Healthy vs. Unhealthy Emotional Validation 

I would say that the main difference between the healthy validation of emotions and the unhealthy version is that the healthy version is based on genuine compassion, caring, authenticity, honesty, and interest in the other person’s experience, whereas the unhealthy version involves a willingness to sacrifice those things in an attempt to make the other person immediately feel good.

At a more detailed level, I think the healthy way to validate other people’s feelings involves expressing the following ideas (but ONLY when these ideas are true).

Healthy Emotional Validation

1) Care: I care about you.

2) Willingness: I’m totally okay with you feeling this emotion right now in front of me.

3) Acceptance: I don’t think badly of you for feeling what you’re feeling.

4) Interest: I am interested in learning more about what you are feeling and why you are feeling it.

5) Compassion: I have compassion and/or empathy for your suffering and want you not to suffer (unless you want to suffer right now, in which case I want you to suffer only insofar and in the ways that seem appropriate to you, such as the suffering that most people feel is right to feel after the loss of a loved one).

6) Understanding of facts: I understand the facts of what happened in this situation (and if I don’t, I’m going to ask open-ended questions in an effort to understand it).

7) Understanding of feelings: I understand why you’re feeling this way (and if I don’t, I’m going to make an effort to understand it).

8) Legitimization of feelings: I think it is totally reasonable that this combination of your situation, your beliefs about this situation, your thoughts, and your past experiences causes you to feel this way right now (and if I don’t see how the combination of your situation, beliefs, etc., lead to your emotion, I’m going to make an effort to understand it).

While some of this is helpful to say aloud when a friend or loved one is upset, much of it will typically be expressed through body language, attention, attitude, presence, tone of voice, and so on. The main thing is that these ideas get expressed in a way that the other person receives them, whether that expression is verbal or non-verbal, explicit or implicit.

On the other hand, I think that it’s usually unhealthy to attempt to validate emotions when it’s done expressing the following ideas.

Unhealthy Emotional Validation 

1) Disingenuousness: you say things that you don’t really mean or believe, such as supporting their claims about what happened when you don’t believe those claims are true.

2) Emotional reasoning: you support the idea that whatever their emotional response is to the situation is a perfect guide to what actually occurred (e.g., if they feel angry at someone, that implies the other person must have done something objectively harmful, or if they feel they’ve lost someone they had a fight with, that means that person is gone forever).

3) Justification: you support or encourage harmful or self-destructive actions they took or are considering taking as a consequence of their negative feelings (e.g., normalizing them taking revenge on the person they are angry about or justifying why it is okay that they did so).

4) Absolving: you encourage the idea that they made no mistakes or behaved perfectly or that someone else is 100% to blame for the situation (unless, of course, you really believe this to be true). On this point, it is often the case that victims of crimes did nothing at all wrong, but this is much less commonly the case when it comes to, for instance, interpersonal conflict between romantic partners, which usually involves both parties having behaved imperfectly, though not necessarily to the same degree.

To recap, people often want emotional validation from their friends and loved ones when they are feeling upset. People are often confused, though, about what this means exactly. There are both healthy ways and unhealthy ways to do emotional validation. 

The healthy version is not always easy to do, but I think it is what we should aspire to when a friend or loved one wants emotional validation. 

To do the healthy version, aim to imbue your responses to their emotions with genuine compassion, caring, authenticity, honesty, and interest in their experiences. And avoid sacrificing those things just to make the other person feel good.

This piece was first written on October 1, 2023, and first appeared on this site on October 11, 2023.

One remarkable benefit to such a state is that it allows for a level of optimal allocation of resources that can be otherwise difficult to achieve. If there is one cookie left on the cookie tray, the member of the pair who enjoys that type of cookie more will take it. The other will be pleased, knowing that more pleasure will be had by his partner than he would get if he ate it himself. And even if this last-cookie-on-a-tray situation occurs ten nights in a row, the same total happiness maximizing result will occur, with the member who benefits most eating the treat each time. No negotiation of “if I let you have this cookie, what will you do for me later?” need occur, and so the optimal result (from the point of view of maximizing total benefit) is achieved even when tit-for-tat exchanges aren’t possible.

A more striking example occurs when one member of a pair becomes needy for a long period of time. This could be due, for instance, to sickness or mental illness. With something approaching symbiogenesis, the non-sick member will be there to help the sick member, which likely maximizes the sum of the utility of both parties. This state may be hard to attain for selfish actors: the non-sick member of the pair could calculate that the cost of helping is not worth the benefits to himself, or that these benefits could be still achieved without making such a large sacrifice. He might choose to abandon the sick member altogether, or to only put in a minimal effort to maintain the relationship until the sickness passes and the relationship again becomes selfishly beneficial.

If you were given the choice to enter into symbiogenesis with another person, would you? It might seem problematic that you could end up sacrificing yourself for the other person (and, in fact, that you would want to do so, if such a sacrifice helped the other person enough). But, the other person would also sacrifice themselves for you. You would sit with them while they were sick, but you would also be taken care of when you are sick. You would miss out on the oatmeal raisin cookies, which are her favorites, but would get more chocolate chip cookies, which are yours.

Given the highly social nature of our species, and the fact that people have different skills and preferences, two people are usually better at achieving two people’s goals than one person is at achieving his own. Two people can provide each other with the basic human needs of love, companionship, physical contact and conversation that a person cannot provide himself. The member of the pair who is better at job interviews can help the other one prepare for them, and the member who is a great cook can share his meals. The member of the pair who is more socially skilled can help the second solve his social problems, while the one who is more financially savvy can help the first make better investment decisions. Plus, both parties can feel safe, and protected, knowing that the other member of their pair is looking out for them unselfishly.

For all its benefits, symbiogenesis can be dangerous when one side of it is faked or faulty. If another person’s happiness makes you happy, but yours does not do the same for him, you are in danger. You will probably start to sacrifice and give, while that person is likely to benefit from your generosity and take. The more the other person gets used to taking, the more natural it will seem to him to do so. You will be risking sitting by someone’s bedside for months when they are very sick, without simultaneously being assured of someone sitting by yours if you need it. Half-symbiogenesis can be extremely damaging. So when you notice the state of symbiogenesis forming, you need to be cautious, making sure that neither person’s feelings of aligned incentives are developing substantially faster than the other. If the feelings develop in near synchrony, the pair will remain protected, and the arrangement will have the best chance of being mutually beneficial.

Some people use a marriage contract as an attempt to force some of the benefits of symbiogenesis. Duty, and social pressure tell us that if our husband is sick we are supposed to take care of him, even if it has become unpleasant to do so. And that we are supposed to earn enough money to make our wife comfortable, even if we hate our job. Marriage contracts, like symbiogenesis, reduce people’s fear of being alone, unprotected, and unloved. Ideally, marriage actually contains symbiogenesis, so that the couple takes care of each other not because they feel like they must, but because it makes them happy to do so. So help is given happily, not begrudgingly.

To help maximize happiness and minimize risk, symbiogenesis should be a goal of ours in our romances, friendships, and familial relationships. We should try to cultivate genuine pleasure in the pleasure of those we like when they are willing to do so for us as well.