Self- Validation: Understanding Your Feelings Without Judging Them

Do you find yourself avoiding things you know matter? Struggling to calm down once you’re upset? Or constantly checking with other people to see if your feelings are “reasonable”?

A lot of people don’t trust their internal experience. Not because something is wrong with them, but because at some point, their emotions were not taken seriously. Maybe their emotions were dismissed, minimized, or told they were too much. Over time, that invalidation created confusion and they stopped trusting themselves. 

In DBT, we understand this as an invalidating environment. When emotions are constantly questioned or denied as children, we don't learn how to understand or regulate them. Instead, emotions escalate, get shut down, or turn into behaviours like impulsivity, avoidance, or people pleasing (Shenk & Fruzzetti, 2011; Ford & Gross, 2019).

This is where self-validation comes in.

Self-validation is the ability to notice how you feel and understand why it makes sense, given your situation. It doesn’t mean you like the feeling. It doesn’t mean the behaviour that follows the emotion is effective. It just means your internal response is not random or wrong.

According to Marsha Linehan (1993) we all have what she calls, essential validity, meaning each person has inherent significance that cannot be taken away or discounted. This means that each person’s voice warrants being heard and taken seriously. Your emotions are communicating something. When that message isn’t received, the system tends to turn up the volume. That’s when people feel overwhelmed, reactive, or out of control.

When you start validating yourself, this shifts. You don’t have to escalate as much to get your own attention. You don’t need as much reassurance from other people. And you can move into problem solving without skipping over how you actually feel.

So what does self-validation look like in practice?

First: Observe and describe. Deep breath. Slow things down. Name what is happening internally by observing thoughts, body sensations, and emotions nonjudgmentally. “I feel angry.” “I feel tightness in my chest.” “I feel embarrassed.” Most people skip this step and go straight to judging or fixing.

Second: Understand why the emotion makes sense. Get curious about why this emotion makes sense. What happened? What are you reacting to? Even if your reaction feels big, there is almost always something in the situation that connects. You’re not trying to prove you’re right, but trying to understand your own system.

Third: Practice being non-judgemental. Notice judgements that show up as as “shoulds.” I shouldn’t feel this way. I should be over this. This is stupid. These thoughts tend to shut down processing and increase shame.

Finally: Replace the “shoulds” with more realistic statements. Something like, “Given what happened, it makes sense I feel this way.” That doesn’t mean you stay stuck there. It just means you stop fighting reality long enough to actually work with it.

A common example I see is around anger. Someone feels angry, and immediately jumps to, “I’m overreacting” or “I need to calm down.” They might text a friend to check if their reaction is valid before they even understand it themselves. But if you slow that down, you might notice tension in your body, a sense of injustice, or feeling dismissed. When you validate the emotion and body sensations, the intensity often comes down just enough to think clearly.

Self-validation is not the same as agreeing with everything you do. You can validate the emotion and still choose a different behaviour.If you skip validation though, behaviour is difficult to change (Linehan et al., 2006; Lynch et al., 2007). You end up either pushing feelings away or getting overwhelmed. At the same time, if you only validate and never move to change, you can stay stuck. Both are needed.

Most people don’t struggle because they feel too much. They struggle because they don’t understand what they feel, and they don’t trust it. Self-validation is how you start rebuilding trust with your own body, heart, and mind. 

And for a lot of people, self-validation is where things actually begin to shift.

If you’d like to learn more about validation– for yourself, you and your partner, working with your teenager– feel free to reach out. I am a DBT-informed psychologist seeing clients virtually in Alberta. 

References

Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.

Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

McKay, M., Wood, J. C., & Brantley, J. (2019). The dialectical behavior therapy skills workbook (2nd ed.). New Harbinger Publications.

Shenk, C. E., & Fruzzetti, A. E. (2019). The impact of validating and invalidating responses on emotional reactivity. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 30(2), 163–183.