they are indeed experiencing that emotion. That's not even a question up for debate. They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a valid response to the situation. The overly academic definition doesn't reflect how people communicate in the real world. There's also a factor of consistency over time: It's no big deal to go along with someone venting from time to time, but when someone you're close to is overreacting to everything and having unreasonable emotional reactions all the time, validating those emotions consistently is going to be viewed as an implicit endorsement. > It sounds perhaps like your family member's former partner was going further than validating the emotions, and trying to justify or prove them right. Not in this case. Just going along with it.

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lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It took someone more level headed to start telling her when her reactions were not valid to certain situations to begin stabilizing the behavior.

I guess at the risk of splitting hairs, I think it's more likely they stopped misappropriating more than they started invalidating. I see a difference between "you shouldn't feel that way" and "I disagree with that conclusion" such that one can logically say both (well, the former being "it's okay to feel that way") in the same breath.

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nuancebydefault an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Indeed, the more strong the feeling, the less rational it can become, even though the feeling is there for good reasons. A pure rational solution won't help, pure empathy as well not.