Ch14: The Importance of Validating Feelings#

Think of a time — childhood, last week, doesn’t matter — when you told someone how you felt and they said:

“You shouldn’t feel that way.”

Or: “You’re overreacting.”

Or: “Come on, it’s not that bad.”

Did the feeling go away? Did you suddenly feel lighter, corrected, grateful for the feedback?

Or did something else happen — a door closing, a wall going up, the sense that you’d reached out and been shoved back? And now there were two problems: the original feeling, plus the shame of having it.

That second problem — the shame of feeling what you feel — is almost always worse than the feeling itself. And it’s created, nearly every time, by well-meaning people who don’t know how to do one of the most important things a human can do for another:

Validate.

What Validation Actually Means#

Validation is acknowledging that another person’s feeling is real, that it makes sense given their experience, and that they don’t need to justify it.

That’s the whole thing.

It’s not agreeing with their interpretation. It’s not saying they’re right. It’s not giving permission to act on every impulse. It’s saying: I see that you feel this. Your feeling is real.

Sounds simple. Almost trivially simple. In practice, it’s one of the hardest things most people do — especially with their children.

When your child says “I hate my sister,” the instinct is to correct: “No, you don’t. You love your sister.” When they say “I’m scared,” the instinct is to reassure: “There’s nothing to be scared of.” When they say “That’s not fair,” the instinct is to rationalize: “Well, life isn’t fair.”

Every one of these responses is invalidation. Every one, delivered with love and good intentions, teaches the same lesson: Your feelings are wrong.

Validating Is Not Agreeing#

This is where most parents get stuck.

Validating your child’s feeling does not mean endorsing their behavior. These are separate things.

When your child hits their sibling and screams “I hate her!” — you validate the feeling while holding the line on behavior.

“I can see you’re really angry at your sister right now. That feeling is real. But hitting is not okay.”

Both are true simultaneously. The anger is real. The hitting is unacceptable. You don’t choose between acknowledging the emotion and addressing the behavior. You do both.

Elena, a mother I worked with, had a nine-year-old son named Mateo who was getting sent to the principal’s office weekly — pushing kids, throwing supplies, once flipping his desk. Elena was terrified he was developing a “behavioral problem.”

When I spoke with Mateo alone, he was articulate and thoughtful. He described a situation where a classmate took credit for his idea during a group project. “I told the teacher, and she said, ‘It doesn’t matter whose idea it was.’ But it was my idea. It did matter.”

“What did you do?”

“I pushed my chair back really hard and it fell over.”

“What do you think would have happened if the teacher had said, ‘I can see why that’s frustrating — you worked hard on that idea’?”

He looked at me like I’d described something from science fiction. “She would never say that.”

“But if she did?”

He thought. “I probably would have been okay.”

That’s validation’s power. It doesn’t erase the feeling or solve the problem. It lets the feeling move through instead of getting stuck. Mateo’s anger wasn’t the issue. The issue was that his anger had nowhere to go — denied, dismissed, trapped — so it came out sideways as behavior.

Why Validated Feelings Flow#

There’s a mechanism worth understanding, because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Feelings that are acknowledged tend to flow. They rise, they’re felt, they’re named, and they naturally subside — not instantly, but organically, the way a wave rises and falls.

Feelings that are denied tend to freeze. They get stuck. They solidify. And frozen feelings don’t disappear. They go underground — showing up later as anxiety, physical symptoms, behavioral eruptions, or the eventual inability to identify what you’re feeling at all.

Think of it as water. Acknowledged feelings are water in a stream — moving, flowing, reaching somewhere. Denied feelings are water behind a dam. Pressure builds. Eventually, something breaks.

Validation isn’t magic. It’s hydraulics. You’re allowing the emotional system to work as designed — feelings enter, feelings are processed, feelings move through.

When Elena started validating Mateo’s feelings at home — not his behavior, his feelings — the shift was immediate. Instead of “Stop being dramatic,” she tried “That sounds really frustrating.” Instead of “You’re fine,” she tried “Ouch — that must have stung.”

“It felt fake at first,” she told me. “Like reading from a script. But he responded instantly. The first time I said ‘I can see why that made you angry,’ he just… deflated. Like the pressure came out of him. He didn’t need to push a chair over. He’d been heard.”

The Three Moves of Validation#

Validation doesn’t require a degree in psychology. It has three moves:

Name it. Put the feeling into words. “You look sad.” “That seems scary.” “You’re disappointed.” Young children often lack the vocabulary for their emotional states. When you name what they’re feeling, you give them a handle — a way to grasp what was previously just overwhelming sensation.

Reflect it. Connect the feeling to its cause. “You’re upset because your friend didn’t invite you.” “You’re angry because it felt unfair.” This shows the child their feeling has a reason, a logic, a context. It’s not random. It’s not crazy. It’s a reasonable response to something that happened.

Accompany it. Stay with the feeling. “I’m here.” “You don’t have to be okay right now.” “We can sit with this together.” This is the most important move, because it communicates what no words fully capture: You are not alone with this feeling.

Name. Reflect. Accompany.

What Happens When You Don’t#

Every parent will occasionally miss — dismiss a feeling out of exhaustion, distraction, or simply not knowing what to say. That’s human. An occasional miss doesn’t cause damage.

The pattern does.

When invalidation is the default — when a child consistently hears that their feelings are wrong, excessive, inconvenient, or unacceptable — they learn to distrust their own emotional experience.

A person who doesn’t trust their own feelings is a person who is lost.

They don’t know what they want, because wanting is a feeling. They don’t know what they need, because need is a feeling. They can’t set boundaries, because boundaries require knowing when something feels wrong. They can’t make decisions, because decisions require access to that gut sense of what matters.

This is the real cost of chronic invalidation: not just the pain of the moment, but long-term disconnection from yourself.

The Hardest Part#

Here’s the honest truth: validation is simple, but it’s not easy.

It’s not easy because most of us weren’t validated ourselves. When your child says “I’m scared” and your reflex is “Don’t be silly” — that reflex didn’t come from nowhere. Someone said it to you. Probably many times. You internalized it so deeply it became your default setting.

Validating your child often means going against your own programming. Doing for them what nobody did for you. And that can surface grief — real, raw grief — for the child you were who didn’t receive this.

If that happens, be gentle with yourself. You’re not failing. You’re feeling. And that’s exactly the point.

Something to Practice#

Next time your child shows a strong emotion — anger, sadness, fear, frustration — try this before anything else:

Pause. Don’t fix. Don’t reassure. Don’t correct.

Then say what you see: “You’re really [angry / sad / scared / frustrated] right now.”

That’s all. Just name it.

You might be surprised how much a child can do with their feelings once they know those feelings are allowed.