What could be better than validation?

A Valentine's Day post

There’s an applied behavior analyst who primarily works with children that I follow on Instagram (@abanaturally). I find her mesmerizing. She (obviously) is never yelling at her children in her videos, but almost all of her videos show her guiding her children’s behavior, including denying them things that they want. There is an immovable air to her approach, with a tranquility and sturdiness reminiscent of natural features - stillness like that of a tree or glacier.

As I’ve said before, other people can feel your feelings.

This is not a post about empathy and it’s not a post about validation. Indeed, there is a negative, intrusive kind of empathy that happens sometimes despite our best efforts: we often feel pushed around by other people’s emotions unless we’re unusually grounded, mature, and developed.

This implies that it is a kindness to the people around you, especially the people close to you, to have a gentle, capable handle on your emotions:

Soothing yourself so others don’t have to do it for you is a legitimate gift to your loved ones - many people know what it feels like to have a parent who places strongly felt emotional expectations on their children to make them feel less anxious, whether that’s by doing fewer risky things, or complying more with parental expectations for their life choices. Parents who more clearly manage their own anxiety around these (very real!) challenges of growing children will have better relationships with them over time.

It also implies that if you want to get your way without smashing heads or yelling, you do your cause a great service by maintaining a stance of generous equanimity.

We don’t want validation as much as we want to feel like other people don’t freak out when we feel negative emotions. If we’re in distress with feelings we struggle to control, we most want closeness to someone who seems immovable by those emotions, provided that they also show that they care about us - it’s easy to be unconcerned when someone you don’t know is frazzled or strung out, and few things are more upsetting when you’re in real distress than sharing it with someone who turns out not to care enough about you to think it’s a problem.

There is great security in a feeling that your distress or annoyance can be acknowledged by others without having to be changed or removed. It is much more helpful to have an emotional anchor than to sense that sharing our feelings distresses someone else.

We want to feel that our loved ones care about and can handle knowing how we feel, perhaps especially when the ways we feel aren’t the most acceptable or desirable. There’s an important difference here between this and being validated - we often don’t actually need to be told that what we’re feeling is good or that we’re going to get our way in order to be soothed by someone listening to us.

This exists alongside an aggravating factor that can obscure the benefits of emotionally grounded listening: we often desperately want validation and approval, and like our reactivity, we want it more the less emotionally mature we are. That too can hamper us in our quest for better relationships and more closeness. True intimacy is not found in being accepted for your shitty or unwieldy feelings because that would often require the person you love to hide their true thoughts - and not just their least emotionally grounded ones - from you.

In the words of Adrienne Rich: “An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”

Real emotional closeness is the result of a willingness to share the good and bad of yourself with another, knowing they won’t universally praise you for all of it, and of a willingness in turn to be honest with your love even when you don’t have praise to give. There is no daring and thus no honor in baring your psyche to someone who can only tell you that your soul is the best of all possible souls. We can’t be close to someone if we withhold our thoughts from them because we fear they can’t handle our responses, nor can we truly know someone if we punish them (rather than simply disagree with them) in their honesty. Disagreement without emotional reactivity and with care for the other person is the goal.

Children, with their newness to emotions and experience in general, benefit particularly from quiet, rooted responsiveness to their distress without reactivity. We feel safest when we know that other people that we look to for security, home, and reliability aren’t dysregulated and discombobulated when we are. It sends a powerful message to children when their misbehavior is not allowed but is still met with grace and mature responsiveness. They learn that their intense feelings won’t hurt them, because they don’t hurt their caregiver, and over time, they learn from their caregiver how to experience high emotion without indulging in excessive, disproportionate reactions or harmful behavior.

This is a useful lesson that can help in bypassing a lesson most of us take a lot longer to learn: emotions do not demand particular behavioral expression, and we can choose good behavior in the face of pretty much any emotion. This isn’t easy to internalize, because emotion is a key driver of all behavior, including harmful and destructive behavior, so people tend to try to manage both as if they’re a unit (which is much harder). People often conflate behavior with feelings in a way that does a disservice to both:

People fall all over themselves to justify feeling the wrong things or browbeat themselves into feeling the right things; they sense that if they didn’t feel what they’re feeling they wouldn’t behave the way they do. They’re usually technically right about that.

It’s easy to forget that you can choose good behavior not just in spite of but partially because of your feelings, even when they’re painful and pressuring. Choosing more productive behavior in the face of rough feelings is a muscle that you can load with increasing weight over time.

The first step toward offering more emotional stillness and lower reactivity is recognizing that emotions and behavior are separable. Honest expression of even difficult emotions does not require yelling, to name one of many possible conflations. That emotional stillness, groundedness, is also similar to an ancient virtue system for behavior: stoicism.

I’ve mentioned stoicism in previous articles, and especially talked about what it isn’t - it’s not a unilateral refusal to talk about (or show others) what bothers you. Positive and functional stoicism is active and doesn’t compromise intimacy, while a refusal to be open does. This kind of stoicism meets difficulty where it stands, seeking to be its best and least volatile self in the face of pain and suffering. This is genuinely challenging, and for most of us, it will be a work in progress as long as we live. There isn’t much virtue in berating yourself over a failure to be composed, any more than there is functionality in doing the same to someone else. I would hope that if you’re the type to feel stricken by unrealistic calls to better behavior that you approach this essay with a lightness and a sense of patience for your own limitations even as you try to apply it to your actions. There truly are better relational dynamics awaiting those who increase their emotional stability.