One day, my wife (then girlfriend) came home frustrated with a coworker. He kept overstepping the boundaries of his role while neglecting the work he was actually assigned. The work he dropped ended up falling on her.
I told her this shouldn't be happening. She needed to bring it up with him and their manager. She shouldn't be paying the price for someone else's incompetence while he reaped the benefits.
She told me she already knew what she needed to do.
I was confused. If she already knew, why did she want to talk to me about it?
She said she wanted to vent. She wanted someone to validate her feelings.
At the time, I didn't understand what validation meant. I also didn't like the idea of venting. It felt like she wanted to share this uncomfortable feeling of injustice with me. I would become angry and unhappy too, and then neither of us would feel good. What was the point?
Still, I stopped trying to solve the problem. I held her and listened to what she had to say. I was uncomfortable, but something surprising happened. Without me saying much of anything, she started to calm down. She relaxed and became happier.
The situation at work hadn't changed. The problem was still there, but she felt better anyway.
My advice wasn't wrong. It was an answer to a question she wasn't asking.
Looking back, I can see why that surprised me. I had weathered my emotions alone for most of my life. I would reason through them, understand what they were telling me, and come to terms with them. That might mean taking action, or it might mean letting the feeling ride.
There were a couple concepts I thought I understood:
- Your emotions are trying to tell you something.
- Your emotions can be wrong.
This seemed like a pretty good set of tools. They worked well enough when I was processing my own emotions. But this is where my engineer brain created a blind spot. If sadness was the distance between where someone was and where they wanted to be, I thought helping meant finding the shortest path between the two. I offered my friends the same process I used on myself.
Have you heard these before?
You're overreacting.
You're actually doing great.
I used to say things like this to console people. At the time, I thought I was helping. What I meant was: I understand where you're coming from, and I want to help you get to a better place. What I was actually telling them was that the way they felt didn't make sense.
That conversation didn't change this habit overnight, but it started to change how I understood what other people needed. I had assumed everyone weathered their emotions alone, like I did. I didn't realize how powerful it could be to have someone there to go through them with you.
I used to summarize one of my emotional rules as "your emotions can be wrong." I think what I meant was that emotions can lead us in the wrong direction. If I get angry because I feel a friend has wronged me, my immediate impulse might be to lash out. I might feel ashamed afterward if I act on it. But the anger itself is real, and it has a real effect on me. Acknowledging the emotion is separate from deciding what to do with it.
Validation is that acknowledgment. I'm not saying that someone's interpretation is right or endorsing what they do next. I'm saying: your emotion makes sense. I understand why you feel this way, and I'm here with you.
I've realized that the practical problem is usually right in front of me. The emotional impact is harder to see. Now I try to ask not only what needs to happen next, but how the situation is affecting the people in it. My wife already knew what to do. At best, my advice might have saved her a couple minutes getting there. What it couldn't give her was the feeling that she wasn't alone.
Learning to do this was strange at first. I would say something like, "Damn, that sucks," and use every fiber of willpower to stop myself from offering a solution. Sitting with someone in an uncomfortable situation is hard because I want to make things right. But making things right isn't always what they want.
I now catch myself when I try to console a friend by saying their situation isn't actually that bad. Instead, I sit with them. I tell them the situation does suck, or that I understand why they feel the way they do. I've also changed how I think about venting. I might still get angry or sad with someone, but I can control how their emotions affect me. It feels much healthier than keeping their emotions at a distance.
I'm still learning how to validate someone's feelings. If someone comes to you upset, try starting with their feelings instead of the solution. Tell them that what they feel makes sense. Don't offer a different perspective yet. You might be surprised by how much it helps.
Validation doesn't mean "you're right." It means "you make sense." Sometimes people need an ally in their battle, not advice from the sidelines.