Emotional Validation And Invalidation: What Are They And How Do They Affect Us?
Yes, emotions are innate, they come with us; Yes, they are the physical reaction to our own interpretations of our environment, to thoughts or memories; and yes, they are in favor of our survival through adaptation. Then it will be very important to know them, identify them and validate them.
Validating emotions is the recognition and acceptance of another person’s emotional experience and communicating that acceptance In simple words, it is allowing emotions to be there because they have reasons to be there. However, a cultural model intervened in emotional validity, since in the identification of what is acceptable for each gender and age; It was classified between what was emotionally permitted for men and women; to children and adults. So men were only allowed to experience anger and joy, so you can see how fear and sadness are usually expressed from anger.
In some cultures, a man with fear, sadness or disgust is considered a weakness for his gender. This emotional invalidation leads to catastrophic consequences; By distancing men from most emotions, statistics speak of the alarming number of male suicides in Spain, which reaches 65%. Ignorance of emotions and the difficulty in identifying them nullifies coping strategies for emotional discomfort.
On the contrary, women are allowed the emotion of sadness, fear and surprise. Anger is not acceptable to them since it is related to a “hormonal” state, they are “emotional” or “hysterical.” Likewise, emotion is invalidated in children, since it is usually believed that their problems are not that big and difficulties with mood such as an anxiety disorder or childhood depression are justified. It is in childhood where emotional invalidation occurs most and therefore we learn self-invalidation.
The need of parents to make their children happy and to find a quick solution to the children’s adversities, even if there is a good intention. Their bias does not allow them to understand the emotional experience that the children are having, thus ignoring possible depressive or anxious symptoms in their children since this would also confront them with their personal value of being good parents.
The lack of education in mental health and learning from the environment leads to the invalidation of emotions When a child distances himself from some emotion it is not because he cannot feel it or does not have the ability to produce it, it is because at some point he learned that it is not okay to show it. If a child is told or taught in some way that he should not be sad, afraid or disgusted, that it is wrong to feel this way or with these emotions, guilt appears for feeling what he should not. feel. Guilt leads to emotional discomfort and learned self-helplessness.
Emotional self-invalidation
Emotional self-invalidation is the rejection and contempt for one’s own emotional experiences; it is judging the physical and psychological relationships of emotions in a negative way On the contrary, emotional validity is the principle of acceptance of the human condition given that by nature emotions are present in most living beings, including vertebrate animals. Emotional disability produces confusion, anxiety and irritability, a feeling of inadequacy and guilt, in the end there is a need to avoid emotions because we do not know how to identify them, much less regulate them.
Emotionally invalidating is when we do not allow another person to have the emotion of the moment and their physical reactions; we pretend to know how it should feel, judging from our own personal experience. In the same way, believing that people who suffer from some condition in their mood is because they do not know how to manage their emotions, also leads us to invalidate the way of perceiving their world, identifying it and valuing it emotionally due to their own experience and learning.
In therapy it is necessary to approach the patient by validating them emotionally knowing that when a person seeks professional help in mental health it is because they are having some kind of emotional discomfort and that discomfort has sufficient reasons to be there, as a first step the validation of the patient must then lead to self-validation, through psychoeducation about emotions and the need for emotional validation.
