One of the biggest and most important steps we will ever take on the self love path, is the step of learning how to validate ourselves.
How to validate our own emotions, how to validate our thoughts, how to discover and validate our wants and needs as well as learning how to validate our own experience and perspective.
The reason this validation is so important, is because when we AREN’T able to validate ourselves, we are going to get trapped in a life where we are perpetually pushing away our emotions, where we are diminishing our wants and needs and where we are erasing our own experience - and this is going to lead to us living in ways that really don’t feel GOOD for us.
When we don’t know how to validate ourselves, our feelings and our experience, we aren’t going to be able to figure out what we really want and need, which means we’re going to have a very hard time figuring out how to create a life that actually works for us long term.
Validating Our Emotions - Why Does It Matter?
When we aren’t able to validate our emotions, we aren’t going to be able to investigate those emotions. We aren’t going to be able to understand WHY we are feeling what we’re feeling or what messages those emotions have for us - and in that we’re going to have a hard time figuring out what in life hurts, why it hurts, what we need instead, what feels good in life, why it feels good, what we want to follow, what we want to remove ourselves from and so on.
Our emotions are there to help us FEEL what is and isn’t ‘right’ in real reality. Our emotions are there to help us process and work through our experiences so that we can discover truth for ourselves - and when we aren’t able to connect with our emotions in a way where we are embracing them and making room for them - we are going to lose our connection to all of this wisdom and insight.
We have to remember that the mind can be conditioned to believe that anything is ‘right’ and beneficial. Our minds can be convinced that certain ways of life are how things ‘should’ be. Our minds can be convinced that how we were raised and the ‘normal’ we grew up with is how things are always going to be. Our minds can be convinced that what we feel and what we want and need are ‘wrong’ and bad - but the emotions are there to help guide us OUT of any conditioning that is taking us away from ACTUAL reality.
Our emotions are there to respond to outcomes. Our emotions are there to help us realize that just because certain patterns of behavior, certain ways of being and certain value systems are ‘normal’, this doesn’t mean that they are actually beneficial. They are there to help us see where harm is being caused even if we have been convinced that we ‘should’ be ok.
When we learn to validate our emotions, we are essentially allowing ourselves to tap into a much deeper wisdom about ourselves and reality. We are going to have access to awareness around what hurts and what doesn’t - and THIS is going to be something we can use to help us figure out where conditioning and ‘normal’ have the WRONG idea about what’s actually useful and where going another way is actually the BEST thing we can do.
Our emotions are there to let us know when our thoughts are stuck in loops and tracks that don’t serve us. They are there to let us know when we are thinking and believing ideas that again, we may have evidence for from our perspective, but that ultimately aren’t in alignment with what’s ACTUALLY happening or what where our power actually lies.
For example, our emotions are there to help us see that just because the family we came from is used to ‘sweeping issues under the rug’ and pretending that problems don’t exist - that this way of being doesn’t actually FEEL good. Our emotions are there to help us see that just because this is family custom, this doesn’t make it ‘right’ nor does it make it useful or helpful. When we are able to validate the emotions we have when our pain gets ignored or invalidated in this way, we are then going to be able to bring our pain to the surface and actually deal with it - even if the family doesn’t want to come along. We are going to be able to recognize the fact that sweeping things under the rug isn’t a HEALTHY way of being - and again just because it’s ‘normal’ in our family doesn’t make it RIGHT.
The emotions are there to help us see that when we think thoughts about ourselves like ‘I am unworthy of love, I am useless, I don’t deserve good things’ - that just because we have gathered evidence to support these thoughts in the context of how we have been treated or spoken to by others - that this doesn’t make these thoughts TRUE. The fact that when we think these thoughts we FEEL terrible in our emotions means that our emotions are there to help us start to question these thought patterns so that we can replace with with ones that FEEL better. Doing so is going to greatly enhance our life experience, because the more we are able to ground into our own sense of inherent worth, the more we’re going to be able to create lives for ourselves that are supportive rather than living from a place of trying to earn our worth forever.
When we are in a situation where someone is hurting us via their behavior, but that behavior has been normalized or when we are being told that we’re being ‘too sensitive’ or otherwise reacting wrong - and we notice that we have a hard time forgiving and forgetting or ‘being ok with it’ - again our EMOTIONS are there to let us know that just because what’s happening is seen as normal, this doesn’t mean it’s actually OK. Our emotions are there to help us see that we are upset for a REASON and in learning to validate our emotions we can discover WHY we are upset, what about the situation is upsetting and what we need to change so that we can feel better.
When we don’t know how to validate our emotions, when we are stuck in loops of looking for how we are reacting/responding wrong, when we are telling ourselves that we ‘should’ be feeling some other way or that it is our reaction that is the problem - that’s when we get stuck in situations and dynamics that are causing harm, that will ALWAYS hurt, without any way to resolve the issue.
It’s through validating our emotions that we can figure out what’s hurting, why it’s hurting and eventually what we need to do about it so that we can feel better.
Validating Our Experience - Why It Matters
From here, learning to validate our own EXPERIENCE is just as important as validating our emotions.
For the most part, we live in a world that is deeply obsessed with how things LOOK vs. how they actually FEEL for us/the outcomes we experience within reality.
We live in a culture that is continually telling us what we should value, what we should care about, what the ‘right way’ to live is, what success looks like, what it means to be a ‘good person’ and what it means to fail - and all of this tends to get deeply embedded in our view of ourselves and the world - so much so that we may have a really hard time learning to step back from culture so that we can determine for ourselves what is actually worth it to us and what isn’t.
We again are taught that we must have a certain type of partnership/relationship in order to be seen as worthy, legitimate or respectable.
We are taught that there are certain careers and career paths we must follow in order to be considered ‘successful’ and therefore worthy of provision, safety and access.
We are taught that our bodies need to fit into a certain mold/look in order for us to feel like we are worthy and in order for us to be seen as valuable.
We are taught that we must dress in certain ways, speak in certain ways, value this or that - and in all of this we are essentially being told that what we actually experience as we pursue these things doesn’t matter.
We are being taught over and over again that how it FEELS for us to be in these relationships, what we have to do to create the ‘right’ kind of body, what we have to do to become ‘successful’ in the eyes of culture doesn’t matter - that if pursuing any of these things hurts, is uncomfortable or if we struggle to accomplish anything we ‘should’ be accomplishing that this means that we are failing and need to fix ourselves.
We’re taught over and over again that if we aren’t able to reach success by societies narrow standards, that this means that WE are doing something wrong/are fundamentally flawed in some way, and thus we need to be engaging in all the plethora of self help modalities out there to try to remedy what’s broken in us so that we CAN achieve success.
There’s no room for us to question what success actually is, why we value what we value in terms of ‘success’, nor is there any room to question if what is ‘success’ to the world is ACTUALLY a success in real reality.
On top of that, most of us have been trained from early childhood to discount and erase our own experience in exchange for fitting ourselves into what the world or our caregivers are telling us we ‘should’ be.
Many of us weren’t raised in a home where our emotional expressions were validated and understood - rather we were seen as having ‘outburst’ for no reason, and told that we needed to simply change the way we were behaving. There was little investigation into WHY we were reacting and responding the way we were, what we were feeling, what we were experiencing and what we needed to feel better.
We were trained that we had to go to school, we had to socialize in certain ways, that we had to align with certain religious philosophies, that we had to be interested in some things while being told we weren’t allowed to be interested in others, we were told that there were right and wrong ways of expressing ourselves - and while *some* of this may have been helpful developmentally, a lot of the time what actually happened was that we learned how to deeply invalidate our own experience and to conform to what was expected of us.
Then if we failed to do so again, many of us were then labeled as defective or broken in some way, vs. being seen as a unique individual who may simply have needs, wants and interests that didn’t align with what our culture was telling us they ‘should’ align with.
Through all of these experiences again, we would have lost touch with our capacity to use our experience as a guidepost for what is true and right - not just for ourselves personally but for humanity at large.
Instead of being able to see that not everything in culture is actually healthy, actually worthy of being valued and actually supportive of human life and the life of the planet - we instead learned to internalize that if we were not able to ‘succeed’ in the ways culture and our families expected us to succeed, that this meant we were broken, bad, wrong and shameful.
Which means that we would then spend the rest of our lives trying to fix ourselves to align with something that was NEVER going to work for us.
It means that we then would likely have forced ourselves into relationships that didn’t actually feel good - ending up with lots of pain and drama that we don’t know how to fix or resolve.
It means ending up in situations where we are in a constant battle with our bodies, ever able to figure out a lifestyle that supports our health and makes us actually feel good.
It means pursuing careers that look good on paper, but that feel terrible to us in practice, or pursuing something we care about and constantly feeling like we’re ‘failing’ because the outcomes aren’t what society expects they should be.
It means never being able to determine for ourselves what is of value and what isn’t - meaning we spend a lot of time putting energy into things that actually don’t matter to us but that we feel we MUST care about in order to be ‘good’, and then we don’t have the energy or capacity to pursue the things that really DO matter to us.
When we aren’t able to validate our own experience, what we actually feel and think about what we are doing in life, again we are never going to be able to find a life that works for us. We will instead be stuck pursuing what we are told we ‘should’ pursue, feeling terrible while we do it and always feeling like we’re ‘missing’ something.
We will continue to participate in a culture that’s actually quite destructive - always feeling that the pain we feel as we do is a sign that we are defective, vs. being able to see that it’s a sign that CULTURE is wrong and actually going in a destructive direction.
When we can’t validate our own experience, we will constantly feel shame and guilt instead of being able to see the truth - we are feeling resistance for a reason and that reason needs to be investigated and understood so that we can figure out a way of life that actually WORKS for us.
Why We Have To Get Upset Before We Learn To Validate
Basically the whole point here is this - when we can’t validate ourselves, we aren’t going to be able to determine where our perceptions may be off and we need to adjust to what is true in reality and we aren’t going to be able to identify what is actually NOT WORKING for us in real reality, and thus what we need to do to change our circumstances to something better.
When we are constantly telling ourselves that we should be feeling some way that we aren’t, or that we shouldn’t be feeling what we are - we are never going to be able to investigate deeper into WHY we’re feeling how we are, what we need and what’s actually beneficial - nor will we be able to solve our own problems for ourselves in a productive way.
When we can’t validate our own emotions and experiences, we can’t problem solve - and that’s why this is SUCH an important step. We can’t figure out a life that’s going to work for us, because we are not in contact with the source of the information we need to figure that out!
But the trouble comes when most of us begin to attempt validating ourselves, and we realize that we actually have a REALLY hard time doing so.
We find that we can’t access how we actually feel - but rather get stuck in our ‘thoughts’ - analyzing what we ‘think’ about what happened to us, what we think it means about us, what we think it means about others, trying to figure out what others are thinking/feeling/wanting and conceptualizing our emotions.
We find that we are constantly second-guessing if our perceptions of our experiences are ‘right’ or if we are just delusions.
We find ourselves in a state where we are continually trying to work out what OTHER people thought/felt about the experiences we have been through, trying to see things from others perspectives and centering the emotional experience of others rather than being able to center ourselves and our perspective.
We doubt ourselves and believe that we are blowing things out of proportion, not seeing what happened clearly, overreacting, under-reacting, or that whatever emotions we ARE feeling that we can access must be wrong on some level.
We notice that trying to validate ourselves actually feels dangerous, scary and like we may be allowing ourselves to veer off into fantasy land - worrying that if we actually admitted to ourselves that we feel how we feel or that we see things how we see things that we might lose ourselves to delusion.
We notice that trying to validate ourselves feels like a massive inner battle - especially when it comes to validating our emotions.
This can then lead us into MORE shame and blame spirals - we start to feel like we are failing on the self love path, like there must be something wrong with us that we can’t validate ourselves, like we are doing something wrong - or again we simply believe that our own perspectives and our own feelings don’t actually matter, are wrong and SHOULDN’T be validated in the first place.
This is not happening because any of the above is actually TRUE.
Rather, what we have to recognize here is that this pattern of invalidating ourselves is something that we LEARNED.
It was something that we were TAUGHT to do.
We aren’t ignoring our emotions, centering the perspective of others or struggling to connect with our true selves because we just decided to abandon ourselves.
Rather we have to realize that this was likely something that was first DONE to us.
We have to realize that if we are in the habit of denying ourselves, this is likely due to the fact that growing up our experience was often denied by those around us.
That our caregivers taught us that our emotions didn’t matter. That our caregivers showed us that our perception of our circumstances was ‘wrong’ if it didn’t align with theirs. That our caregivers showed us that when we expressed emotions we were either going to be reprimanded, ignored or otherwise told that we need to go ahead and be/do/not be/not do whatever was expected of us regardless of how we felt.
It’s likely that we were not given space to process through our emotions. Rather they were swept under the rug or we were taught to suppress them or deny them.
It’s likely that when we expressed what was going on for us we were told that we were seeing things wrong, that our pain was our fault, that we needed to go along and get along.
It’s likely that in order to feel safe and loved, we felt like we HAD to abandon ourselves and our perspective in order to predict and adjust to the perspectives and feelings of those around us - because when we didn’t we experienced being abandoned, abused, neglected or ignored.
At the end of the day, we have to recognize that if we struggle to connect to our own experience and our own emotions, that this is because we were TAUGHT to dissociate from them.
Which is why we sometimes need the step of getting UPSET that our experience was so deeply ignored BEFORE we are going to be able to start to truly connect with and validate ourselves.
Sometimes we need to take the step of grieving the fact that we weren’t supported, weren’t seen, weren’t given space to be ourselves and to express ourselves.
Sometimes we need to get upset and angry with our caregivers for centering their own experience at the expense of us.
Sometimes we need to allow ourselves to be deeply resentful that we learned to dissociate from ourselves in order to try to find safety.
Sometimes we need to go through a period of being upset before we’re going to be able to move towards healing.
And that’s what I want to give you permission to do today.
If you find validating yourself is challenging - it’s not your fault. This was likely something you were TAUGHT to do - and you are worthy of allowing yourself to grieve and be upset about this.
THEN you can start to work towards learning how to support, love and value yourself.
So would you be willing to be upset with the real reason why you have learned to invalidate yourself, instead of being upset with yourself that you can’t validate you OR assuming that you must be WRONG in how you’re feeling/seeing things all the time?
What if it’s not your fault, and what if it’s ok to be upset that this is now hard for you?
Can you make room to process this?
This is not an easy process - but I promise you it’s worth it.
You won’t get stuck in anger forever. It will just be a phase - but it is an important one.
Check out this video here if you need more support with this.
You are worthy of being able to access all the information your emotions have for you - so allow yourself to on the process of connecting with that wisdom.
One step at a time.
<3
Want more tools like this?
Check out The Mystery School Here
