To feel loved and appreciated is to feel heard and understood.
To validate someone is to love someone and grow alongside them.
What Is Validation?
We often use validate as a word to let others know we recognize that they, their opinions and feelings matter and are worthwhile. To feel validated by someone makes us feel loved and appreciated.
But there is much more hiding behind this powerful word.
Validation is a practice. This is a truly beautiful practice that will not only support the process of you understanding yourself better, but will allow you to be present with someone, to truly understand where they are coming from and what they are feeling.
You will gain an insight into how they are feeling and be really able to land into what it is they feel and need. What it is YOU need and feels. Once you begin to master validation, it will also support the practice of understanding your loved ones more.
Validation Grows Love
To love someone more is to truly want to get to know their feelings and the needs behind the emotions that arrive with them.
The challenge is to not make it about us.
To not make it about what we need, want, and desire. To not say, ”Well that was not my intention”; saying this makes it about you.
The challenge is to fully listen and not try to explain where you were coming from. All you really need to know is what they are feeling and what they need. In the end to really understand what it is they need.
It is not to disregard your needs, feelings, emotions that are coming up for you.
All of this is allowed. And this is a parallel journey, a plural journey, and an individuation journey.
Validation Helps You Grow
To really understand ourselves is to understand ourselves through others. The ability to grow with someone in any relationship is to really be able to land with them and understand them. From here we see the human in them, and we see the human in us.
The human that just has emotions, the human that has needs.
My hope is with practicing this validation practice on yourself first, you will understand yourself deeper and love yourself deeper and accept yourself fully.
My hope is that when this is practiced in relationships that you both will feel understood and validated, and be able to be productive by supporting each other’s needs.
In the end both needs must be met in some way. The key intention when it’s a growth opportunity for two people, BOTH must be understood, validated, and needs must be met. In the end we are here to love, to support and want what each other wants. Want the best for each other.
I’ve created a free worksheet you can download and print to guide you through the Validation Practice. If you have a journal, or any other place/space where you keep your thoughts, you might want to add this worksheet to your ponderings and reflect back to it as you grow and evolve.
Find your worksheet here: Validation Practice
For more inspiration and tips, follow The Elemental Being on Instagram.
I love you and I hear you!
I am always here for support, Brandy
