YouTube episode (Man Talk Show) in which Connor Beaton answers a listener question about women who expect emotional validation from men. Beaton argues that women commonly ask men to share emotions not so they can validate or fix them, but to assess whether the man can self-regulate; he advises men to develop emotional IQ and internal validation rather than relying on women, and warns that seeking validation from a partner fosters codependency and enmeshment. The episode closes with an invitation for comments and future questions.
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Welcome to the Man Talk Show. I'm Connor Beaton. Today we're going to be talking about women validating your emotions, specifically why you should stop making women validate your emotions. So I got a question recently from a man who said, hi, Connor. Something that's been on my mind lately about women is that I've noticed with several women in my life, they always seem to want me or the men in their lives to validate their emotions and their feelings, but they never want to reciprocate it and validate the man's feelings of return. This was really evident with my ex, but I've noticed this with other women, I. E. Friends, wives, girlfriends, etc. To me, this seems like they just want control. Do you find that this is a common trait in general with women, that they need to or never need to apologize or validate a man's feelings? Just a thought. I feel like it should go both ways. Maybe it's something you could cover on the show. Okay, so first and foremost, why should it go both ways? Why is it that just because a woman might want something from you that it's. It's automatically expected that you should get that in return from her? This is a very sort of feminine approach to a relational dynamic that. That when emotions are shared, that those emotions are validated. This is a misconception. You know, a lot of women are telling men in our. In our modern culture, a lot of men hear this idea like, you should open up more, you should be more vulnerable, you should share your emot. You should talk more. That's a very feminine way of putting it. What most women are actually saying in that space is I see you as being emotionally dysregulated. I see you as being emotionally unsafe. So for me to feel safe in this relationship, I want you to share your emotions. Not so that I do anything with them, not so that I be responsible for them. Not for me to validate them, not for me to tell you what to do with them, because that will lead to codependency and all kinds of challenges within the relationship. But I want you to share some of your emotional experience and landscape. So I know that you are capable as a man of regulating your own emotional body. And this is true for a number of reasons, least of which, you know, is the fact that many women have experienced or witnessed emotionally dysregulated men who have caused a lot of damage and harm to their mothers, to them, to their sisters, to their girlfriends, you know, in past relationships. And so women have experienced a lot of Damage at the hands of emotionally unregulated or dysregulated men. So when women say, I want you to share your emotions, they're not saying, I want you to show your emotions so that I can solve them for you, so, so that I can be responsible for them or so that I can validate that they're real. What they're saying is, do you have the emotional IQ and capacity to navigate your own emotional landscape? Are you mature? Are you a mature man who's able to navigate that part of himself? Or at the very least have the resources and the wherewithal to develop those resources so that you can be grounded in your own inner frame, so that you can be grounded in your own inner experience and that I can trust you enough to have that. So when a man is constantly asking for his partner, his girlfriend, his wife to validate his emotions, it can be in some sense a turnoff because she will feel like she's responsible for telling that man that yes, indeed, he does feel that way, for helping him fix the way that he feels. She'll start to try and problem solve for him. She'll start to see him as someone that needs her support in order to be emotionally, mentally okay. And that's the foundation for enmeshment, for codependency. And for the man, what starts to happen is that he feels like the only access point to his partner is by then oversharing. And what can very quickly happen is if that man has not had men in his life that, that he can bring his challenges to, that he can bring his triumphs to, that he can bring his wins and his failures and his defeats to, to say, this is what happened and I don't need anything from you, or I do need some support, he can begin to be reliant on that woman, his partner, his wife, his girlfriend, et cetera, to help him regulate his own internal system. Lastly, really, in some ways, women don't want to validate your emotions. They want you to do that for yourself. They want you to have developed the skill set to be able to validate your own emotional experience and to have the internal awareness of what you're actually experiencing, whether it's rage and anger and aggression or sadness or shame or guilt or embarrassment or whatever it is that is happening within you. What they're actually saying, when I want you to open up, I want you to be more vulnerable, is I want you to know, understand and regulate your own experience. I want you to lead yourself in that way. Because when you do that, I can trust you when you do that. I know that you've got your own inner experience and I don't need to be responsible for it. I don't need to caretake you. I don't need to sit in this maternal role and validate what you're feeling. There's more that I can dive into in future episodes. But if you enjoyed this comment below, feel free to leave me any thoughts that you have on this, and I look forward to answering more of your questions next week.
