Emotional Validation

In a Couples Therapy episode, a woman and a man are arguing about finances. They are sitting on a couch, the woman quarter-turned to the man, gesturing. He could be making more, she says, to support their child. She could spend less on glasses, he shoots back. The wife throws her hands up – he simply needs to improve his performance, she says. Finally, she sighs, “Maybe this is who you are. And maybe this is who I am. Angry and anxious over performance.” This is a conversation she has had multiple times – with him, within her own mind. But now there’s a third person. “Whose performance?”, asks the therapist. “Rod’s!”, the woman cries out. “Because I didn’t have a performance!”

And now she pauses, breathes, and looks straight and clearly at the therapist for the first time. “I took too much time off”, she says. “And that’s what I’m angry at. I’m angry at myself.” Rising, the husband starts to defend himself – then, stopped by the therapist, tries again. “...but…because of that, we have an awesome kid! And you’re an awesome mom, so you have to also, you know, give yourself a pat on the back…”

The therapist looks at him gravely. “That’s great”, she says. “But not the point”.

—

I have another story. A boy and a girl write each across the Atlantic. Friends since thirteen, they are now well into young adulthood. One week, she shares her trip to New York. She writes about Broadway, about poetry readings, and about the hidden underbelly of artist life in the city. “I would never live there”, the friend replies. “It’s too expensive”. Another week, she shares how she stumbled into a line-dancing class and absolutely loved it. “I prefer partner dancing”, he says. And then one day, she decides to share her hopes and dreams with him. She wants to write, she says, actually be an author. She dreams of writing page after page, creating a full-length novel, and seeing people around the world enjoy it. “Ah – I used to prioritize achievement”, he replies, “but now I prefer comfort”. She reads this letter. And then she stares, unmoving. And stands up, blinking, as the paper, unnoticed, falls to the ground. She starts walking rapidly into the harsh sunlight. She has to get away, and everywhere are white tiles and white buildings, and she has to get away.

—

I look at these stories and I am struck by how common they are. In the first story, we have a man stuck in a never-ending argument with his wife. When she realizes the root of her frustration, he tries to support her. “...you’re an awesome mom”, he says. Since she now feels bad about her decision to stay home, he tries to convince her it was the right decision. He is trying to support her. But what he says fails to do so. Why? I can’t know for sure. But I think what she needs, in this moment of vulnerability, is something like his understanding. To support her as she looks at the truth she has wrapped away from herself for so many years.

In the second story, there is a boy who is trying to respond to his friend. She shares her thoughts on a subject, and he shares back his own. But in the end, she runs away crying. Ann Pierce writes that conflict is “caused by threat (real or perceived)” and the most common threat we encounter day-to-day is “invalidation, communication that you are bad or wrong”. Any single invalidating event is fine, but when they build up over time, it creates disconnection, pain, or resentment.

How then, to live with other people? To live with another person is, after all, by definition, to live with a person who has different preferences and a different perspective than your own. You can’t just agree with them all the time! Sometimes you have to admit that you don’t like eating fast food, or you need the dishes put straight in the dishwasher, or you do in fact find spiders disgusting. Pierce writes, “Validation means approval. Sometimes you don't approve of what someone is doing, saying, or the conclusions they've reached. But no matter how much you disagree, you can always validate someone on the level of feeling.” That is, you can support them emotionally. You can express joy back at them when they talk excitedly about their tennis team, or wistfully mention a too-expensive daycare, or stop on walks to point out birds. You can stay with them in distress, too. And say it makes sense to feel that way, it is normal, you are there with them.

In the first story, this means validating the wife’s distress at losing her career to raise their child. In the second, this means validating the friend’s joy, delighting in their joy of New York, or line-dancing, or writing.

Psychological research says that opposites do not attract. We do better with people who share our preferences and perspectives. I agree. And yet, there is no one who is exactly like us. I recently read an essay on “Growing Together” by Ava, who transcribed the wedding vows of the late poet Max Ritvo and his wife, Victoria Ritvo. Friends since their teens, they married at 24. A year later, Max would die from cancer. Victoria is a scientist. She likes knowing the truth and being accurate. She did not grow up playing pretend. In her childhood, she says, she suffered from a lack of imagination. Max Ritvo was the opposite. He saw the world through imaginative “translucencies”. He was fun. She was serious. He was creative. She was exact. But a thing they both cherished was living in the other person’s perspective.

Here is an excerpt of his vows:

When the world is overwhelmingly beautiful and sublime, it tends to be because you've made it that way, Victoria…We move from your observation that ants are like neurons, to my observation that when an ant colony eats every brain cell gets to taste the food, to a discussion of which of our friends would most like to taste food with their whole brain…

And her vows to him:

You taught me how to laugh. You taught me how to play. You taught me the importance of imagination. I understand the necessity of comedy in life now, whether we're talking about ABC's The Bachelor or we're talking about cancer. But I understand the importance of play in a way I didn't when I was a kid, and how to find silliness in the world and in other people. And I understand how imagination can transform the world. You showed me the world is not just something to understand but something to make more beautiful by transforming it.

My favorite games are when we walk and you ask questions that can change our surroundings like: "Which bite of this food tastes the best and why?" "How can we make this fountain a metaphor for a new religion?" "Which flower here would be which family member?" And I can look into your future where we can be each other's second set of eyes, opening each other to our own ways of perceiving. And I know for you that's the most personal thing I can do—to be receptive to how you see as part of how I see and to share that with other people. And I think we're not just interested in the other's point of view, but through our trying out each other's perspective, we're trying to push each other to love the world more.

I read these vows on a train from SF to Palo Alto, as the sun went down, in the red-gold light, and I was sobbing.