No. “Feelings” are just opinions.
Yes. Almost perfect between you two.
I’d add that where people get confused is that they can form an opinion based on conscious deliberate analytic thought. Or they can form an opinion based on amorphous emotion, intuition, etc. They are both opinions, and either type may be right or may be wrong. But correct or not, they’re qualitatively different from each other. Witness the many aphorisms to the effect of “You can’t reason someone out of a position (read as ‘opinion’) they didn’t reason themselves into.”
For the many people mostly lacking in introspection and logical deliberate thought, their whole internal experience of life is of emotional states and opinions formed by those emotional states.
Until and unless they can be persuaded to see the difffence between “feeling” as “emotional state” and feeling as “emotionally derived opinion”, we’re not getting anywhere. It sounds to me like Pantastic’s ex- was especially (willfully?) blind to this distinction.
I like Reimann’s term “genuine” instead of “valid” to apply to emotional states. Barring mental illness, one’s appreciation of their own emotional state is genuine. But that says nothing at all about the external correctness of any emotionally derived opinions. Some are excellent, others are bunk.
Opinions come in gradations from objectively correct to matters of taste to right for the wrong reason(s) to confused to uninformed to downright insane. IMO validity is not properly a property of an opinion. The word is too loaded with disparate meanings.
There’s a massive difference between what you feel and how you behave. People cannot control how they feel, therefore I could never fault a person for feeling anything - no matter how nasty. But there are times where I
It is inappropriate to act on feelings and times where certain behaviors are unacceptable no matter what emotions are driving you. In short, having intense feelings doesn’t give you permission to act like a jerk.
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Feelings, perceptions, opinions and actions are different things. Of course feelings are valid, in that they’re real. That doesn’t mean your perception of what caused the feeling is valid, or your opinion of what the feeling means is valid, or your action based on the feeling is valid.
If I feel hurt because (borrowing someone’s example from upthread) I think a friend is ignoring me, that feeling of hurt is real. But the perception that she was ignoring me might not be valid - she might just have had a lot of stuff going on in her own life. If I form an opinion that she’s a lousy friend based on that feeling, that opinion might not be valid. If I act to cut her off based on that feeling, that action might not be valid.
You can acknowledge and respect a feeling without buying into any of the other stuff. That even applies to paranoid delusions: I can understand and acknowledge that someone is terrified that the Illuminati lizards have planted a bug in his toothbrush, without validating the perception that brought him to that terror.
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You can acknowledge and respect a feeling without buying into any of the other stuff. That even applies to paranoid delusions: I can understand and acknowledge that someone is terrified that the Illuminati lizards have planted a bug in his toothbrush, without validating the perception that brought him to that terror.
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And that right there, IMO, is at the heart of compassion.
That should be printed in big text on the wall of every counseling room and at the start of Page One of every self-improvement / psychobabble / support book and website in the land.
Bravo!
And as **Spice Weasel **says, having the insight to see that in others is huge.
Iit might help to think of this in terms of feelings being meta-valid.
This is in reaction to situations like:
A: “I feel unhappy a lot.”
B: “Now you don’t. You’re happy almost all the time.”
Assuming A isn’t lying, then A’s statement is meta-valid. To A, that seems right. It is inappropriate for B to tell A that it isn’t true.
I use the term “meta” to point out that this is within the confines of having/expressing feelings and the self-referencing of those.
This kind of meta discussion isn’t appropriate for “external” matters. E.g., “I feel the world is flat.”
Unfortunately, the usage of the word “valid” used in this example is not consistent. The message in the second paragraph is “she’s not ignoring you, and you’re wrong to cut her off, you’re wrong to say she’s a lousy friend, and you’re wrong to think she’s ignoring you in the first place - but you’re not wrong to feel hurt, because…feelings are real.” Opinions, perceptions, and actions are also real, but that doesn’t make them correct.
While “correct” is not the same thing as “valid,” it’s a hell of a lot closer than “real,” and I think some people who call for validation of their feelings don’t want mere acknowledgement of their feelings’ reality. They want to be right. And I think it’s perfectly valid to say “you’re wrong to feel that way.”
The beginning of empathy is acknowledging that people have feelings, and working to understand those feelings. It is neither necessary nor sane to pretend that the feelings are correct or reasonable, and that goes double for feelings with implicit judgments in them, like “hurt.” In some circumstances, it may even be wise to consider whether they’re even genuine or sincere, though I’ll agree that it’s obnoxious to make a habit of it.
There are some technical meanings for “valid,” and they don’t support the therapy usage either. To a logician, a valid argument is (roughly) one that can’t be wrong if the premises are true. The therapist asks us to accept - what, exactly? The logic of an unstated argument? The truth of a conclusion with unstated premises?
Another meaning, used in the engineering field of validation, is to establish the soundness, fitness, or accuracy of a device or process. There’s also the sense of official confirmation, as in validating a passport or parking stub. Neither of these is analogous to anything I can do for anyone’s feelings.
I think the “validate my feelings” people would do well to sort out emotions from implicit judgments, attitudes, and biases. Emotions don’t need validation, and the rest don’t deserve it.
And I think that that’s exactly what saying “Feelings are valid because you feel them” is to meant to counter. It’s another way of saying “You don’t get to decide how I feel”. There’s a certain amount of confusion because people often say " I feel " when they actually mean " I believe" or " I think___" ( you don’t feel the earth is flat or that vaccines are dangerous, you think or believe those things.) But if we are actually talking about emotions , they aren’t objectively right or wrong. The other person’s intentions don’t always matter either - they might matter if feel hurt because I believe my friend is ignoring me when in fact she was just busy, but if I feel that I’m at best second on the list of people my husband needs to please because he cancels our plans whenever his mother calls and wants something, it doesn’t much matter if he actually thinks I come second or if he intended for me to feel that way. I might feel I’m being punished for being successful if my mother disinherits me and leaves everything to my lazy mooch of a brother, even if that isn’t her intention. And sometimes it’s not even a matter of another person’s behavior- it’s not unheard of for people to tell others that they shouldn’t be so upset that they lost a job, lost a pet, had a miscarriage etc.
To me, valid means more than ‘real’ when it comes to emotions. All emotions are ‘real’. A paranoid-schizophrenic’s hallucinations are for all intents & purposes ‘real’ to them. They see and hear things that don’t truly exist, but in a manner that is indistinguishable from reality, therefore they ‘feel’ emotions based on them just the same.
In terms of emotions, ‘valid’ goes a step further in that it also means ‘earned’ or ‘deserved’, and that requires the ability to step outside your own feelings and be objective and honest and empathetic. If a criminal robs a convenience store and instead of just getting a few hundred dollars he by chance gets a few thousand he is going to feel very happy. Is that happiness feeling real? Yes. Is it valid? No. If I was friends with this person and they offered to give me a thousand dollars just out of friendship I would not take it because, knowing where it came from, it would ultimately not make me happy because for me the feeling of happiness would NOT be a valid one (quite the opposite in fact). But for the other person it ends with happiness. Validity never even enters into the equation.
This all comes from childhood. A big difference between being a child and an adult is that because a child is not in control of their life, they aren’t fully in control of their emotions either. And if they don’t ever really learn how to be then a sense of ‘validity’ for their emotions will never develop. That’s why people with bad childhoods become criminals. And more importantly, that’s why most people who become criminals stay criminals. Their emotions simply end at gratification.
Keep in mind that this is all an artificial, human society-made construct. Animals generally don’t need to feel ‘validated’ to survive. This is why one of the most human-defining emotions is empathy.
Clearly, as this thread demonstrates.
My take is that it’s just a slight misuse of the term valid, but there’s usually a prior context to justify it. It’s a response to situations like this:[ul]
[li]Person A says to person B: “Your feelings are not logical, so they don’t matter.” (i.e., They’re not valid.)[/li][li]This just makes person B even more upset, and causes an impasse.[/li][li]So person C (typically a therapist or someone like that), says to person B, “Your feelings are valid,” so that person B can at least deal with the feeling and get over them.[/li][/ul]I think it’s that simple. It’s not some kind of attempt to instill truth value to all feelings, which seems to be a concern here.
My wife very often takes the position that her “valid feelings” mean I am not allowed to disagree with her.
See, it doesn’t work that way. In this scenario, your feelings are also valid. Which one of you is actually right is another matter entirely.
But people have a lot of invalid feelings that they don’t recognize as such. Take someone insanely jealous, for instance. Most of the time they’ll think that their feeling of jealousy are totally reasonable.
As pretty much everybody else, I think that indeed using the word “valid” for this meme was a pretty bad idea. Plenty of people are now familiar with the concept, and some (or many) understand it to mean : “nobody can argue that my feeling aren’t justified”, making any further discussion impossible. Especially since our current culture is heavy on self-validation, making people reluctant to second-guess their feelings to begin with. I already faced such a situation a couple time.
…So *your *feelings aren’t valid then? :dubious:
Yeah, I’d be pretty sure that no properly trained therapist is telling patients that every belief they have is objectively true.
In logic there is an important distinction between arguments that are valid (that is, the conclusion logically follows from the premises) and arguments that are sound (they are valid AND all premises are actually true). It’s possible to have a perfectly valid argument that relies on false premises and thus either leads to a false conclusion or to a conclusion that’s only correct by coincidence.
People rarely, if ever, arrive at their emotions by working through a logical argument first, but I’d guess that this is what the saying “all feelings are valid” is trying to get at. All feelings are “valid” in the sense that they are the genuine emotional response of that individual to the situation as they understand it. Yet the individual’s understanding of the situation may very well be flawed. Recognizing their feelings as “valid” does not mean having having to agree that their beliefs and perceptions are correct – their feelings can be “valid” without being “sound”.
I think it’s dumb to insist on a different wording when it’s the term already used by psychologists all over. “Genuine” doesn’t work, because that’s just saying “your feeling are really there.” What saying they are “valid” means is that “it’s okay that you have these feelings.” They might not be useful. You may want to change them. They may lie about reality. But you have to accept that they are there and you are allowed to have them. Or that the other person’s feelings are there and they are allowed to have them.
That’s why those statements above involve “validating” people’s feelings. Yes, they’re there, and I’m not gonna tell you that they shouldn’t be there. But that’s not the same thing as saying they are true or healthy.
For an awful lot of feelings people have, I would tell them they shouldn’t have them. They’re bad, harmful, mean-spirited, shallow feelings. They’re sometimes jealous feelings, or vindictive feelings, or severely depressed feelings.
They aren’t valid. They’re harmful, and not only to the ostensible victim of directed harmful thoughts – the object of jealousy or anger – but also to the person having the feelings.
This is why we say things like, “Get over it” and “Calm down, man!”
I agree with Nietzsche’s take on these so-called “bad” emotions. They can be useful and shouldn’t be repressed. If I’m feeling jealous, that means I’m feeling insecure about what I have or don’t have. So I should use that feeling to motivate me to acquire what I have or don’t. If I’m feeling depressed, it means that something is wrong with my health and/or environment. Ignoring this feeling means turning away from self-improvement.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with feeling vindictive. If someone stabs you in the back (literally or figuratively), why wouldn’t you want to get back at them? The problem isn’t in the feeling itself. It’s in how you display vindicativeness. Some people get their revenge by picking up a gun. But other people have a “I’ll show them!” attitude and they get their revenge by living the kind of life their enemy wishes they could have. Personally, having negative emotions about a person helps me to stay the hell away from them so that they can’t hurt me anymore. A lot of people do the foolish thing and swallow their feelings for the sake of a relationship–even when they are being abused and disrespected in that relationship.
Many folks are raised to ignore their negative feelings. “Suck it up!” is not conducive for long-term mental wellness. People who can’t deal with unpleasant feelings often grow up to have serious problems. Personally, I think a lot of people are overweight and dealing with addiction because they heard “suck it up!” one time too many as a kid.
IMO, that’s all you can actually say with certainty.
I don’t think “allowed” is the proper word. What do you mean exactly by this? Even less so with “it’s OK to have these feelings”. What about, again, an insanely jealous person? Is it OK to have such feelings? What about a serial killer? Are his feelings regarding his potential victims OK too?
People have feelings that are completely baseless, and harmful for themselves and/or others if they nurture them. So, no, saying : “it’s OK to have whatever feelings you have” isn’t helpful.