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.

The emotional world is vast. From what I hear here, there is a collapsing of a couple things all under 'validation'.

Emotional processing, in my experience, is completely separate from action. I hear that your family member had her actions validated - what she decided to do.

An emotion itself can be complex, scary and counter-intuitive. In my experience, always valid - but that doesn't mean you have the right reasons. It's often very difficult to get the right environment to actively explore where an emotion is coming from - purely because of the reactions in other people - which try to suppress, deflect, minimize, etc.

Strangely, simply agreeing or validating someone's outcome is actually a way of minimizing or deflecting the scary expression. Let's not go deeper, let's not figure out where this is coming from - you just go with your gut and act.

Getting to the root of an emotion can come in waves and many iterations. It can be incredibly useful to try and completely unhook action from it.

I've had very strong emotions from events that were almost always "right emotion, wrong reason/story" and I've slowly corrected the 'why' multiple times over.

A lot of those corrections took removing people from my life that made it hard to feel or have access to those difficult emotions.

I wonder if you value that family member or just the idea of them. Value them only when they're 'stable'? Want to get in the muck with them to find where instability comes from? It's okay to not. It's less okay IMO to stay connected to someone you require change from. If you don't like behavior, say it and leave/create much space. Give them agency to choose, agency to fail, agency to be someone you don't like, agency to not be okay.

> They're looking for people to share in that anger, sadness, or frustration and confirm that it's a valid response to the situation.

Which is what the whole "empathy movement" of recent years seems to emphasize. The problem is that when empathy is unmoored from the objective good, this can become scandalous (not in the sense that it causes outrage, but in the older sense that it encourages evil). Not every response is a valid response. You must be able to identify whether something is good, you must refrain from actively enabling things that are bad, but you must discern whether to correct, and if so, how to correct. Not every problem is yours to correct. Busybodies think they are.

(N.b. the Catholic Church, drawing on ethical distinctions, makes distinctions between moral principle, the objectively moral status of particular acts in light of moral principles, and the pastoral needs of particular persons. So, e.g., while prostitution as a practice is roundly condemned as a matter of principle, particular prostitutes may be treated gently. This is especially true if he/she expresses remorse for the way he/she has lived his/her life (the parable of the prodigal son comes to mind).)