i'd like to welcome everybody today's presentation of pacer's integrative behavioral health
we are continuing to talk about attachment and mental health
focusing today on validation and of course i'm your host dr dawn elise snipes
so validation is really pretty straightforward validation communicates hey i hear you
your thoughts wants and needs are valid and important and i'm not going to try to
minimize or take them away and that is really important to focus on sometimes we want to make
our loved ones feel better we want to make the hurt stop but it is their feelings it is their
thoughts and they are should be empowered to choose when they are ready to let those go
when they are feeling safe enough to let those go so we're not going to try to take them and tell
them oh you shouldn't feel that way or hey let me do something to make you feel better
so you stop hurting well if they're hurting let's figure out why they're hurting and help
them figure out how to solve it instead of trying to put numbing cream on the wound so to speak
so validation communicates that what you're saying is important and again we're going to go back to
it's important to be able to validate yourself and this is something that linehan talks about a lot
in dialectical behavior therapy hayes talks about it a lot in acceptance and commitment therapy
pretty much any of your cognitive behavioral therapies are going to
encourage you to pay attention to yourself to acknowledge your thoughts wants and feelings
without judgment to hear them say okay i feel how i feel or my thoughts are my thoughts
now what do i do what is the next best step to improve the moment and that's really important you
may not be ready you know if you're grieving for example i know after my mother died i was grieving
and i knew how i felt i knew what my thoughts were i wasn't ready to let them go yet i wasn't
ready to take that next step to move on and it was important for me in that situation to explore
why you know part of it was that culture said you know you're supposed to grieve you're not
supposed to get over things too soon so you know i didn't feel like i felt guilty if i started
feeling too happy too soon but another part of it was that there was a lot of stuff that
you know went along with losing my mother and it was important for me to be able to sort through
spend time sorting through all those thoughts and feelings that were associated with her death
and then once i had sorted through all of those i could move on but not until
then and that is so important when we're coping with things to allow ourselves plenty of time
to go through and sort through the issues to resolve whatever issues and then move on it's kind
of like when you do spring cleaning and you sort through your closet you know you have different
bins it's like okay this is taken care of this i still need to deal with this you know whatever
but you sort them into different bins and you're not going to leave your closet halfway sorted
and go on and do something else i i hope um but the same thing is true for our feelings we don't
want to halfway deal with our feelings and then just kind of shove the rest back into our deep
into our psyche because eventually we're going to that's going to come back and bite us in the butt
so validation of ourselves means accepting non-judge non-judgmentally our thoughts wants
and feelings in the moment and then from that perspective from that point deciding what is it
i need to do next maybe it's not move on maybe it starts process things maybe you've got to
you know stick there and kind of you know trudge through some stuff first that's okay
same thing is true with other people we want to validate them and we don't have it doesn't mean
we agree necessarily with what they're feeling it doesn't mean that we're glad that they're feeling
a certain way necessarily it means that we are acknowledging that they have feel how they feel
and they think what they think we all come from our own what they call phenomenological reality
which is i don't know why they had to come up with such a flowery name for it but we all have our own
perspective that has been shaped by our experiences and i use the explanation a lot
that i come from a family of french canadians and italians
and we talk we talk with our hands we talk loud we tip we are very loud group um and
it's just the family i grew up in that was you know the norm so it is not uncommon for people
to be loud and making big gestures and that doesn't make me feel threatened because i have
not associated that with a threatening event other people may have come from a much more
restrained household or a restrained culture where that would seem intimidating or overwhelming so be
i can go into a situation where people are being loud and large and think cool you know let's
have some fun and other people may be completely intimidated it's not my place to tell them that
they shouldn't feel that way validation means i i say i understand what you're saying i hear
what you're saying and i will try to understand your perspective i haven't been through your
past you know i haven't been through there but i'll try to look through your lens i will try
to validate that for you what you're thinking feeling and wanting right now makes sense in
in your own way and i will meet you where you're at so you know if i were bringing somebody home
for christmas vacation for example who was from a more restrained culture or background you know i
might acknowledge how they're feeling overwhelmed and then ask them you know what is it that i can
do to help you feel more comfortable or what is it that you need to do right now in order to feel
in order to feel safer because i hear you're feeling unsafe you know i'm not feeling unsafe
but i hear you're feeling unsafe so what is it that i can do to help you and that's where
validation really comes in not telling people that how they should feel not telling ourselves how we
should feel but accepting feelings and thoughts in the moment without judgment and then making a plan
so validation really like i said is pretty straightforward is really pretty simple in concept
it's harder to do as i mentioned earlier a lot of times it hurts to see our friends struggle
to i remember a couple of times when my daughter was going through some stuff
and as a mother it just it ripped my heart out to see her so sad to see her hurting so much
and but i knew it was something that she had to work through
and you know i can be there i can be encouraging i can be supportive i can be validating but
you know from my perspective what she was going through in the big scheme of things
probably wasn't gonna be a big deal in five years from now or even in a year from now but
how in invalidating would that have been for me to go you know what
you're making a big deal out of something that's really nothing
oh that would have been horrible for me to say and it was important for me to recognize that at 14
she has not had the you know 50 years of experience in living that i have so that was
a big deal to her compared to other things that she'd gone through that was what she was going
through was huge and it was agonizing and you know as we grow we go through these experiences that
shape us they allow us to experience distress and that makes us stronger
as we move through so when we get to be adults we can look back on that and go
oh that was no big deal you know let me tell you what i'm going through now but
unless we had gone through those experiences and let them make us stronger
we wouldn't have developed that different perspective so again it's it's important to let
people have their feelings their thoughts their wants their needs and try to understand try to
get in their head or walk a mile in their shoes or whatever you want to say
but try to recognize that they may not be experiencing the moment in the same way you
are based on their past and it's important for you to understand that we all have a different
concept of reality everybody interprets reality through their own lens based on their own learning
are there questions about validation or
how that applies to developing healthy relationships or secure attachment
you know the concept the term secure attachment you know that even communicates to me when i
hear it secure that communicates to me a sense of safety and if i feel safe then i
feel that the people around me are going to not criticize they're not going to
invalidate how i feel or what i want they may not be able to meet those needs necessarily
at that moment but they are not going to invalidate my thoughts wants and needs and
that helps me feel safe because that helps me feel heard and empowered to be my true authentic self
everybody have an absolutely fabulous day tomorrow we will be finishing up this series and we will
be talking about uh encouragement and support which sound a lot alike but they are
slightly different and that puts the bow on the characteristics of secure attachment
remember it's consistency responsiveness attention validation encouragement and support