All of this.
I think that when people talk about the validity of feelings, they mean one of 2 things
[ul]
[li]Feelings are invalid when they make us believe false things about reality.[/li][li]Whether valid or invalid, feelings can’t simply be ignored or wished away at our convenience[/li][/ul]
Let’s say a close relative has suddenly died. Whether this makes me happy or sad, it’s valid. I can’t and shouldn’t deny it, though maybe I shouldn’t share that I’m glad Auntie Evil has just kicked the bucket.
OTOH let’s say the entire One Direction band got killed in a plane crash. To me, the greatest impact is there won’t be any new 1D shows or recordings. It’s valid to feel happy or sad about that, but if the feeling is so intense that I can’t function, then we’ve crossed the line into invalidity.
In either case, valid or invalid, you can’t simply wish away inconvenient feelings. They will return in increasingly dramatic ways until you find a healthy way to cope with them.
real =/= accurate =/= good
feeling =/= belief =/= opinion
True. Too often the parent/authority figure simply tells you to stop feeling that way or that feeling that way makes you “bad”. They do not go into how do you handle the feeling and turn things in a direction that is positive for you.
Except that never really works, does it? You don’t have to validate their feelings, but you have to acknowledge them.
Expert psychologists will understand the concept however it’s labeled, so that’s hardly a sound argument. The point is that the word currently used by psychologists to label the concept is contrary to its common meaning, leading to potential misinterpretation as in the example in the OP, and the large number of comments here seeking to unravel what the idea actually means. The common meaning of the word “genuine” is far closer to the idea psychologists wish to represent than “valid”. The points is that the person is really feeling certain things, not dissembling, and that this needs to be acknowledged by all concerned and dealt with; not that the feelings are necessarily valid in the usual sense of the word, since the word valid strongly implies justified by external reality.
It is my understanding, when talking about valid feelings, is that the feeling has some correlation to the stimulus. So becoming homicidal when someone cuts you off in traffic is probably not a valid feeling. When talking about enthusiasm for a celebrity there are shades of validity. Ranging from turning up the radio when their song comes on, ranging through paying whatever it takes to get to any concert within a three state area and on to collecting discarded chewing gum of band members and parking outside their house for days waiting to catch a glimpse. The last is probably not a valid feeling.
The feelings that are not “valid” are likely caused by something other than the apparent stimulus.
Well, I wouldn’t say “never.” It often doesn’t work, but it communicates valuable advice. I agree that it is acknowledging the feelings in question…but it signals disapproval by suggesting the feelings be curtailed. I think it works in shortening the episode.
It’s better than the old-fashioned slap to the face…
All the things you’re describing are actions and behaviors, not feelings.
All too often, people in general shame others for their feelings. Every time someone tells you you “shouldn’t” feel a certain way, they are communicating that they think you’re wrong or not as evolved as they are.
What gets me is that they do this even when the feelings are perfectly reasonable and normal. I was once expressing to someone that I occasionally get embarrassed when I experience a tic in public, and they told me I shouldn’t feel that way since people know I can’t help it. This is bullshit. This person knows good and well that they would be embarrassed too if they were in my shoes, and yet instead of commiserating by saying something like, “I can understand that”, they felt the need to try to “fix” me out of my perfectly reasonable response.
When people are made to be ashamed of their own feelings, they become reluctant to disclose them. Which then causes other people who feeling the same way to believe they must be broken weirdos–never knowing that they aren’t the only ones who feel as they do.
Not nonsense at all.
All of these things you describe are actions, not feelings. Yes, you are angry when you lose you temper, but you can also be angry with your lips firmly zipped.
And again, it comes down to the definition of valid, as well as a clear understanding of the difference between feelings, actions and thoughts.
After being told what my feelings were (which they weren’t), or weren’t (although they were), wrong or treated as completely unimportant, it took the longest time in therapy to be able to sort these things out.
It’s still quite difficult for me to understand my own feelings and to be able to do something about it. I would have avoided decades of depression, anxiety, poor coping behavior and bad choices in life had I grown up with my feeling validated. (Yes, my case is on the extreme side.)
Also, what I didn’t understand is that there is nothing inherently “wrong” or about feelings but OTOH, there is nothing necessarily “right” about feelings. Not does having a feeling mean that it needs to be acted on, and when people scream out “my feelings are valid” there may be a good chance that they are not understanding this.
There are certain behaviors which we don’t allow our children (7 and 5) to do, despite what they feel. As I’m taking them (usually the younger one now) for a time out, I’ll tell them that yes, it’s OK to be angry but not cool to hit or keep screaming. Adults in relationships shouldn’t expect to get any more of a pass.
I suspect you already know this, but one thing I’ve learned through mindfulness-based practice is that feelings are actually little more than physical sensations. We’re so inherently trained to identify those physical sensations right away, that we often don’t separate our thoughts from the physical sensations. One of the best demonstrations of this is that there is zero physiological difference between anxiety and excitement. It is only the thoughts that make it so.
In my opinion, whether a feeling is justified by external reality or not is irrelevant. People cannot control how they feel. There is a difference between feeling what you feel and nurturing the thoughts that perpetuate that feeling, or allowing those feelings to lead you down an unhealthy road to destructive action, or whatever. Feelings feed thoughts, thoughts feed feelings in this perpetual cycle that must be broken for effective change to take place. To change feelings in the long-term, you have to change cognitive schemas. For example, a trauma survivor might feel they are responsible for what they endured. You can’t just tell a person, ‘‘It makes no sense to feel that way,’’ because it actually makes a lot of sense if you understand anything at all about how humans process traumatic experience. You can only change those feelings over the long term if you break down the cognitive schema.
There are a couple of ways to do this. One is via exposure, until that particular thought no longer holds any emotional threat – the survivor becomes desensitized to that thought and no longer associates it with the set of physical sensations that are ‘‘shame’’ – and another is through cognitive restructuring, where you compassionately dismantle unhelpful beliefs. This might happen through a careful examination of the evidence, or something like, ‘‘What would you say to someone else who had been through the same thing?’’ This takes time. You cannot change the feelings until you change the schema.
As Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes once said, ‘‘There’s no feeling so bad you can’t add a little guilt to it and make it worse.’’ Feeling guilty for your feelings, however bizarre and irrational they may seem, is counterproductive.
I think it works along the same principle as calling “Shotgun!” when a road trip is about to get underway…
Very insightful. I’m sorry it took so much time and pain for you to gain the insight.
My concern with the “all feelings are valid” *terminology *is that it invites confusion and stagnation in the folks who haven’t been enlightened as you have.
Contrast Spice Weasel’s comments just above with chihauhua’s as quoted by kaylasdad99.
Somebody who’s feelings-driven but *not *insightful (i.e. most of them) will hear “all feelings are valid” and interpret that as “My entire mental state (implicitly including the behaviors my mind conjures up) is not only OK, it is unassailable.”
And that’s not helpful to them or to the people their mental chaos impacts.
Sadly that “valid” terminology is out in the wild and we’re collectively stuck with it. The best thing we as individuals can do is try to educate the non-insightful on the true meaning of the words in the context of feelings <> perceptions <> beliefs <> actions.
I wonder if the same people who think it is okay to argue with someone over their feelings have the same philosophy about lack of feelings.
If “suck it up!” is an appropriate thing to say to someone expressing a “wrong” emotion, what should someone who isn’t able to express a feeling be told?
Darn good question. Some thoughts and questions:
If someone isn’t expressing a feeling, how would their audience know to comment at all? Are you asking about people who experience feelings but for whatever reason choose not to talk about them, or are you talking about people who are so out of touch with their feelings that they don’t recognize them as part of mental life at all?
Clearly if a person believes their life is adversely affected by their relationship with their feelings they should seek qualified help. The best the rest of us can do is to accept that there’s more than one way to live.
Witness the many family drama threads over the years here, clearly these different ways of living are not all perfectly compatible. Such that each of us has to decide for ourselves how much differentness of behavior is more than we’re willing to put up with.
Recognizing that changing others is mostly a fools’ errand and so the most workable remedy for excess differentness ranges between “tolerate as much as you can” to “leave when you can’t tolerate as much as there is.”
Easy. Everyone is expressing their emotions by crying or laughter or whatever, while that person is acting like everything is normal.
Or you ask someone how they feel about some major event, and they tell you they aren’t feeling much of anything.
Or a person let’s you know they feel awful over the fact that they don’t feel a certain way. It could be that that they don’t feel bad that their absentee parent just died, but that they feel like they “should”. Or maybe they feel bad because everyone is grieving over the latest terrorist attack and they just can’t summon up the same feelings. They ask, “Does this mean I’m a bad person?” What would you tell them?
How does a person make themselves have the “right” feelings? Does it make sense to shame this person?
IMO …
It almost never makes sense to shame an adult for anything. Much less for a genuine, if atypical, emotional reaction. People who would do that are not themselves very emotionally or socially aware.
I’m personally familiar with both the examples you cite. For my case my answer is: The person feeling atypical emotions is doing what feels natural and right for them under their specific circumstances. As such they’re welcome to do that. And that’s what I would tell them if asked.
At the same time we each live in a larger society. So each of us is well-served to recognize when our feelings, perceptions, opinions, and actions are atypical. As we move along that 4-step chain, any atypicality becomes more obvious to everybody else. With obvious social consequences ranging from confusion to censure or in extreme cases, shunning.
So you (any you) should think twice about wearing your atypical emotions on your sleeve. Your genuine atypical emotions may lead to equally genuine atypical actions your in-group may not like. Whether that bothers you enough to change your actions is your choice.
One of my personal aphorisms is “You can choose your actions or you can choose your consequences. You don’t get to control both.”
When a person experiences conflict between what they feel and what they themselves think they *ought *to feel, the best advice I can offer is what I tell myself:
There are unexplored reasons for the disconnect. If the disconnect doesn’t really bother me, I’m done. The world is full of unfulfilled minor “oughts” and this is just one more of the same.
If the disconnect *does *bother me then I have a challenge: explore the why of the feelings and the why of the ought to uncover the root of the differences. Then decide which I think is more important or more genuine under the circumstances. And work to conform the outlier to that new knowledge. In all likelihood a thoughtful person will end up in the middle. i.e. the ought and the actual converge towards the center. They may not meet fully.
Other times a healthy person faced with a big gap might conclude after study that the “ought” is BS and the “is” is just fine. The older I get the less I value “ought”. Whether that’s cynicism, weariness, or just increasing inflexibility setting in I couldn’t honestly say.
I often conclude (rationalize?) that “oughts” flow from childhood simplistic thinking applied to poorly understood parental guidance that’s now 100 years out of date versus when those parental attitudes were inculcated by *their *parents. As such, “oughts” are often obsolete guidance and “is” is better because it’s more current and comes from a more mature base.
Where trouble comes in is when people have rigid ideas that “oughts” are universal. Believing that “Everyone regardless of personal details should always feel X when Y happens” is stunningly ignorant. But very common.
Witness the rigid codes of “proper” mourning in effect as recently as 50 years ago. People tried to force themselves, and force others, into a rigid “one-size-is RIGHT-all-others-are-WRONG” model. All I can say from the perspective of today is “The ignorance; it burns!”
Said another way …
Feelings and “oughts” are features of each of our mental landscapes. They are real. But that doesn’t mean they are immutable. They are subject to conscious deliberate reasoned manipulation. Different people have different aptitudes for molding and shaping these things. Some can do a lot, others only a little. Some do it naturally whereas others need to be taught from zero.
But with 21st Century knowledge anyone who’s willing can be taught to maximize their own potential to manage these features. There is no need for anyone to be 100% stuck with particular feelings and oughts as immutable features of their mental landscape.
My younger brother never made it. He’s homeless and psychotic. One sister is also psychotic as well, although my mother provides an apartment for her. One of my cousins works for CPS, preparing recommendations to the court for child abusers. She says looking back, my father was as bad as it gets.
What 99% of the people here can’t realize is how powerful it is to have your feelings validated after a lifetime of being denied that.
The problem is (and here comes out the soapbox) is that almost therapists just can’t handle extreme cases because they just don’t have the experience. Therapy, as is practiced in the West, is for people with moderate problems, not for people with serious shit.
It’s based too much on an assumption of underlying sanity and experience which us crazies don’t have.
I went through the phase of therapy where the counselor was trying to validate any of my behavior, even bad things. That was completely wrong on his part.
I did not understand what being a human was all about until I had my own children and could see how a normal child grows up in a non-abusive environment. Children start to realize that certain behaviors are counter productive and start to curtail them on their own.
What really needs to happen for people like me, is for some sort of system to teach the basic lessons of life and therapy is really hit or miss with that.
Somehow people do need to learn that while their feelings are valid, they still have to be held accountable for their behavior. As someone put it, you aren’t at fault for what happened to you, but it’s your responsibility to deal with it.
Unfortunately, many people get into therapy or read self-help books only to the degree to where they feel better and don’t see how they are affecting others. Many examples have been given in this thread. Spice has shared about her mother doing exactly that.
My own mother is the same. She has gotten to where she’s comfortable with her past, but can’t take responsibility for what she did to her kids.
I am too open with my issues, and really I don’t show them most of the time. However, I’m damn sure that I would not have really changed if it weren’t for the responsibility of breaking the cycle of abuse and neglect in my family so that my kids don’t repeat it.
I was lucky enough that the first therapist I ever had never flinched. She had a deep knowledge of trauma psychology – particularly the impact of childhood abuse. She didn’t heal my PTSD, but her primary role was in helping me understand myself. It was a scary picture, in the beginning, and she knew it. But she helped me work through what exactly it was. (Tokyo, if you haven’t read Trauma and Recovery, I sincerely recommend it. Just be careful. It’s very clinically oriented and it can be a real head trip seeing someone break down your life experience and the entire nature of your psychology so clinically. Try this on for size, see if anything fits.)
I’ve had a lot of therapists since (moving a lot) and nothing’s worse than that awkward moment of silence during intake where they don’t know what to say. And then they say something roughly equivalent to, ‘‘Wow, it’s amazing you aren’t a complete fuck-up!’’ I’ve gotten some variation of this so many times I call it the So You’re Not a Crack Whore lecture. I’m told that people from similar backgrounds do far worse than me, which I find vexing. On the one hand, I wish I understood exactly why some people make it and others don’t. On the other hand, I wonder if I am nearly so okay as people think. I’ve had a lot of problems but I’ve at least tried not to make my problems other people’s problems. Maybe that’s why even therapists often don’t see how screwed up I can be internally… I rarely let it affect others.
They say, ‘Oh you’re doing so great’ but they don’t know my mind. Deep inside, that’s where I think my true self is. And I’m not sure many people see it.
Maybe instead of ‘valid,’ one could say, ‘Every feeling arises for a reason.’ Which acknowledges the feeling without implying that it’s necessarily a correct or good feeling.