Creating Secure Attachment Part 4: Validation

Foreign today's presentation of pacers. Integrative behavioral health. We are continuing to talk about attachment and mental health, focusing today on validation. And of course, I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. So validation is really pretty straightforward. Validation communicates, hey, I hear you. Your thoughts, wants and needs are valid and important, and I'm not going to try to minimize or take them away. And that is really important to focus on. Sometimes we want to make our loved ones feel better. We want to make the hurt stop. But it is their feelings. It is their thoughts. And they are should be empowered to choose when they are ready to let those go, when they are feeling safe enough to let those go. So we're not going to try to take them and tell them, oh, you shouldn't feel that way, or, hey, let me do something to make you feel better so you stop hurting. Well, if they're hurting, let's figure out why they're hurting and help them figure out how to solve it instead of trying to put numbing cream on the wound, so to speak. So validation communicates that what you're saying is important. And again, we're going to go back to, it's important to be able to validate yourself. And this is something that Linehan talks about a lot in dialectical behavior therapy. Hayes talks about it a lot in acceptance and commitment therapy. Pretty much any of your cognitive behavioral therapies are going to encourage you to pay attention to yourself, to acknowledge your thoughts, wants, and feelings without judgment. To hear them say, okay, I feel how I feel, or my thoughts are my thoughts. Now what do I do? What is the next best step to improve the moment? And that's really important. You may not be ready, you know, if you're grieving, for example, I know after my mother died, I was grieving, and I knew how I felt. I knew what my thoughts were. I wasn't ready to let them go yet. I wasn't ready to take that next step, to move on. And it was important for me in that situation to explore why. You know, part of it was that culture said, you know, you're supposed to grieve, you're not supposed to get over things too soon. So, you know, I didn't feel like I felt guilty if I started feeling too happy too soon. But another part of it was that there was a lot of stuff that, you know, went along with losing my mother. And it was important for me to be able to sort through, spend time sorting through all those thoughts and feelings that were associated with her death. And Then once I had sorted through all of those, I could move on, but not until then. And that is so important when we're coping with things, to allow ourselves plenty of time to go through and sort through the issues, to resolve whatever issues and then move on. It's kind of like when you do spring cleaning and you sort through your closet. You know, you have different bins. It's like, okay, this is taken care of, this, I still need to deal with this, you know, whatever. But you sort them into different bins and you're not going to leave your closet halfway sorted and go on and do something else. I, I hope. But the same thing is true for our feelings. We don't want to halfway deal with our feelings and then just kind of shove the rest back into our, deep into our psyche because eventually we're going to, that's going to come back and bite us in the butt. So validation of ourselves means accepting non judge non judgmentally our thoughts, wants and feelings in the moment. And then from that perspective, from that point, deciding what is it I need to do next? Maybe it's not move on, maybe it start process things. Maybe you've got to, you know, stick there and kind of, you know, trudge through some stuff first. That's okay. Same thing is true with other people. We want to validate them and we don't have. It doesn't mean we agree necessarily with what they're feeling. It doesn't mean that we're glad that they're feeling a certain way necessarily. It means that we are acknowledging that they have feel how they feel and they think what they think. We all come from our own, what they call phenomenological reality. We, which is, I don't know why they had to come up with such a flowery name for it. But we all have our own perspective that has been shaped by our experiences. And I use the explanation a lot that I come from a family of French Canadians and Italians and we talk, we talk with our hands, we talk loud, we tip, we are very loud group. And it's just the family I grew up in that was, you know, the norm. So it is not uncommon for people to be loud and making big gestures. And that doesn't make me feel threatened because I have not associated that with a threatening event. Other people may have come from a much more restrained household or a restrained culture where that would seem intimidating or overwhelming. So be I can go into a situation where people are being loud and large and think cool, you know, let's have some fun and Other people may be completely intimidated. It's not my place to tell them that they shouldn't feel that way. Validation means I. I say I understand what you're saying, I hear what you're saying, and I will try to understand your perspective. I haven't been through your past, you know, I haven't been through there. But I'll try to look through your lens. I will try to validate that for you. What you're thinking, feeling, and wanting right now makes sense in. In your own way. And I will meet you where you're at. So, you know, if I were bringing somebody home for Christmas vacation, for example, who was from a more restrained culture or background, you know, I might acknowledge how they're feeling overwhelmed, and then ask them, you know, what is it that I can do to help you feel more comfortable? Or what is it that you need to do right now in order to feel. In order to feel safer? Because I hear you're feeling unsafe. You know, I'm not feeling unsafe, but I hear you're feeling unsafe. So what is. Is it that I can do to help you? And that's where validation really comes in. Not telling people that how they should feel, not telling ourselves how we should feel, but accepting feelings and thoughts in the moment without judgment and then making a plan. So validation really, like I said, is pretty straightforward, is really pretty simple in concept. It's harder to do. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of times it hurts to see our friends struggle to. I remember a couple of times when my daughter was going through some stuff, and as a mother, it just. It ripped my heart out to see her so sad, to see her hurting so much. And. But I knew it was something that she had to work through. And, you know, I can be there, I can be encouraging, I can be supportive, I can be validating. But. But, you know, from my perspective, what she was going through in the big scheme of things probably wasn't going to be a big deal in five years from now or even in a year from now. But how in invalidating would that have been for me to go, you know what? You're making a big deal out of something. That's really nothing. Oh, that would have been horrible for me to say. And it was important for me to recognize that at 14, she has not had the, you know, 50 years of experience in living that I have. So that was a big deal to her. Compared to other things that she'd gone through, that was. What she was going through was huge. And it was agonizing. And, you Know, as we grow, we go through these experiences that shape us. They allow us to experience distress and that makes us stronger as we move through. So when we get to the adults, we can look back on that and go, oh, that was no big deal. You know, let me tell you what I'm going through now. But unless we had gone through those experiences and let them make us stronger, we wouldn't have developed that different perspective. So. So again, it's. It's important to let people have their feelings, their thoughts, their wants, their needs, and try to understand, try to get in their head or walk a mile in their shoes or whatever you want to say, but try to recognize that they may not be experiencing the moment in the same way you are based on their past. And it's important for. For you to understand that we all have a different concept of reality. Everybody interprets reality through their own lens, based on their own learning. Are there questions about validation or how that applies to developing healthy relationships or secure attachment? You know, the concept, the term secure attachment, you know, that even communicates to me when I hear it secure, that communicates to me a sense of safety. And if I feel safe, then I feel that the people around me are going to not criticize. They're not going to invalidate how I feel or what I want. They may not be able to meet those needs necessarily at that moment, but they are not going to invalidate my thoughts, wants and needs. And that helps me feel safe because that helps me feel heard and empowered to be my true, authentic self. Everybody have an absolutely fabulous day. Tomorrow we will be finishing up this series and we will be talking about encouragement and support, which sound a lot alike, but they are slightly different. And that puts the bow on the characteristics of secure attachment. Remember, it's consistency, responsiveness, attention, validation, encouragement and support.