329 - Validation Variety Pack
Validation 101
These terms typically come up during the discussion about validation:
Self-Worth: How external feedback and our own self-talk affects our self esteem, confidence, and overall general sense of worthiness as a person.
Self-Image: Not just our overall worth, but specifically what qualities we identify in ourselves based on feedback from others or our own self-generated thoughts.
Self-Compassion: Recognition of your own or another person’s thoughts, feelings, sensations, and behaviors as understandable.
Self-worth
Studies have shown that self-worth is more often tied to what others think. Unhealthy reliance on external validation could look like the following:
Narcissism or antisocial behavior: disregard of others’ feelings, putting others down to feel better, appearing to have high self-esteem but in reality it’s very low.
A people-pleaser: fear of one’s true self, doesn’t know oneself but follows others blindly, codependent, lack of boundaries and the ability to say so.
Over-reliance on the following: addiction to positive feedback on social media, attention-seeking behaviors, trying to get attention solely to feel good about yourself, wanting more sex from a partner because that’s how you feel loved and appreciated.
How do we improve this?
Recognize that these thoughts and feelings are deeply rooted in us from a young age.
Recognize that others’ reactions to you actually have much more to do with themselves than you.
Learn how to balance taking feedback in a constructive way with feeling unnecessary shame about yourself in the process (episodes 281 and 282 on shame).
Self-image
Charles Horton Cooley, a sociologist, coined the term “Looking Glass Self,” which refers to how we think we appear to others and the judgments we make about those assessments and assumptions. It comprises of three main components:
We imagine how we must appear to others in a social situation.
We imagine and react to what we feel their judgment of that appearance must be.
We develop our sense of self and respond through these perceived judgments of others.
Self-confidence
Many of us have a fear of being alone and feel as though no one can understand our thoughts. Generating skills for better self-compassion and understanding here is important, and as a bonus, they’re essentially the same as the skills you can apply to your interpersonal connections. This can give others much-needed validation and increase your trust and intimacy with others.
Be Present.
Start by recognizing your own feelings or those of others as being real. Even if you don’t think the perceptions that led to the reaction are true, the feelings are still real to the person feeling them.
Attempting to deny the emotion entirely doesn’t actually do anything to help get over it.
Just know the facts.
What exactly happened in the situation? (not your guesses about what other people intended, just the facts)
What are you feeling physically and emotionally?
Try to name the feelings
What might someone else feel in this situation? Is it angry? Are you feeling that? Is it fear? Are you feeling that? etc.
What kind of action do you want to take? Does that give any clues? I want to cry. Maybe there is some sadness. I want to run away. Maybe there is some fear. Etc.
Compassion and Normalizing
Everyone has emotions and we don’t always understand them or want them. It’s totally normal to feel this way.
Nobody is happy all the time, motivated all the time, energetic all the time, etc.
Realize that other people in your/their situation would probably feel similarly.
Acknowledge an impact your history might play in the feelings. Is this reminiscent of an older hurt or something from your parents?
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about internal and external validation. We're looking at, what does it really mean to validate someone or yourself? We're going to talk about how both of those are important to healthy relationships, and a healthy life, as well as some ways that you can work toward finding a better balance between the two in your own life. To start out, what is validation?
Dedeker: Somebody has got to make the parking ticket joke, right?
Jase: Oh, to validate the parking.
Emily: Oh, what? Oh, validate your parking?
Dedeker: Just validating your parking?
Jase: In planning this episode that never once came to mind and-
Dedeker: Really?
Jase: -that's a real missed opportunity.
Dedeker: I saw a sketch once where a bunch of people were in line to get their parking validated, and of course, they walk up and they're like, "Oh, can you validate me?" The person is like, "Oh, yes, you're so kind, and you're so giving." All of that stuff.
Emily: That's adorable.
Jase: That's scary. What I found when looking at the articles and research and things about internal and external validation, it became clear that everyone wasn't talking about the same thing, or at least not in the same way. I didn't find anyone else who made this distinction specifically, but I started to identify that there were essentially three different types of validation that people were talking about in either their research or in blogs by psychologists or coaches or therapists who were trying to offer people advice on internal and external validation, that it's like, each one would usually be talking about one, maybe two of these three areas, and that's what they meant by it.
I thought it would be useful for this episode to split it up into three sections and to talk about each of those, both internal and external versions of them, and then what an extreme of internal looks like or an extreme of external looks like within that context. Then throughout the episode, we'll get this larger picture of the landscape of talking about validation.
Dedeker: The first of these three meanings is self-worth. This essentially boils down to how external feedback, as well as our own internal self-talk, can affect our self-esteem, our confidence, and our general sense of worthiness as a person.
Jase: Right, and then, the next one is related to that, but a little bit different, and that's about our self-image. Not just our overall worth as a person, but specifically, what qualities we identify in ourselves. Am I a brave person? Am I a kind person? Stuff like that based on feedback that we get from others, as well as from our own self-generated thoughts and things that we've decided about ourselves. Those questions of, am I generous? Am I smart? Am I chill? Am I responsible? Am I attractive?
Dedeker: Am I chill?
Jase: I ask myself that all the time.
Dedeker: Emily, Jase asked me that question all the time. He's seeking both internal and external validation on whether or not he is chill.
Emily: Got it, okay.
Jase: Am I a chill guy? Am I a chill, cool guy? Yes, exactly. Those sorts of things. It's more about the image of who you are as a person, not just your value.
Emily: Finally, the third thing here is self-compassion or self-understanding, which is the recognition of your own or another person's thoughts, feelings, sensations and behaviors as understandable.
Jase: Yes.
Emily: Understandable.
Dedeker: Like relatable, or like worthy of compassion?
Jase: Yes, essentially that. I know that we try to avoid using the word crazy on this show, but it's that question of like, "Am I crazy for having these thoughts? Am I crazy for feeling this way or for doing what I did?" It's that kind of question. That kind of validation, and we'll talk about this more when we get into it more in-depth, but validation of, yes, your experience is a valid one. That the way you're feeling right now, that makes sense, and I can understand how a person would feel the way that you feel right now. Validating those feelings as being understandable and acceptable, I guess.
Emily: It's interesting to me that all of these are about self, and I guess that does make sense, but not that you are actively validating another, but rather that your self is validated in these three separate ways.
Dedeker: Also, all three of them can be influenced internally and externally.
Emily: Externally, yes.
Jase: Right.
Emily: Yes, I guess that's true.
Jase: All of these, we do give these things to other people, and we influence other people as their external validators in all three of these different ways, just for the purpose of keeping them uniform with each other, they're all focused on the experience of each of us as an individual of how our self-worth or our self-image or ourself acceptance or understanding are influenced by these external and internal types of validation.
Emily: That makes sense. While all of these are interconnected, we tend to focus on different things when we're talking about them, so we're going to look at all three intern, so let's start with self-worth.
Jase: Self-worth also could be called self-confidence or self-esteem, there's a professor named Elizabeth R. Thornton who reports that in her research. I don't know the details of this research, but what she wrote is that in her research, 55% of people reported that their self-worth was often, more often or always tied to what others think, and that's a pretty high number and a high amount of importance we put on what other people think of us, but I'm also not surprised at all. I'm like, yes, totally, totally.
Dedeker: Actually, I'm more surprised that it's so close to being 50/50. That feels actually pretty realistic to me.
Jase: Okay. Yes, that it's 50/50 like that.
Emily: I guess let's talk about a little bit why that might be, why it might be a little bit higher or even 50/50, or why it is realistic, I guess comparison between external and internal are tied to what others think, why that's happening. When you're a kid, a little baby person, your entire existence depends on others, and rejection could mean literal death for you. I think especially in the wild, this happens to animals. While this outcome doesn't happen to most people, there's an instinctual and evolutionary reason why others' opinion of us is important. Yes, if somebody is going to leave you be for days at a time, then you could literally die if you were a small person. You need them to love you and care for you in order to stay alive.
Dedeker: It's not even limited to being a young person, but to a certain extent, evolving to be social creatures. There is also that further implication that if we're dependent on others and dependent on the tribe or dependent on other people around us, that does mean that if we're rejected by other people, that we could possibly die. Maybe we have better chances than we would if we were a baby, but the stakes are still pretty high.
Emily: It's unrealistic to think that we could ever just completely remove the importance of external validation. We're social beings like you said, and we care about the opinion of others because it's important to our interactions with those other people.
Jase: I think that part is so key, that I think a lot of times when people start talking about internal and external validation in this way, there's almost this assumption that, "Oh, well, you need to just have internal validation, and don't worry about external validation, and try to get away from caring what other people think. Right, that whole like, "Don't care what other people think." I think that while that advice is often good because most of us, I think care arguably too much about what other people think, and we project a lot onto what they're thinking that they might not actually be thinking about us.
We don't actually want to get rid of this entirely, because it is important that as humans, we do care about what other people think, and we may modify our behavior a little bit because of that and that's important. That's going to help us fit in better in the workplace, help us fit in with our social circle, help us be more understanding and compassionate to people. It's like, this isn't something we want to erase entirely.
Dedeker: However, if completely left unexamined, then it can cause us to end up dependent on that external feedback. Essentially, we could end up being just blown around on the breeze of everybody else's opinions about us, or offhanded comments about us, positive or negative, and also regardless of how accurate they actually are. To contrast that, having a sense of internal validation that influences your self-worth would be maintaining that, I have a sense of worthiness as a person even if I've had a negative interaction, or some falling out, or some disagreement with someone, or I've made a mistake, or at least it's having the ability to handle that emotional blow without just completely falling apart.
Emily: Yes, what does this unhealthy reliance on external validation look like? Here is an extreme maybe narcissism or antisocial behavior, things like disregard for other people's feelings, or a feeling of like it's me against everyone else. I've definitely met people who say stuff like that, it's me against the world, but, in a way that's kind of super-negative.
Jase: Yes, that if you don't have enough of an internal validation in this way, it's like, "Well, what am I going to do? I need to protect myself against how much I'm affected by everyone else," and that one possible outcome of that is this. It's just like, "Well, it's everyone else against me. I'm a good guy and everyone else is the bad guy then." Now that we have a sense of what this version of self-validation or external validation is about, this kind of, "Am I worthy as a person?" We can look at what happens if, like Dedeker said, if you let that get out of hand, if you don't examine that, if you don't look at it.
It is important to care what other people think, but if we care too much and don't have enough of an internal sense of worth or have been just given too many signs that we're easily abandonable, or not lovable, or something like that, it can lead to maladaptive behaviors as a defense mechanism for that.
Emily: Yes, on one end of this extreme is that you can develop narcissism or antisocial behavior. Essentially means, a disregard for others feelings or a feeling of me against the world or against everyone else, the way to feel better about myself is to put other people down, just constantly doing that, or protect myself by lowering or dehumanizing others because we're worried about criticism that might be happening. Let's see, also, these people might appear to have high self-esteem, but it's actually a result of a very low self-esteem and self-worth.
Dedeker: Well, I'll be totally honest. I don't want to necessarily demonize anybody because I've fallen into these traps before, myself, so I don't necessarily want to make it seem like, "Oh, it's just all these bad people," but I've also met some real jerks-
Emily: When?
Dedeker: -who seem to operate from this place. Maybe seeming to exude a lot of confidence-
Emily: Confidence.
Dedeker: -and a lot of high self-esteem, but the reality is that's a very fragile structure that requires really having to insulate yourself from any criticism, or if you get any criticism or any kind of negative interaction with somebody, really needing to attack that person or put them down in order to preserve your sense of self.
Emily: Yes, the types of people who never take a note, or everything is somebody else's fault or somebody else's problem rather than being able to say, "Huh, okay, maybe I need to examine that or whatever." It's interesting because there are definitely some people out there who simply will not take criticism, or choose not to believe it at all, and every problem is somebody else's problem.
Jase: I think kind of what we're getting at here though, that we don't want to demonize these people, because even though that behavior is very destructive and often hurtful to the people around and that-- The point though is that, it comes from trying to find some way to defend against how much that external validation does affect them. Unfortunately, instead of being able to find resources for themself to find a little more resilience and self-validation and self-worth in that way, whether that's because of things from their childhood or whether it's something they can learn to think a little differently about, like Dedeker said, you veered into that territory at points in your life.
I think we can all relate to pieces of it sometimes. When you're feeling especially fragile, it's like those are the times you lash out and you get defensive, or you put down other people to try to make yourself feel better, but it all comes from this very deep fear and vulnerability to those things that it's like trying to be strong but doing it in this destructive way, unfortunately.
There was an interesting study that I came across that was looking at narcissistic behavior versus the behavior of people with high self-esteem. I'm not sure exactly how they went about measuring or finding those participants, but one of the big identifiers or big differences that they found, because, some of the behavior seemed similar on the outside, but, in actuality, one of the key differences was that a person with a high self-esteem feels good about themselves and is willing to boost themselves up but also boost up their romantic partners and other people around them versus a narcissist who feels like the only way to boost themselves up is to put down other people.
You might think, "Oh, that's self-confidence," but whether they're lifting others up with them or not is the marker of whether it's a destructive--
Emily: That's a good distinction.
Dedeker: Very important distinction.
Jase: Yes. Okay. Then, the other extremes. That's the narcissist or the antisocial behavior as a defense mechanism. On the other side, we have the people-pleaser. I think--
Emily: Me.
Jase: I think I tend to go more on this side than the antisocial, narcissist side-
Dedeker: I certainly do.
Jase: -but I think I've doubled in both, to be honest. This one is, again, that fear of abandonment or not being loved, over-reliance on that external validation. So it leads to things like being afraid of expressing their true self. They may not even know who they really are, or what they like, or what their interests or opinions even are because they're so used to just following the lead of others, trying to fit in, trying to conform.
They might not even know. Like, they're not even willingly going against it. They just don't even know, and tend to be more likely to be codependent on romantic partners, again, for understandable reasons, and this lack of ability to say no. I think that could show up in a workplace of just taking on any assignment that's given to you even if you don't have the capacity to handle it, and then, you end up taking the brunt of it instead of your coworkers, or it can show up in romantic relationships, of course, as we've talked about many times on this show, of just always feeling like your no isn't an option because the consequence would be abandonment and all those things we talked about.
Dedeker: Right. Those are the extreme ends of the spectrum, but, of course, in between, in the middle area of the spectrum, we have other behaviors that can still be a sign of too much reliance on external validation. We have some examples here. These aren't 100% bad. They're quite normal. We've all been here, but it's a good thing to examine. If you have an over-reliance on some of these behaviors, then you might be masking a lack of internal validation.
That can include things, being addicted to attention on social media, or getting positive feedback on social media. Other attention-seeking behaviors. It can include flirting, hooking up, or otherwise, trying to get romantic or sexual attention for the sake of feeling good about yourself rather than a genuine interest in those things. I think that's a little fuzzy because, we can seek flirting, we can seek sex, we can seek connection and intimacy for many, many reasons at the same time.
Jase: Yes, exactly.
Dedeker: Often, it's murky.
Emily: Including not--
Dedeker: It's not always just the one reason, but with some self-awareness, you can examine yourself and kind of really look at, "Am I turning to this because I am interested in it or am I turning to this because I'm feeling really low right now and need just a really quick boost to how I'm feeling about myself?" It include something like wanting more sex from a partner not necessarily because you want the sex itself, but because you want to feel loved and appreciated by your partner.
You want to feel sexy. That's not a bad thing to want those things, but, sometimes, I think it's important to know, are you able to ask for those outside of sex. Are you able to get that outside of sex? This is something that is often very gendered specifically with, straight men are often really socialized to only be able to get attention, love, affection, being seen as sexy or desirable through sex.
That leads to, I think, a lot of the tropes that we hear about, like sexual dynamics and all the straight relationships where men are only seeking these things through sex. That's something to think about as well. Again, while enjoying these things isn't necessarily bad, the negative side comes from the dependency. So, if you notice a decrease in well-being when you aren't getting these sources of external validation, that's something to pay attention to, or if you're finding that you keep needing more and more and more, almost like an addiction where it's not really scratching the itch, that's also something to pay attention to.
Emily: If you listened to us talk about this and felt like, "Hey, maybe this is me in a couple of this. I definitely did. I was like, "Yes, done that, done that, done that."
Dedeker: Oh, yes. Me too.
Jase: Check, check, check.
Dedeker: Yes, check, check, check and check.
Emily: Yes, and you feel like, "Hey, this is maybe something that I want to change about myself." It is possible, because, our brains are capable of change if we are able to self-examine and put in the work. The first step is to just recognize that you heard this, you recognize those thoughts and feelings, and you see that they're happening, and that they are deeply rooted in us because of what happened to us in our young age, any of our experiences of abandonment or a variety of other experiences may have caused a need for external validation, maybe an intense need.
Jase: Which, to clarify, this is not to say this can only happen if you had some very traumatic abandonment as a child. It's like no no. Growing up as a human being with human parents or caregivers, you will have some instances of feeling abandoned, especially as a child who doesn't understand the larger context of things. We've all got this in us, maybe to greater degrees because of certain experiences, but it's there in all of us.
Emily: Recognize that other's reactions to us actually has much more to do with themselves than it does with us. That's something that I feel like I've really had to learn over the years, that, you know what? Like, this is a you problem, not a me a problem. I've been able to say that a lot more recently than I did even five years ago, but somebody may have an adverse reaction to you not because of something intrinsic to you, but because you have a similar trait to someone who hurt them in the past, or they might just be having a bad day, and the reaction to us has more to do with that than to anything that we said. I have to remind myself that at work a lot, like if somebody is mean to me, I'm like, "They're probably just having a rough day." I don't take it personally.
Dedeker: One of most valuable things that my therapist ever said to me was, "Sometimes you just end up on the receiving end of someone else's trauma." I think about that a lot, and I think about that both with like big T trauma and little t trauma, that it's like sometimes, you just end up the recipient of maybe an inappropriate reaction, or a reaction that is appropriate but also overblown, and like way bigger or way higher octane than it needs to be.
That doesn't mean not taking any responsibility for your actions or your influence or things like that, but, for me, that's been a really really helpful reminder. Whenever I feel like someone is reacting to me or criticizing me in a way that I feel is unfair, to help put that in perspective.
Jase: Speaking of advice that really stood out in our lives, something that my mom told me back when I was in high school, and I forget how we got on this subject, but it was something about feeling like people were unfriendly to me in the hallway, or like no one liked me or something like that. I guess nothing's changed.
Emily: I was going to say, "That's changed Jase." Geez.
Gosh, Jase.
Jase: But, I am better than I was back then. What she said to me was basically to be the one to make the first move in terms of just like smiling or saying hi, or waving to someone, if it's someone you know or whatever, because they're like probably feeling the same way you are. It was just getting me out of this very self-centered view of the world of every thing that every one is doing is because of what they think about me, versus, they're just in there in their own heads as much as I am.
That was a pretty radical shift that I've over the many years since then, I've tried to remind myself of when interacting with people. It's like, "If I'm having a bad day, I'm feeling hurt by things people do, who knows what kind of day they're having? Who knows how I'm affecting their day?" It ripples out much bigger than just our own self-centered experience.
Emily: If you want to hear us talk a little bit more about stuff like this, then go back to our two-part episode on shame, episodes 281 and 282 to hear about how to balance taking feedback in a constructive way with feeling unnecessary shame about yourself in the process. We talk a lot about that on those two episodes.
Jase: We're going to go on to talk about validation as it relates to our self-image, and also in terms of self-compassion and understanding, but before we get to that, we're going to take a quick break to talk about some ways that you can support this show, visiting our sponsors or checking out our Patrion really does a lot to help us keep bringing this show to all of y'all out there for free.
We're back to talk about self-image. To reiterate from what we said at the beginning of the episode, this is rather than being just about overall self-worth or your ability to be loved and cared for and not abandoned. This is more about how we shape our idea of who we are in the world, how we relate to other people, what are our traits? Am I chill, as I said before. This is something that was really interesting for me to learn about. There was a sociologist named Charles Horton Cooley who coined the term, the looking glass self in 1902 in a text called Human nature and the social order.
Dedeker: Oh, yes. Back when we did call them looking glasses I suppose.
Jase: Yes. Exactly. He's not being all vintage-y, he was just being current.
Emily: Oh, 1902. Okay, I hear you.
Jase: The looking glass itself essentially is describing that as we're developing the sense of who we are, we're doing that based on the feedback that we get from other people, so that we think about ourselves as being the thing that we think others think about us. In his research, he wasn't even putting it to be cheeky in terms of, "Oh, well, we just think that we are what we think that other people think that we are."
He was actually saying now very literally, we are often right about what people think of us, because often we do get fairly direct feedback about that of, "Oh wow. You're so tall," or, "You're so strong," or, "Oh, yes, there you are, always late." Or like, "You're still clumsy, aren't you?" In positive and negative ways, we get that feedback ,and that's how we develop our sense of who we are, what our traits, what our qualities are. That the impact that other people's opinions of us has is stronger the more "ascendant" over us they are. Which basically means, if they have higher status than us.
Dedeker: Interesting.
Jase: Or if we perceive them to have higher status than us.
Emily: If we perceive them to be above us in some way- to have higher status than us, whether that's just because it's a peer we look up to, or because it actually is someone in a status position above us like a boss or a parent or a teacher or something like that, or an older person, an older kid growing up, that we tend to weight those more strongly.
Dedeker: The looking glass self-comprises of three main components. The first being that, we imagine how we must appear to others in a social situation. The second being that we imagine and react to what we feel their judgment of that appearance must be. Then third, we develop our sense of self and then respond through these perceived judgments of others. It's like a weird feedback loop that really doesn't require actually anybody else but yourself to populate, which is maybe the scary part of it.
Emily: Interesting. So, that was a while ago, way back at 1902, but since then, other researchers have continued to study and develop this theory of how we develop a self-identity. Now, I will say, we are doing an episode on identity next week. We're going to do more about this and how one does develop self-identity. In 1974 and 1975, King-To Yeung and John Levi Martin from the Rutgers university department of sociology, it did a study in 1974 and 1975 to try to find empirical evidence to further test this hypothesis.
Essentially, they wanted to test if people see themselves based on how others perceive them to see if that impact is more significant when coming from someone you perceive as higher status than yourself, and importantly, if it can go the other way. Can our own self-image affect the way others see us over time? I think abso-freaking-lutely.
Emily: I think this makes sense now because, in 1902, you could just be like, "This is the case and I'm going to write it down because I'm a man and I'm going to write it in a book and it's just true." At least by the '70s we were like, "Is that actually true? Let's apply some science."
Jase: Pretty much.
Dedeker: Well done.
Jase: What they did for this study is, they analyzed perceptions of social interactions in 56 naturally occurring communities and intentional communities. Which in this case were communes, 'cause this happened during the '70s, so, there you go. Essentially, what I'm assuming they mean by naturally occurring communities is just maybe peer groups that formed around some common interest or something like that, something where they've just naturally come together, and then also looked at intentional communities specifically carved themselves out as a community.
The groups consisted primarily of young adults. The median age was 25, so definitely, young adults, and they collected data in 1974, and then again, in '75 so that they could compare how things changed over that year, and some of the communities disbanded during that year.
Dedeker: I was going to say, communes, of course. Famously
Jase: I can imagine also like your D&D group falls apart or something and you're not all together anymore. It can happen, but, they did still have enough data to compare those two. The size of the communities ranged from 5 to 40 individuals in each one with 10 as the average size. Remember, we had 56 of these, so we've got pretty decent chunk of people. What they did is they gave each member of a community a three-part questionnaire. Part one asked them to name the members of their group that had specific personal qualities, such as being supportive, decisive, influential, loving, strong, sexy, dominant, et cetera, et cetera, just identify who do you think of identifies-- Or, who would you identify as having these traits?
Then part two, they were asked if they believed they themselves possessed these qualities. Like, which of these do you also possess? Then part three asked them questions about how they related to those people, essentially, getting at the, "Do I view this person as being significant in my life? Are they more powerful than I am in this relationship?" Or, "Are we equals?" Essentially, trying to get to the heart of that question of them being ascendant over you?
Dedeker: This feels like it would be a really weird and also fascinating exercise to do, thinking about some of my own communities I am part of. Maybe a little uncomfortable at times.
Emily: Workplace, for example, my work and like your work Jase, where there's a lot of people, I would be fascinated to know what people thought.
Jase: Basically, the important thing to take away from this is that because they did this in fixed size communities, they were able to cross-reference that information. They had information, not only about what people thought the traits were they had, but also, how many other people identified them as a person who had that trait? It allowed them to see both how they saw others, and then how much people's individual perceptions matched what other people thought of them.
Dedeker: I see. The primary findings of the study were that self-understanding is indeed, at least to some extent, an internalization of the views that others have of oneself. They also found that self-conception, or perhaps, as what we're calling self-image, that also does involve the internalization of the perspective of others. Yes, it is significant if it's from others who we see as being higher status than ourselves.
Emily: There was an interesting bit about gender here, Cooley originally hypothesized the women were more likely to concern themselves with others' perceptions of them. Okay.
Dedeker: It was 1902.
Emily: That's fine. I will give them a pass this time.
Jase: You don't have to give them a pass. Let's just be aware of the context.
Emily: Yes. Young and Martin find that, the looking glass effect was higher in women of their sample. It is because of the relationship between status and gender. This is a quote, "Hence it seems that the reason the looking glass effect is stronger among women than among men can be adequately explained simply by virtue of the lower status women have in these groups n average. If women are more concerned about social image than men on average, this may simply be because they are less powerful on average, the gender psychology imputed by Cooley need not be invoked. Fascinating.
Jase: They were basically like, "Let's just not make that one about gender. We've mathematically zeroed that one out here."
Emily: I wonder, in these intentional communities, the idea that the women have less status than men. Whenever I think about being a man, I'm like, "I don't know if I'd want to, but I wouldn't mind the power that being a man gives."
Dedeker: I don't know how they're necessarily codifying status in this study, but--
Jase: Just based on people's answers to those questions of, do I perceive this person to have more power than me in this relationship? It's all just based on people's self-reported relative to each other.
Emily: They're saying that all these men have a lot of status, and they were self-reporting.
Dedeker: Are perceived to have more status. That's fine. I don't think anyone would argue that in 1902 or in 1975 or 2021, that women or that women are perceived to have less power and less status than men are. Often, it is true. Yes. On average.
Emily: For sure.
Jase: This last part is the really cool finding that added to Cooley's work, that this is not something that he had, I guess, been able to look at or really study. That's the question of, is it possible to not just have our own perception of ourselves influenced by others, but can our own perception influence the way other people think about us? This is what's cool about them doing this same thing two years in a row, that essentially, they were able to look at, "Is there a trait that someone thinks about themself that other people did not identify with them, that then by the next year, other people did identify that trait with them?"
They found that the effect of someone belief about themselves on other people's responses the following year was positive for every one of the 24 characteristics that they studied, and especially significant in 16 of those. Essentially saying, it's very unlikely that there's not a relation there. That it does seem to be a causation. That essentially the idea is, if I think of myself as being, say, reliable or brave and other people don't identify me as that. But then I believe that about myself. I continually demonstrate it, that then eventually others will start to have that opinion of me. They showed empirically that there is evidence that that does happen.
Dedeker: Are you saying I need to start thinking of myself as more chill, and then acting more chill. Then people will think that I'm chill, because no one's ever thought that I was, and I've never thought that I was chill. That's a trait that I would like to invite more into my life and how I move through the world. Is that the key? Does it all start with me?
Jase: The power comes inside of you. It was inside of you all along.
Emily: The chill was inside me all along.
Jase: That's why I've been telling you for the last year or so, that I'm a chill cool guy, because I recognized that I was not. So, I'm like, "I think I am."
Emily: You want to be.
Jase: I'm trying to really embody that as much as I can.
Emily: That's like affirmations, or self-actualization, or whatever. It's nice.
Jase: I do think there is a little connection there of-- The trick though, is in their study. They did show, you have to follow it up with the actual actions.
Dedeker: You can't just think it away.
Jase: You can't just say I'm a nice person to be a jerk all the time, it doesn't work that way.
Emily: No. Sure. That's good. The third variety of this variety pack of validating--
Jase: That's good. I like that. The validation variety pack.
Emily: Beautiful.
Dedeker: Basically, just fruit snacks. We're going to put it in your lunch.
Jase: What I wouldn't give for some validation is my lunch therapy day.
Emily: If kids got that in their lunch every day, maybe they'd feel better about themselves, because I feel like I really needed validation when I was a child. I need it now too. Let's be honest.
Jase: Yes. You don't grow out of that.
Dedeker: Maybe we can, at Multiamory, we can market some little like fruit snack, variety packs that have little messages of validation.
Emily: Could say like, "You're the best."
Dedeker: Or prompts, maybe some prompts. Actually, instead of it being just canned messages, it could be--
Jase: That's good.
Dedeker: Tell your partner your favorite things about them, or think about something about yourself that you're proud of today.
Emily: Oh. I love that.
Dedeker: It's beautiful.
Jase: Let's get in touch with the snack manufacturers. It'll be like conversation heart style, so you could print on the candy.
Dedeker: Oh, yes. That's good. That's a lot to fit onto a tiny little-- I was imagining on the packet of fruit snacks.
Jase: Oh, I see. I see, on the packet itself. All right. Well workshop. We'll do some focus group, figure out how that works.
Emily: The third variety of validation is less focused on our overall worth, or our relative quality is, but about how understandable or normal our thoughts, feelings and actions are. Again, this is self-acceptance and self-compassion. Karyn Hall, PhD said that validation is the recognition and acceptance of other person's thoughts, feelings, sensations and behaviors as understandable. There, that is again that threw me off last time, but I understand what you mean now, Jase, it's understandable.
Jase: It wasn't me. It was Karyn Hall, PhD.
Emily: Yes, you're right. Self-validation is the recognition and acceptance of your own thoughts, feelings, sensations and behaviors as understandable, like you said before that people get where you're coming from.
Jase: This is that self-validation is that recognition for yourself. It's like the feelings I'm having are understandable, they're acceptable and valid.
Emily: Or undesirable, acceptable. For example, if you're feeling hurt by something that someone did, but when you tell a friend about it, they just tell you why you shouldn't feel that way. We talked about this a little bit with toxic positivity, but, if they try to explain it away, it can feel really invalidating, like our emotions or reactions just don't make sense, or maybe something's wrong with me, stuff like that. That can be an example of not having self-compassion or self-acceptance because, somebody else isn't validating your experience in that moment.
Dedeker: I think we've all been on the giving and receiving end of that, times where we felt really invalidated by a friend, or a family member, or a partner. Also, times where we have done the same to a friend, or a family member, or a partner. The way that I tend to see this playing out with clients, because I'm very, very big on helping to coach my couples, especially for validating each other's feelings when they're opening up.
The way that I often see this go awry is, one person opens up about their feelings of vulnerability, or fear, or what they're worried about, and the other person responds to what they think is reassurance of, "Oh, it'll be okay. Oh, no, no, you don't have to feel that way because X, Y and Z."
Emily: Talks about positivity
Dedeker: Maybe trying to fix it and be like, "Okay, well, we can do this, and that'll fix it." Again, both things may be true, both sides may be trying to be helpful, but it can end up being really invalidating. It's a really tricky thing, it's a really tricky balance. I think we can do that to ourselves as well, we can try to logic ourselves out of our feelings, and really invalidate ourselves.
The thing is, a fear of being alone it's so deeply rooted in us as human beings. If we feel like nobody understands our thoughts, or our feelings, or to give a call back, again, we feel like we are crazy for feeling the way that we feel, it can make us experience that really deep primal fear, even when we aren't actually truly alone and there isn't actually a risk that we're going to be abandoned or that we're going to die from neglect or things like that. In this area, it is possible to generate skills for better self-compassion and understanding.
Also, as a bonus, it's essentially the same skills that you can apply to your interactions with others. You can help your partner, your friends, the people close to you get that much needed validation, and that's likely going to increase the trust and intimacy between the two of you, which is going to lead to healthy relationships all around.
Jase: Step one is to be present. Basically, what this means is just start by recognizing your own feelings, acknowledging them, or the feelings of someone else, if you're giving this to someone else. Is just accepting that they're real. Even if you don't think those perceptions are accurate, or that their reaction is justified or true, but that the feelings are real. Same for yourself. I'm like, "I don't think I should be feeling this way." Start by accepting, "But I do, and that's real. That's something that I can acknowledge and accept that that feeling is real regardless of why I might feel that way." Because, attempting to deny the emotion or just tell someone else that they shouldn't feel that way or that, "Oh, no, you don't feel that way, you actually feel this other thing."
That that doesn't do anything to help us get over it. It's like Dedeker said, it comes from this place of wanting to reassure, but it's not actually, it's not as helpful. The same with ourselves. If we just try to deny ourselves from feeling these things, we're not helping ourselves get past it, actually, it's counterproductive to what we're trying to do.
Emily: Number two is just the facts, ma'am. Ask yourself what exactly happened in the situation that you were in. Not just your guesses about what other people intended, or trying to figure out motivation or stuff like that. Just the facts of what exactly occurred. Then ask yourself, what are you feeling physically and emotionally. For example, instead of, "Jake's over being friends with me, whatever, which is why he cancelled on our lunch," something like that. Like, essentially, putting a reason behind what occurred and saying like, "This person doesn't want to be friends with me anymore, so they cancelled on our lunch and that's why that happened."
Rather, say to yourself, "I started feeling upset and a little angry today when Jake cancelled on our lunch. I'm also feeling like my stomach is in knots, so maybe there's some fear or shame there too." You're literally just speaking about yourself, and the feelings and the facts of what occurred, and not placing any external, "This is what occurred on to somebody else because they hate me now and they don't want to be friends with me."
Jase: I had a counsellor years ago who-- This came up a lot for me, this type of thing and--
Emily: You still say like, "Everybody hates me." Does everyone hate us?
Jase: I still struggle with this. The thing that she would say to me whenever I would bring up something like that-- I would be like, "Oh, I did a show last week, and I performed at this bar with my band, and I feel like everyone just really hated me and just couldn't wait for me to get offstage." Her response was almost always the same, was basically a variation on the same. She's like, "How do you know that? Did someone tell you that? Did all the people tell you that?" Kind of getting to like, "What actually happened? How do you know that?"
Then just asking that question of like, "What do you actually know? What did you perceive? What were the feelings that you had when that happened?" And acknowledging those, and realizing they're real while not invalidating that, but still, just being like, "Okay, well, let's try to understand what really happened? What are the objective facts that we can identify, including how you're feeling about it?"
Emily: Physically, too.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: Yes. That leads to step three, which is, doing your best to name the feelings. This can be tricky. There is research that we pulled for a different episode, I didn't have time to pull it for this one right in this moment, but it does say that, people who are better at being able to name their feelings generally have, I think it's a better sense of wellbeing, better emotional intelligence. That like, this is a skill that we can cultivate, and having feelings is a great time to practice it. You can ask yourself questions like, "What might someone else feel in this situation? Am I feeling anger? Is it fear? Is it sadness?"
Then you can ask yourself, "What kind of action is this feeling compelling me to take?" That may give you some clues. It could be, "I want to cry, I want to run away, I want to punch something, I want to crawl under my desk and bury myself alive so that no one will see how shameful I am." That can also really give a lot of clues about what's actually going on in your feelings.
Jase: I struggle so much with identifying my feeling sometimes. I feel like some, I got on lock, but sometimes I'm like, "I feel something. I don't know if I'm sad or if I'm scared, or if I'm excited. Okay, I can't quite tell which it is." This also came up in some of the articles out there talking about this, which is just this idea that many of us have certain emotions that we confuse for each other, or that we're not good at telling the difference between.
This is an exercise to practice that. I'm not good at telling the difference between fear and excitement, for example, or not good at telling the difference between sadness and anger, perhaps. It's like, it could look a lot of different ways and learning to become clear on it. Like Dedeker was saying, getting better at naming those things can help you handle them in a better way and have just better overall wellbeing.
Then step four. Once we've done this, we've accepted the feelings as they are, we've tried to get to just the facts of what happened, and physically how we're feeling, and then trying to name it, the fourth one is compassion, and normalizing. That's basically that everyone has emotions, and that we don't always understand them. We don't always want them, but it's perfectly normal to feel that way.
That no one's happy all the time. No one's motivated all the time. No one's energetic all the time. That's just, if we were happy all the time, it wouldn't be happy, it would just be-- We wouldn't have a word for it. We have a word for happy because there is the contrast to it, there's other things to feel besides that. Don't beat yourself up over it, you're not always going to feel good, and that's normal.
Also, to accept that other people in your situation would probably feel similar to how you feel, and acknowledge that an impact your history might have on these feelings. That that's also not a bad thing. Again, it's like, "Okay, I know I'm overreacting to this," or, "I think maybe I'm overreacting because I have some history that this brought up, I have some baggage, or this hit some trigger of mine."
That doesn't mean your feeling's not valid, it's totally understandable. You can accept that you have that feeling while simultaneously acknowledging, "Okay, this might be influencing that." Or maybe some other factor of just, "I didn't sleep well enough this week." I can acknowledge that's affecting me, but also accept that my feelings are still real. That they're still valid and someone else in the same situation would probably feel this way too.
Emily: Now, if these feelings caused you to maybe fly off the handle in a moment, or have a moment of weakness, or get a little too intense, none of what we just talked about necessarily means that you have to agree with, or justify the actions that you took or want to take, or that you're justifying the actions of somebody else if they did that in turn to you, but we're just talking about simply feeling and validating what happened, and those feelings, validating that experience and validating what you were feeling in that moment.
Jase: You could offer validation for the feelings without agreeing with them or saying, "Yes, you're right to feel that." Again, if you're giving this validation to someone else too.
Emily: There's a difference there.
Jase: There's a difference between saying, "Yes, your feelings are right, you should've punched that person," instead, it's like, "I can totally understand from what you've told me given your history, like, I could totally understand feeling that way." Also you shouldn't have done that, and also, maybe I'm even going to hold you accountable for that, especially if it's something you did to me or maybe to someone else when I was there, just like, I could still hold you accountable while still validating that you had those feelings, and not saying like, "You're broken for having those feelings," because that's not going to help the person change that behavior, and it's not going to help yourself if you're the one who messed up too.
Emily: It is challenging parsing out the feelings versus the action taken, because one can be valid and okay while the other is not necessarily. Just distinguishing between those two. I think that makes a person a really big person if they're able to say, "Hey, I understand where you were, this place that you were in the moment versus saying, "I understand why you hit that person or freaked out in that moment."
Dedeker: Pro tip if you're trying to validate a partner's feelings, get information from them about what they're feeling, it doesn't work--
Emily: Don't try to tell them
Dedeker: Don't try to tell them, "Oh, yes, I could totally understand why you'd like totally freak out and get so pissed off and fly off the handle, yes, it's totally normal to feel that." No, like, no. You can ask these questions too. You can be curious about the thoughts that came up for them, what they're feeling physically and emotionally, you can bring that compassionate curiosity, and then validate the feelings that they say they were feeling.
Jase: Actually, in the article, there are a few different articles that these steps were based off of. In some of those, some of the advice was actually, if you're trying to validate someone else, to guess what they might be feeling and try to validate that. I was like, "Mm, no, we've heard a lot everybody saying that that's not a helpful thing to do, and that we're really bad at it as human." I was like, "No. Bad, bad, bad, but I did validate their feelings. I can understand why you might think that that's the right thing to do.
Emily: Well done.
Jase: Anyway, this has been a fun ride through the world of the validation variety pack.
Dedeker: A fun journey through the looking glass, eating a variety pack of snacks along the way.
Emily: Now I'm hungry.
Jase: Hopefully, feeling all right about ourselves. Just as a quick recap, all of these are referred to as validation. As external validation or internal validation. Some people will tend to demonize external validation in some of these situations, and really, in all of them, we need a balance, and it's just about that. The point of this episode is to give you some tools, some things to think about to examine that for yourself, then maybe evaluate, "Yes. I think I am maybe leaning a little too heavily on external validation in this way," whether it's about what type of person you think you are, or how good of a person you think you are, or whether your feelings are understandable or reasonable. Thank you all for joining us.