The problem is in the use of the word “valid.” Anywhere else we use that word, to “validate” something, we mean we are checking that something comports with reality, that it is what it is supposed to be. A “validated” measuring tool means it measures what we intend for it to measure. A decade or more of “validating” feelings has brought this usage somewhere it doesn’t belong.
Yes, I think so too. When I looked at definitions, most used a definition of 'true' but some used 'reasonable." I think we can make a case that it can be reasonable or, at least, understandable to have feelings that don't comport with reality in a way that says, "It's not surprising you feel that way. Your emotional responses are natural and they matter." without confirming them as true.
yea, valid feelings are just a form of self appreciation, both by the self and others, seems to miss the next step into the world which stop us from being stupid, or unregulated, or in the world where unpoliced narcissists are voted into office "based" on the vibe
Exactly. For me, the problem was not being self-compassionate about my own feelings of distress but tell myself to stop being so stupid/oversensitive/weak. But two things can be true at once.
1) There is no point in getting distressed about nasty things random strangers say on the internet about a version of me they invented. They can't actually harm me or change who I really am.
2) I do get distressed about this and I do feel as though this harms me and that their narratives about me impact who I actually am.
My tendency was to scold myself saying things like, "What are you? Some kind of special snowflake who can't handle hurty words? Do you believe words are violence now? Is your personality so weak that it can't withstand misrepresentations of it? How is that consistent with everything you argue for? Are you going to be a hypocrite and let yourself feel this way? Or are you going to put your big girl panties on, live up to your own principles and just deal with it."
But this is a false dichotomy. I can both be a person who gets distressed by nasty abuse, find it very difficult to see my principles, beliefs and motivations misrepresented and hate the knowledge that there are thousands of people who would be happy if something bad happened to me and I can be a person who carries on anyway and continues to argue for resilience and not trying to control what other people say. That is actually being principled and resilient.
But my tendency to scold myself about and tell myself to just stop feeling like that wasn't helpful and did not make me stop feeling like that. Instead, I carried on dealing with abuse coming from others and harsh self-criticism coming from myself until I was waking up in the mornings dreading the day and wondering how I would get through it. One day it got too overwhelming and I made a half-hearted attempt on my own life which I regretted almost immediately but required me to go to the hospital and from there got referred to the mental health Crisis team.
What I needed to do was stop telling those negative feelings that they were unreasonable and stupid and weak and to go away and instead be kind to myself and say, "It is natural to have this kind of emotional response and having them does not make you an unreasonable, weak or inconsistent person. It makes you a human. Let yourself feel those feelings and accept them, talk kindly and reasonably to yourself about them and think about what you can do to manage them and take care of yourself when you are distressed."
And the maddest thing is that this is exactly what I would say to somebody else who told me they felt that way! Automatically and without hesitation. I would never dream of calling someone else who confided in me that they were struggling to cope with online abuse that they were being a weak and pathetic snowflake and needed to get a grip. But I'll say that to myself!
In this sense, I can understand the phrase "Your feelings are valid" if this means "It is natural for you to feel this way given the situation you are in and having normal human feelings and stress responses does not make you a bad or weak person." I think self-critical people often do need to hear that. But if "Your feelings are valid" means "You are factually correct that the opinions of nasty online trolls should matter to you and can harm you and change who you are as a person", then no, that was not true. Validating that would not help at all. There's a need to move from "Accept those feelings as natural human ones" to "How can you think about this differently, perceive it more accurately and become less affected by it?"
Had someone just yesterday ( on Bluesky) call me a “nasty, hateful Terf!” or some such (a thread on women in sports). My first foray into Terfdom! Certainly not the first time i’ve encountered vitriolic responses or hate mail or ugliness, especially on the internet. I know the hurt feelings. But yesterday I’m just like, WTF dude! This is so far from a reasoned discussion. Maybe it’s because I’m old (74) and have seen so much of it? Any more & I just resign myself to misunderstanding, differences of opinion, even anger at me for idk know what. I try to be reasonable 🤷♀️
latter day stoics would step in here to mansplain, but I prefer more Buddhist practices, or neo-pyrrhonism, on 'appreciation'. The is something in the current rise in the chatter of the term self-regulation that is important. As a male I get more punitive towards others rather than this inwards talk, when I get the "goose energy" as we call it (we keep geese) when something is amiss representation wise. However if I do something in error myself the pain is much worse.
I didn’t learn how to stay present to my feelings, rather than trying to ‘fix’ or otherwise avoid them, until my fifties. (What helped me was a little book by Tina Gilbertson called “Constructive Wallowing: How to Beat Bad Feelings by Letting Yourself Have Them.”) It’s a skill that gives you resilience because, as you’ve discovered, it allows you to tolerate the emotional discomfort that comes with speaking up for what you believe.
In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff link Critical Social Justice ideology, aka wokeism, to a lack of emotional self-regulation skills. Wokeism teaches people to indulge rather than counter the cognitive distortions behind their feelings, such as the all-or-nothing thinking that sees everyone who disagrees with them as evil. (And of course, the woke don’t have a monopoly on this kind of thing!)
Aggressive demands that other people validate one’s feelings – for example by colluding against their will in the pretence that a man can literally become a woman – can come partly from poor self-regulation skills and a resulting dependence on others for validation.
Simply naming a feeling every time it recurs until it fades away – and they always do – helps metabolise it and restore one’s equilibrium.
Thank you, Helen, for writing about one of the key skills of emotional literacy and how it has helped you deal with vicious bullying. Your acknowledgment of your normal, human vulnerability makes your resilience all the more inspiring.
I also wonder about the intense self-doubt that is surely driving the need to have others validate one's feeling as reality? I'm thinking here mainly of those who feel they are the opposite sex. Why do they need so much external validation of those feelings? Surely it would be healthier to grow one's own confidence in what one believes (preferably using objective reasoning and evidence, rather than relying solely on feelings)?
The world needs tall poppies; people who can stand up for truth, reality and a sound sense of justice. How could such people emerge in communities where everyone needs others to support their views of themselves and the world? Communities that eject anyone who raises questions, because to do so is to deny people's very existence, or so they say.
I see you as one of the tall poppies, Helen. I'm sorry to hear that the relentless trolling took the toll it did, but also heartened that you're coming back, perhaps better resourced having learned to honour the presence of difficult feelings, and to explore their meanings.
I'm reminded of a Buddhist teaching of the worldly winds, a set of 4 pairs such as pleasure and pain - life gives us both halves of the pair, no matter how hard we try to only have one half. Another pair is fame and infamy.
This formulation and way of thinking is, admittedly, associated with, yet in no way exclusive to NLP, just as ‘treat others as you would like to be treated yourself’ is associated with, yet in no way exclusive to Christianity. Please open your apparently very closed mind.
My response to your ‘NLP? Yuck!’ post recently was prompted by what appeared to be your wholesale rejection of all things NLP, when my own experience of its teachings and practitioners has been both very positive and very negative. Likewise with Christianity. My intention was merely to implore you not to throw out the baby with the bath water.
Googling the pros and cons of Neuro Linguistic Programming throws up a useful summary. The following video also explores the topic in greater depth: https://youtu.be/jSSFYKqc0xk?si=hLU3fVJf9hoxOhhq
What you 'feel' or how you 'identify' is real to you, but not necessarily to everyone else. Donald Trump really believes he won the 2020 election but no one seemed willing to 'validate' his feeling by telling Joe Biden to step aside. The crazy dude in the street raging that he's Napoleon isn't; regardless of what he believes. The diff between the far left and the rest of us is they demand we go along with their delusions. I don't deny the man who thinks he's a woman feels that way; but he has no right to demand everyone else accept him as that if they don't want to fuel his obvious delusion. Me, I'm okay with him as long as he stays out of my public restroom.
Yes, but he spoke without presenting or even citing this evidence, instead citing “common sense.” There is no reason to believe that he knew of the evidence you just cited, and every reason to believe he was motivated by his own narcissism and anti-woke agenda, given his relationship to truth and evidence in general. Your read of this situation is extremely generous toward Trump, and undeservedly so.
Right. But instead of citing facts, he appealed to a “trust me, I have common sense” approach. And there are many, many reasons not to trust that he is being truthful. That’s why I say your assessment is very generous.
Agreed. His comments especially in the written blurb they posted made me think of the FAA hiring scandal. Although I do think trump tends to over generalize and not necessarily critically think through his assumptions
The problem is in the use of the word “valid.” Anywhere else we use that word, to “validate” something, we mean we are checking that something comports with reality, that it is what it is supposed to be. A “validated” measuring tool means it measures what we intend for it to measure. A decade or more of “validating” feelings has brought this usage somewhere it doesn’t belong.
Yes, I think so too. When I looked at definitions, most used a definition of 'true' but some used 'reasonable." I think we can make a case that it can be reasonable or, at least, understandable to have feelings that don't comport with reality in a way that says, "It's not surprising you feel that way. Your emotional responses are natural and they matter." without confirming them as true.
yea, valid feelings are just a form of self appreciation, both by the self and others, seems to miss the next step into the world which stop us from being stupid, or unregulated, or in the world where unpoliced narcissists are voted into office "based" on the vibe
Exactly. For me, the problem was not being self-compassionate about my own feelings of distress but tell myself to stop being so stupid/oversensitive/weak. But two things can be true at once.
1) There is no point in getting distressed about nasty things random strangers say on the internet about a version of me they invented. They can't actually harm me or change who I really am.
2) I do get distressed about this and I do feel as though this harms me and that their narratives about me impact who I actually am.
My tendency was to scold myself saying things like, "What are you? Some kind of special snowflake who can't handle hurty words? Do you believe words are violence now? Is your personality so weak that it can't withstand misrepresentations of it? How is that consistent with everything you argue for? Are you going to be a hypocrite and let yourself feel this way? Or are you going to put your big girl panties on, live up to your own principles and just deal with it."
But this is a false dichotomy. I can both be a person who gets distressed by nasty abuse, find it very difficult to see my principles, beliefs and motivations misrepresented and hate the knowledge that there are thousands of people who would be happy if something bad happened to me and I can be a person who carries on anyway and continues to argue for resilience and not trying to control what other people say. That is actually being principled and resilient.
But my tendency to scold myself about and tell myself to just stop feeling like that wasn't helpful and did not make me stop feeling like that. Instead, I carried on dealing with abuse coming from others and harsh self-criticism coming from myself until I was waking up in the mornings dreading the day and wondering how I would get through it. One day it got too overwhelming and I made a half-hearted attempt on my own life which I regretted almost immediately but required me to go to the hospital and from there got referred to the mental health Crisis team.
What I needed to do was stop telling those negative feelings that they were unreasonable and stupid and weak and to go away and instead be kind to myself and say, "It is natural to have this kind of emotional response and having them does not make you an unreasonable, weak or inconsistent person. It makes you a human. Let yourself feel those feelings and accept them, talk kindly and reasonably to yourself about them and think about what you can do to manage them and take care of yourself when you are distressed."
And the maddest thing is that this is exactly what I would say to somebody else who told me they felt that way! Automatically and without hesitation. I would never dream of calling someone else who confided in me that they were struggling to cope with online abuse that they were being a weak and pathetic snowflake and needed to get a grip. But I'll say that to myself!
In this sense, I can understand the phrase "Your feelings are valid" if this means "It is natural for you to feel this way given the situation you are in and having normal human feelings and stress responses does not make you a bad or weak person." I think self-critical people often do need to hear that. But if "Your feelings are valid" means "You are factually correct that the opinions of nasty online trolls should matter to you and can harm you and change who you are as a person", then no, that was not true. Validating that would not help at all. There's a need to move from "Accept those feelings as natural human ones" to "How can you think about this differently, perceive it more accurately and become less affected by it?"
Had someone just yesterday ( on Bluesky) call me a “nasty, hateful Terf!” or some such (a thread on women in sports). My first foray into Terfdom! Certainly not the first time i’ve encountered vitriolic responses or hate mail or ugliness, especially on the internet. I know the hurt feelings. But yesterday I’m just like, WTF dude! This is so far from a reasoned discussion. Maybe it’s because I’m old (74) and have seen so much of it? Any more & I just resign myself to misunderstanding, differences of opinion, even anger at me for idk know what. I try to be reasonable 🤷♀️
latter day stoics would step in here to mansplain, but I prefer more Buddhist practices, or neo-pyrrhonism, on 'appreciation'. The is something in the current rise in the chatter of the term self-regulation that is important. As a male I get more punitive towards others rather than this inwards talk, when I get the "goose energy" as we call it (we keep geese) when something is amiss representation wise. However if I do something in error myself the pain is much worse.
“Your feelings are real, but may not be an accurate representation of your current reality.”
That should be on billboards all across the land.
Politicization in the psychology field appears to be getting worse from what I hear. Not sure this problem will get better anytime soon.
I didn’t learn how to stay present to my feelings, rather than trying to ‘fix’ or otherwise avoid them, until my fifties. (What helped me was a little book by Tina Gilbertson called “Constructive Wallowing: How to Beat Bad Feelings by Letting Yourself Have Them.”) It’s a skill that gives you resilience because, as you’ve discovered, it allows you to tolerate the emotional discomfort that comes with speaking up for what you believe.
In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff link Critical Social Justice ideology, aka wokeism, to a lack of emotional self-regulation skills. Wokeism teaches people to indulge rather than counter the cognitive distortions behind their feelings, such as the all-or-nothing thinking that sees everyone who disagrees with them as evil. (And of course, the woke don’t have a monopoly on this kind of thing!)
Aggressive demands that other people validate one’s feelings – for example by colluding against their will in the pretence that a man can literally become a woman – can come partly from poor self-regulation skills and a resulting dependence on others for validation.
Simply naming a feeling every time it recurs until it fades away – and they always do – helps metabolise it and restore one’s equilibrium.
Thank you, Helen, for writing about one of the key skills of emotional literacy and how it has helped you deal with vicious bullying. Your acknowledgment of your normal, human vulnerability makes your resilience all the more inspiring.
I also wonder about the intense self-doubt that is surely driving the need to have others validate one's feeling as reality? I'm thinking here mainly of those who feel they are the opposite sex. Why do they need so much external validation of those feelings? Surely it would be healthier to grow one's own confidence in what one believes (preferably using objective reasoning and evidence, rather than relying solely on feelings)?
The world needs tall poppies; people who can stand up for truth, reality and a sound sense of justice. How could such people emerge in communities where everyone needs others to support their views of themselves and the world? Communities that eject anyone who raises questions, because to do so is to deny people's very existence, or so they say.
I see you as one of the tall poppies, Helen. I'm sorry to hear that the relentless trolling took the toll it did, but also heartened that you're coming back, perhaps better resourced having learned to honour the presence of difficult feelings, and to explore their meanings.
I'm reminded of a Buddhist teaching of the worldly winds, a set of 4 pairs such as pleasure and pain - life gives us both halves of the pair, no matter how hard we try to only have one half. Another pair is fame and infamy.
For anyone who's interested. I'm not evangelising, honestly!
https://zenstudiespodcast.com/eight-worldly-winds/
A useful reminder that ‘the (mental/emotional) map is not the territory.’
This formulation and way of thinking is, admittedly, associated with, yet in no way exclusive to NLP, just as ‘treat others as you would like to be treated yourself’ is associated with, yet in no way exclusive to Christianity. Please open your apparently very closed mind.
My response to your ‘NLP? Yuck!’ post recently was prompted by what appeared to be your wholesale rejection of all things NLP, when my own experience of its teachings and practitioners has been both very positive and very negative. Likewise with Christianity. My intention was merely to implore you not to throw out the baby with the bath water.
Googling the pros and cons of Neuro Linguistic Programming throws up a useful summary. The following video also explores the topic in greater depth: https://youtu.be/jSSFYKqc0xk?si=hLU3fVJf9hoxOhhq
What you 'feel' or how you 'identify' is real to you, but not necessarily to everyone else. Donald Trump really believes he won the 2020 election but no one seemed willing to 'validate' his feeling by telling Joe Biden to step aside. The crazy dude in the street raging that he's Napoleon isn't; regardless of what he believes. The diff between the far left and the rest of us is they demand we go along with their delusions. I don't deny the man who thinks he's a woman feels that way; but he has no right to demand everyone else accept him as that if they don't want to fuel his obvious delusion. Me, I'm okay with him as long as he stays out of my public restroom.
Is the need to belong in the warp or weft of these “feelings, therefore validity” concepts? I find myself wondering.
Yes, but he spoke without presenting or even citing this evidence, instead citing “common sense.” There is no reason to believe that he knew of the evidence you just cited, and every reason to believe he was motivated by his own narcissism and anti-woke agenda, given his relationship to truth and evidence in general. Your read of this situation is extremely generous toward Trump, and undeservedly so.
Right. But instead of citing facts, he appealed to a “trust me, I have common sense” approach. And there are many, many reasons not to trust that he is being truthful. That’s why I say your assessment is very generous.
Agreed. His comments especially in the written blurb they posted made me think of the FAA hiring scandal. Although I do think trump tends to over generalize and not necessarily critically think through his assumptions