Your Feelings Are Real but This Doesn't Mean They're Valid

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(Audio version here)

“Your feelings are real, but may not be an accurate representation of your current reality.”

This concept (paraphrased) was presented to me by an excellent clinical psychologist who specialised in schema therapy in 2021 and produced something of a lightbulb moment. Like (I suspect) very many people, I held an unexamined assumption that if I feel like something is real, then there are two options. Either it is real and my feelings are appropriate and to be accepted or it is not real and I have no business having those feelings and they must be dismissed. That one can have feelings which are absolutely real and produced by something absolutely real but they could also not represent reality, and the important thing to do is investigate the cause of the contradiction with the aim of resolving psychological problems and functioning better in the real world was not something I had thought through in a systematic way.

My inclination has always been to become impatient with myself for having inconvenient emotional responses when I am trying to engage with what is true and what is ethical. Thus I responded to my tendency to take personally the opinions of my character as defined by the deeply uncharitable critics one picks up when one writes about politics and culture online by scolding myself to stop being so sensitive. This did not help me to stop feeling that way and I suffered a major depressive episode which put me out of action for nearly a year. Schema therapy helped, however, by helping me to address those feelings at the source rather than trying to scold them away. Other people may be more inclined to become impatient with realities than do not align with their feelings and find ways to dismiss those and prioritise feelings-based narratives. (More on this below). Of course, in reality, we are all inclined to various degrees to avoid examining certain feelings or certain realities because we are human and our psychologies and our social world are messy and complicated. However, I think culturally we have been moving towards norms and expectations which prioritise validating feelings and narratives over caring about what is true, well-evidenced and well-reasoned on both a psychological and political level.

The psychotherapist, Seerut Chawla, whose approach to addressing contemporary political and cultural issues from a compassionate but plainspoken, evidence-based psychological standpoint is one I find particularly valuable, has been addressing this issue on X. Seerut wrote,

No, your feelings are not “valid.” Your feelings are ‘real’ in that they exist & you feel them- but they are not objective reality nor necessarily giving you accurate information about objective reality. Emotions are meant to be felt, meanings explored, or just coexisted with. Not given a rubber stamp of “validity” that instantaneously stems the flow of any possible introspection.

Indeed! Although the position that everybody has their own truth and everybody’s feelings and perception are equally valid has been used as a (misguided) way to be respectful and inclusive of a variety of worldviews for decades, we have been seeing the statement “My feelings are valid” used increasingly in a political context for at least the last decade, primarily from the Critical Social Justice (CSJ) movement. In this context, with the CSJ focus on ‘lived experience’ (perceptions) as an epistemology that should be regarded as highly or more highly than “correspondence with reality” it is not that everybody’s feelings are valid but that those of members of minority groups which correspond with CSJ views are valid and everybody else has a responsibility to validate them. The lived experience and feelings of women who don’t believe they live in a patriarchal rape culture, black and brown people who do not believe critical theories of race best represent or address issues of racism or same-sex attracted people who decline to be ‘queer’ are definitely not valid.

However, we are also seeing an increase in expectations to validate people’s feelings over objective reality or empirical evidence from the “post-truth” right. See Donald’s Trump’s recent announcement that the tragic air collision which claimed 67 lives was caused by DEI policies before any investigation has taken place, and his justification for claiming this, “I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t.” We are expected to accept his gut feeling on the matter and it seems a depressing number of people are willing to. See too the subset of the gender critical movement arguing that disgust feelings should be enough to ban things and principled responses pointing out the importance of interrogating those feelings with ethical principles and evidence of harm.

This is, of course, the specific problem with politicised expectations to validate people’s feelings. Even if this were a good thing to do consistently (which it is not), it is never applied consistently but politically. The feelings which are to be regarded as valid will always be those which align with those of whichever political or religious ideology has the most power at any time. The feelings of those who dissent will not only be invalid, but ‘part of the problem.’ This is, I believe, yet another weaponisation of pseudo-psychological concepts in the service of illiberal political agendas, and I am glad to see an increasing number of people in the evidence-based psychological, psychiatric and therapeutic professions addressing such abuses of their fields.

I am grateful to Seerut for pointing out both that feelings are real and that it is important to feel them and, when they are causing problems, explore their meanings, and that they may not provide an accurate representation of reality. To be dismissive of one’s own difficult emotions or those of others is not helpful, because those unexamined feelings will continue to exist and have a negative impact on a personal and/or social level. To validate all feelings uncritically as a representation of reality is incoherent and contradictory and does not help the individual whose feelings do not align with reality. When a specific political subset of feelings are mandated to be validated by legal, institutional or social pressure with little to no regard to their correspondence with reality, we are in a very dangerous, illiberal situation and our ability to produce knowledge and resolve conflict is seriously undermined.