Validation is the act of showing your understanding and acceptance of someone’s personal position or emotions. However, validation does not imply you condone or agree. Validation can improve relationships and soothe painful emotions. When you feel that others understand and accept your thoughts and emotions, you feel more comfortable yourself overall.
However, receiving validation from others is not the key to finding lasting happiness. The truth is that no amount of praise or approval from others has the capacity to make up for the way you feel and think about yourself. As long as you judge yourself, you will continue to feel poorly about yourself, which is why learning to self-validate is an important part of living a truly fulfilling life.
What is Self-Validation?
Self-validation is the act of accepting your own personal feelings and thoughts without judgment. Self-validation doesn’t imply that you agree with or condone your feelings or thoughts, it only symbolizes your acceptance and acknowledgement of their presence. Often, people have thoughts and or feelings that are uncomfortable to experience or that seem disconnected from what they believe to be true.
But when you judge yourself harshly for having these thoughts or feelings, you only prolong your negative emotions and fuel feelings of insecurity. Judgment also prevents you from taking the chance to explore and challenge your thoughts and feelings to grasp a better understanding of who you are as individual.
How Can Self-Validation Help?
Validating your thoughts and feelings can help you soothe yourself and regulate your emotions in a more effective manner. Self-validation can help with your effort to understand and accept yourself for who you are, which can lay the framework for the development of improved confidence and a stronger sense of self identity. Overall, self-validation can help you gain insight into yourself and find inner peace, which is an essential component a happy and healthy life.
When you start the process of validating yourself, remember that self-validation is imperative to achieving not inner peace and personal happiness, but it is also imperative to building and maintaining meaningful relationships with others.
Tips for Validating Yourself
Use the following tips as a guideline to begin validating your thoughts and feelings.
1. Be Mindful
Being mindful of your thoughts and feeling without giving into the urge to fight against them is the first step in the process of validating yourself. Being present involves not suppressing your feelings or trying to push away your thoughts, no matter how uncomfortable they may be to sit with.
2. Reflection
Reflection is acknowledging your emotional state and visualizing it as clearly as possible. This may mean identifying what event prompted a strong emotion. Reflection can also involve considering the ways you feel an emotion throughout your body or the actions you engage in on behalf of the emotion. The essence of reflection is thoughtfully noticing and describing your emotions to grasp a deeper understanding of where your thoughts and feelings are emerging from and why.
3. Guessing
There will be times when you won’t know exactly what you feel or think. Examine the actions you engage in and the sensations you feel throughout your body when the unknown thoughts and feelings emerge to help you identify your state of mind. Guessing your thoughts and feelings with the information you have available can help you in your plight to gain insight into yourself.
Additional Resources:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pieces-mind/201407/self-validation
https://tinybuddha.com/blog/5-ways-to-validate-be-part-of-your-support-system/
https://psychcentral.com/blog/4-ways-to-validate-yourself/
https://mental-health-matters.com/self-validation-how-to-validate-yourself/
https://medium.com/@masud_hossain/self-validation-is-the-key-to-unlimited-motivation-830f4ef61678
https://www.mindfulnessmuse.com/dialectical-behavior-therapy/how-to-give-yourself-the-validation-you-crave
