Learning What Validation Actually Means

I don't need validation from people, and for a long time that made me lousy at understanding why anyone else did. It genuinely didn't compute. Someone would tell me they needed something, and in my head that request got filed as approval seeking, which in my head at the time was basically a character flaw.

There's a specific memory I still carry. A partner telling me, in plain words, what she needed more of from me. And me hearing it as neediness instead of information, telling her more or less to get over it. I look back on that and wince, not because the words were dramatic but because of how little effort it took me to dismiss something that was clearly real to her.

What I had to learn, slowly and mostly by getting it wrong first, is that validating someone isn't the same as agreeing with them or enabling whatever they're stuck in. It's just giving credit to the experience they're actually having. That's it. I don't have to fix it, solve it, or even like it. I just have to stop treating their felt experience as something to be argued out of existence.

I still don't reach for validation myself, and I've stopped being suspicious of the people who do. Somewhere in the last year I started running a quiet check when I get triggered or knocked down. Is this a validation thing I'm looking for right now, or is that even the question. Because if someone handed me validation in that moment, cool, I'd still be sitting in whatever I was sitting in. The actual question was always what I was going to do about it, and how I was going to get myself to the other side.

That distinction took me most of my adult life to see clearly. I don't think I would have gotten there without being told, more than once, by someone patient enough to keep saying it after I'd already gotten it wrong.