I always get into the arguments all the time with my friends because I don't keep friends around who just agree with everything that I do. I don't expect my friends to agree with everything I do that’s not the kind of life that I want to live and that’s not what I want out of friendship. So my friends will let me know when they think that I’m doing something that’s maybe not so mentally healthy for me or if they think that maybe something I’m doing is not a good idea or whatever.
This issue has come up with some of my friends, it feels weird talking about it but here we are right. My friends don’t want to validate the things that I do because they disagree with the things I’m doing or they feel like they might be enabling me to do something that might hurt myself in someway maybe because they’ve seen in the past that I’ve behaved this way and it turned out that I was hurt and I was upset about it and they don’t want to see me repeating the same mistakes or maybe because they’ve had an experience themselves and based on their experience things don’t turn out that well all of that is totally understandable and to be honest I feel the same way when I see somebody doing same thing.
But there is a difference between validation , agreement and enabling. Most people I think don’t realize the difference also I didn’t know the difference for a really long time and in fact the first time I think I even came across this idea was in couples therapy years ago with my ex.
So let’s talk about validation first:
Validation
Is simply acknowledging somebody’s feelings which are what they are and they are valid for having those feelings. Truthfully everybody’s feelings are totally valid I don’t know what you are experiencing in your body but your body is doing something like right now you’re feeling something , you may not actually be aware that you’re feeling something but your body is digesting things , your body might have some pain because of something you did earlier in the day so you always have feelings and those feelings exist because your body exists.
Agreement
It is a feeling that I have the exact same feeling that you have or I think exactly the same way that you think about the situation we are in an agreement and agreement is it’s own thing.
Enabling
An enabling is when somebody has something they do in action that they’re doing and that action has a consequence but we try to remove the consequences from that action.
Examples:
I had trouble with these concepts because when I was in couple therapy there was a therapist who was trying to give us some examples of ways that you can validate your partner in difficult situations maybe where you don’t really agree with them and the one situation came up that she mentioned was maybe your partner had a hard time at work and they come home to you and tells you that I hate that boss he’s rude to me , he’s a nasty person, disgusting and there’s something wrong with that person meanwhile you didn’t know this boss and you would be like I didn’t know that boss so do I want to validate their feelings that feels like I’m agreeing with them and I struggled with this for a while until I started to really internalize and understand what validation is so in that kind of situation I would say is you know what I understand that you feel like your boss sucks and I understand that your boss is probably hurting you and something your boss is doing is really bothering you and you feel really upset right now maybe you feel like a little bit angry and that is validating all the person’s feelings but notice I did not say that the boss sucks, I didn’t say that something is wrong with the boss, I didn’t say that the boss is a bad person. All I did was say I see that you feel this way and I can take a step further and say you might feel that way because you boss is putting too much pressure on you or you have a lot of stress going on right now and boss is just an extra stress that you can’t handle right now. So there are real reasons why you might feel the way you feel about your boss and that is validation without agreement. I’m not saying I agree I’m just saying you have reasons to feel the way that you feel. It doesn’t matter that those reasons are real or not it matters that the persons has reasons.
Basically I’m saying that Validation and Agreement are separate things. You can validate somebody without agreeing them.
Another area where people get tripped up and probably I got tripped up for a while too is if I’m validating somebody aren’t I enabling them If I’m telling them that the way they feel is true and they have reasons they should be feeling that way aren’t I encouraging them to just keep doing something that’s bad for them I don’t want to do that I don’t want to become enabler and that’s a valid concern nobody wants to be an enabler , nobody wants to help somebody hurt themselves or hurt others.
I don’t like to be an enabler and I don’t like other people when they’re enabling others .
Examples
A child is running and they fall and hurt themselves and the reason they hurt themselves is because they were running too fast , they weren’t paying attention they tripped on something and they fell. Well the child is hurting now and they’re crying and upset so what does most people do is what we should do , comfort the child you say it’s okay I understand that you’re hurting , we're gonna figure this out together , you’re gonna be alright etc. But you acknowledge that they’re hurting and you don’t blame them for hurting. So that’s the validation piece but you might say well I’m not just enabling them , they’re just gonna run again because I’m telling them like it’s okay that they ran and hurt themselves. No you validated them and then after you validated them then you can say maybe later they start running again and you remind them remember the last time you ran you fell and you hurt yourself maybe don’t run so fast right now or maybe slow down.
But that doesn’t mean that’s gonna stop them from running you can’t control other people just as much as you can’t control children but you’re at least giving them the idea that your action of running has a consequence of your falling and tripping.
So that is the examples that you're validating but you’re not enabling.