Validate Your Feelings: Boost Self-Validation for Emotional Honesty

What happens in the situation of feelings invalidation?

It’s not too comfortable. We’ve all been through this!

Invalidating feelings means that someone’s emotions are ignored or minimized. This feels like someone’s feelings are wrong or insignificant.

It’s as if today is harder than it was 2–3 days ago and you tense up and declare that it’s no big deal. It’s a form of minimizing. It might be useful to at least measure how often this happens in a day. You don’t have to do anything else, just take note. Anyway, being aware of this is a lot! A simple formulation like: oh, at time X I said Y which was actually a minimization!

The impact of invalidation:

The challenge of constant self-invalidation can lead to hiding one’s feelings from oneself.

The consequence is a form of confusion that manifests as difficulty in expressing emotional honesty and self-awareness.

Relationship with others:

People who often invalidate themselves may have difficulty being vulnerable with others who invalidate them.

They might put on a facade of positivity instead of sharing their real feelings… and this positivity is toxic and unfortunately, when we…