Validation Part 2: Validation Is A Rare Parenting Approach
Tens of thousands of teenagers grow into adulthood resenting a parent because they never felt understood . . . and as a result, unloved.
Carolyn Fleck opens Chapter 2 of Validation with a story of a sweet woman who was desperate to reconnect with her college-aged daughter. Their relationship had turned so sour, her daughter refused to answer the phone any time she called.
Dozens of emails and text messages went unanswered. Dr. Fleck asked to see the collection of messages to better understand the situation, and learned that despite how warm, upbeat, and positive the mother’s messages were, they were also invalidating. Chronic leukemia was slowly killing her daughter. The daughter also been hospitalized a couple times after a night of heavy drinking.
The mother minimized their mother-daughter conflicts as normal problems every family faces and she’d send articles about the damaging effects of alcohol on immune function. This approach infuriated her daughter and led to the end of communication.
Bitter words and name calling from her daughter two years prior embedded in her heart and impacted the way she saw herself. She was struggling to see herself as anything other than a “bad parent.” Fleck describes the situation this way:
Addressing this belief was as critical to me as improving her relationship with Kamia. Self-invalidation is like a cancer - it spreads throughout the system, becoming increasingly difficult to contain. It also operates like a cruel, self-fulfilling prophecy. Feelings of insecurity undermine a person’s ability to be effective, which in turn reinforces their insecurity.
And so we see as Chapter 2 unfolds that as a parent, we can fail to validate our children, and in turn we can invalidate ourselves for our failures, creating a cycle of failure.
Before Fleck could help the mom reconnect to her daughter, she asked her to pause all attempts to communicate with her daughter and recognize how she was invalidating herself. Only after she addressed this issue could she move towards her daughter without self-sabotage.
In a painstakingly slow process, she then rebuilt connection with her daughter by first acknowledge the gravity of the pain and loss felt by their disconnect. It wasn’t “just” something normal every family goes through. It wasn’t just something to ignore and work around.
If you can’t earnestly acknowledge someone’s pain, you cannot be a safe person for them to turn to.
As a parent, we have an awesome power and opportunity to cause our children to feel heard, understood, and known. If we pass up these opportunities, our inaction tells them a story they take with them for the rest of their lives:
”My pain isn’t important. No one thinks it’s real or that big a deal. Yet it hurts me so much and makes me feel like I can’t go on. How could I ever let people in who treat what matters most to me as unimportant?”
Regardless of whether we’re tired, distracted, confused, or anxious, parents wield a god-like influence in the lives of their children when they validate or invalidate their children’s feelings.
Fleck also makes a handful of claims in Chapter 2 that I’m not going to elaborate on, but I’ll share the bullet points:
Validation will improve your relationships
Validation will help you manage conflict
Validating people will increase your influence
Validation drives big changes
Validation fosters self-compassion
As I continue to share my thoughts from each section of the book, I’ll include summarized stories or bullet points that impacted me, as well as stories from my own life or art that connect for me.
I hope you’ll read the book for yourself, and find more layers of benefit than what I’m covering here. When you read the book for yourself, let me know your thoughts.