People need to be validated. They need to have their experience, their feelings, their thoughts and behaviors be seen as important, understood, acknowledged, taken seriously, accepted, mirrored, seen as valid and real. Validation is an important part of a healthy relationship, and this is even more true if someone grew up in an invalidating household. But validation can also be misused.
Raymond is in a partnership with Miles. They have lived together for just over five years. Three of those years were really wonderful. But then, things really took a downturn. Miles started to behave in really sabotaging ways. He started passive aggressively forgetting things. He started emotionally withdrawing. He started dropping his responsibilities, acting as if he were incapable of them. He started evading issues (including the issues that Raymond had with his passive aggressive behaviors) and stonewalling in conversations. Miles eventually admitted that the reason for his behavior is that he didn’t know if it was right for him to be in a partnership with Raymond. Miles admitted that down deep, he wants the security of the relationship, but he wants to be free and live a totally different lifestyle. One where he is free to do whatever he wants whenever he wants. Free to pursue different romantic and sexual interests whenever the opportunity arises. Free to stay up late, indulge, travel and party.
Spending nights at home, being someone’s emotional support, being meticulous about eating right, exercising together and getting enough sleep, being sexually faithful and having a bunch of household responsibilities, he finds soul sucking and boring. It makes him feel trapped. But Miles did not follow up after sharing this truth by deciding what that meant for the relationship. He made no decision to change their relationship and took no action to either change himself to be more compatible with the life he was living with Raymond. Nor did he take any action to move forward in his life toward something else.
This truth is serious business because given what Raymond wants and needs in a relationship and a lifestyle, and especially given that Miles sold Raymond on the idea that this thing he doesn’t want was exactly what he did want. Not only is it duping, it leaves no room for a compatible partnership arrangement to be made. Miles has un-committed to his relationship with Raymond, while still staying in the relationship. He threw a bomb into their relationship and by doing so, put the relationship in a state of limbo.
Raymond is in a lot of pain. Sometimes throughout the week, he loses his temper at Miles and has a meltdown. In these melt downs, Raymond yells and cries that he needs Miles to make a decision and decide to take an action, so they aren’t in this intolerable limbo. He cries about how unfair it is that Miles duped him into believing they were compatible and by doing so, gave him a taste of what he wants more than anything, only to reveal that it was a lie and take it away. Raymond becomes incensed at Mile’s passive aggressive behavior, which continues, despite the reasons for the behaviors already having been put on the table and talked about. Miles has Raymond on a hook. He keeps hurting Raymond with his lack of commitment, with his state of limbo and with his passive aggressive behaviors and inactions.
When Raymond has these weekly meltdowns or even when they are simply having a conversation about what is happening to try to reach some conclusion or resolution, Miles validates Raymond. He says “I’m so sorry. I know this is all totally not ok. I can see that because of me, you are in an intolerable limbo and to expect you to stay in limbo about the person you share your life and home with, is just wrong. I can see that my focus and energy is not here and that I’m not being present with you. I know that I did this because I wanted to be with you, and thought I’d get used to it eventually. And at the end of the day, that was duping you. And duping you is so unfair; you should be treated better in your relationships. And when I drop my responsibilities, and they fall on you, that is also just wrong. You have so much on your plate already that it makes you feel like you are alone in life. I love you; I don’t want you to feel alone.”
The first few times Miles validated Raymond like this, the validation caused him to emotionally down-regulate. It demonstrated that Miles really saw his experience, feelings, thoughts and behaviors as important, understood them, acknowledged them, took them seriously, accepted them, mirrored them, and what’s more, saw them as valid and real and accurate. And because of this, Raymond believed Miles would follow it up with a decision or action to stop what he was doing or end the suffering somehow. But that never happened. Rather, Miles kept validating Raymond and doing nothing to take him out of the painful situation that Miles kept saying was “not ok”. Essentially, the validation was serving as a tool to keep Raymond in the pain, rather than get him out of it. Because Miles did not want to face the consequences of his own personal truth and what that would mean for him.
Validation is a very effective placation tool. And some people use it as a way of placating someone’s reaction to being harmed, rather than changing what they are doing to harm that person. Such is the case with Miles.
Validation can become a tool of abuse when you validate someone about the pain that they are in on account of something you are doing or failing to do. And especially when you validate the wrongness and not-ok ness of what you are doing, only to continue doing it. There are many reasons why a person might do this to someone else. For example, they may do it to simply placate the other person and not actually believe what they are leading the other person to think they believe or agree with. They may do this to buy themselves time. They may do it to lead the other person to think they will change, as a method of de-escalating conflict and creating a pseudo-repair so the relationship can continue, when in reality they have no intention of changing and that reality being exposed, would lead to a loss of the relationship. They may do it as a means of manipulating the other person into something they want. They may do it because they truly do get it, but are avoiding some consequence or pain that they think would come as a result of making a change and are thus, willing to keep the other person in pain to avoid their own. They may do it to establish a sense of confluence and closeness without having to make a change that they think would lead to pain on their end. They may do it to try to stay in a situation that is incompatible, but to be able to sneakily do something incompatible that is within their own best interests, but against the other person’s within that situation. They may do it to get the other person to step in and take responsibility and blame for making a difficult decision or taking a difficult action. And the list goes on. The important thing if you are doing this to someone, or if this is being done to you, is to find out the why.
If someone is truly caretaking your best interests, they don’t want you to be in pain. They are not ok with you being in pain. They are certainly unwilling to be the one to keep hurting you. Because of this, they are being active about taking you out of pain. They either do this by putting effort into changing what is hurting you (of their own accord and without you having to nag them). Or by asserting that they won’t make a change to what they are doing or failing to do, explaining why, and then working with you to find solutions and changes according to that boundary they have set. This allows you to at least consciously choose what to do with that reality so that you can move towards improvement in some other way and are not stuck in the pain of hoping for them to change.
Using validation as a tool to enable no change or as a tool to enable harm, is not something that should be done or tolerated. The bottom line is, any tool or technique can be misused. And this includes validation.
