The Significance of Validation to Our Development

(Mainstream psychology is slowly catching on…)

(If you’ve received this article by email, please click on the heading, which will send you to the most up-to-date version of the article. I often edit and correct typos after the first upload to Substack)

This is a card I give to my clients to help remind them of what they are actually there to do in therapy.

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This article is in response to a new paper that was just published on how the lack of validation in mothers’ childhood makes it difficult for them to validate their children.

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It is now taken for granted in psychological research that validation of children’s emotional/inner experience is crucial to healthy human development.

Validation is critical to the integration of the child’s limbic and executive systems, which is necessary for lifelong psychological and physical health, and for moving towards our human potential. No matter how safe the child is kept physically, and how much they are told they are loved, if their emotions and inner experience are not validated all the time, their limbic and executive systems will not integrate well. This will predictably lead to anxiety and difficulties, especially in adolescence and throughout life. Abuse aside, without validation all through childhood and adolescence, no one develops particularly well.

Ongoing and consistent validation supports emotional, neurological, and physical regulation (these are all aspects of the same complex system that is us), which in turn leads to better connectivity, and therefore better learning and development in general.

If everyone validates their children’s emotions from the moment they are born, my profession, psychotherapy, would become obsolete. And it should become obsolete! It is not necessary, or inevitable for us, humans, to live the way we do. We have incredible potential embedded in our very neurological ‘equipment’, which holds the key to our evolution from smart (but extremely dangerous) primates, to becoming full human beings. To reach this potential we need to connect our limbic and executive systems, and validation achieves precisely that.

The Role of Validation In Adulthood

Adults cannot directly integrate the brains of other adults by validating their emotions/inner experiences. But validating the emotional/inner experience of another adult, makes them (their limbic brain) feel safer. It therefore provides support for their potential development/integration.

But they still have to do the hard work of integrating their own brains, by learning how to access their middle prefrontal cortex/executive brain, and validating all the information that comes from their limbic brain (mostly their emotions). Just breathing a bit deeper will already give you access to your prefrontal cortex/executive brain. It’s not always easy to start with, but just like with anything new you learn (wire in), it gets easier the more you integrate.

If validation was not available in childhood, we need to do it ourselves as adults. It is no different from any other adult learning process. If something was not available to us in our childhood environment, e.g., a particular skill, a language, etc., we have to learn it (aka wire it in) as adults. It is, of course, more difficult and time-consuming to do this in adulthood, but if we want something that was not available in our original environment, and that therefore we never learned, that’s what we have to do.

But integrating our brains is far more important than learning a language. Growing up without speaking a language that is missing in our environment, is not harmful. I grew up without speaking many languages that I would have liked to learn. But it didn’t harm me. Growing up with poorly-integrated brains because validation was never, or rarely offered, is deeply harmful, and it compromises our psychological and physical health. With trauma and abuse it’s worse of course, but it is bad either way.

No one does well psychologically when they cannot develop towards their potential and are forced into a life of only coping and surviving, which is the only thing you can do when you are poorly integrated, with or without trauma.

If you need evidence that what I say is true, think of the last time you disclosed your feelings to someone. How does it feel if someone tells you, even with the best of intentions: “Don’t be silly. You don’t need to feel that”, compared with: “Hey, it’s OK to feel this way. Anyone would, in the same situation.” What would you find more soothing, supportive, caring and grounding? The dismissive response, or the validating one? I am sure you have plenty of examples of this from your life that you can reflect upon.

To validate simply means telling someone else that whatever it is they are feeling is perfectly fine. When people respond dismissively, or with a challenge, even when they believe they are trying to help, all it does is leave the person alone and abandoned with whatever it is they are already feeling. The feeling does not go away and is likely to go ‘underground’, which will make things much worse for the person. It’s not our job to ‘fix’ other people’s feelings — nor can we even if we wanted to. Our responsibility is to be there alongside them when they feel whatever it is they feel, which is what a validating response does. It makes them feel that someone cares about them and accepts them unconditionally. Why is it so important to feel accepted unconditionally? Once again, reflect on your own rich life experience, and you tell me…

Most people’s brains work precisely as they are supposed to, and they do not ‘malfunction’. If the limbic brain (where our emotions are generated) feels something, there is a perfectly good reason for it. We don’t have to understand another person’s reasons for what they are feeling. All that’s required is that we validate them unconditionally. I promise you that once this is available, most people will feel motivated and able to find the solutions they need to find to whatever real life problems their feelings mirror or reflect from their past, their present or both.

Depression — and as a clinician I can tell you that real depression is much more rare than you imagine — improves almost immediately the moment people’s depressed feelings are validated. Depression, like all our emotions, is a perfectly accurate response to circumstances in our lives. Emotions change on their own when they are validated.

No one gets better, and most people will get worse, when they, or others, try to change their feelings, ‘manage’ or medicate them with substances or certain activities (as if they are an ‘enemy’ to try to vanquish or to shut up), think their way out of them (e.g. CBT), or suppress them in any way. Adolescents — not children anymore, but not quite adults either — are absolutely desperate for regular validation. They are suffering hugely, and most of them feel deeply alone, because no one validates how they feel.

You can look at human psychological difficulties at any age as a desperate cry for validation.

People need to train themselves out of dismissing, ‘rescuing’, trying to ‘fix’, or challenging other people’s feelings (and their own). The first thing that should come out of everyone’s mouth when someone reveals how they feel, is “It’s OK to feel the way you do”. Try it for yourself and see what it does.

It helps to notice how you are feeling when you try to validate someone else’s feelings, especially children and young people. You are likely to discover interesting dynamic inside yourself, because your own limbic brain has probably also been crying for validation for a very long time. Practising validation is enormously beneficial for you and for everyone around you. And by the way, when I say validation, I mean validating absolutely everything: every feeling you have, including doubts, anger, hatred, sadness, frustration, grief, depression, stuckness, and nice feelings too. The more you do it, the better your integration will become, and the more you will change. You will be much safer to be around, and you will notice the impact this has on others in your life and your relationship with them.

A Word About the Current State of Scientific Research

Because of the conservatism and fear inherent in mainstream materialist scientific research (conservatism and fear have nothing to do with how science should really work), studies in psychology often state the obvious. They also tend to express it as if it is something new and Earth-shattering, that just got discovered...

In this case, the big ‘discovery’ — that we have known about for around eight decades, since at least John Bowlby’s attachment theory was developed — is that experiences that mothers/parents/adults had in their own childhood would determine how easy or difficult it would be for them to validate their children’s experience. Parents cannot give or teach what they do not know, and can only guide their children as far as their own level of development. Before anyone embarks on parenting they need to consider their own level of development and whether they are really able to support a human child to develop towards their potential.

Raising Full Humans

Most humans can keep children alive — eight billion of us and growing are proof of that. But how many humans are capable of supporting young humans to develop towards their full humanhood?… Not many, judging by our growing mental health disaster, and the ongoing multi-facetted crisis we are in as a species. Parents do not have to be ‘perfect’. They just have to be fully committed to their ongoing growth and development (aka integration).

If parents also have trauma, they must work to recover. If they do not, they will pass it, or aspects of it on to their children, even with the best of intentions. No one is expecting people to ‘already be there’. Parents’/adults’ active engagement in a process of development and recovery is already beneficial to children. All my clients who are parents would confirm this.

I don’t think that asking parents to develop or to heal from trauma, if they suffer from it, is too much to ask for the sake of future generations, our species and our planet in general… Children don’t ask to be born. But once there, they should be offered the best opportunity possible to develop into full human beings. Otherwise, all we do as a species is repeat our old patterns.

Anyone, any parent, who feels uncomfortable, confronted, guilty or angry with me because of the last few sentences, please stop what you are doing, breathe in a bit deeper and tell your limbic brain — where these feelings are coming from — that everything you feel is OK. Everything you are feeling is OK. This is the start of integration.