Just like you deserve to name and feel every emotion that comes your way, it’s important to allow others the safe space to experience and express how they feel too. Therapy introduced a new word for that in the dictionary of my mind: Validation.

Human experiences and emotions are extremely complex. No two people can go through one experience and come out exactly the same. And so we might not always understand why someone can feel a certain something so intensely when it already sounds normal to our own minds. The point isn’t to always understand though, as much as it is to exert the effort to accept. Accept that people have different needs. Accept that people react differently. Accept that every person has a very good reason behind their behaviors and thoughts, even if no one ever got around to knowing their full story.

When I first started understanding why I feel so many of the things I feel, I happened to take a few wrong turns afterwards. Because I so much believed in the validity of those feelings at some point, I thought everyone else would somehow be on my same page if I shared my thoughts with them too. So I slowly started opening up to the people in my life about some of my realizations. I was still trying to accept and love myself, and yet I was so harshly invalidated.

One of them once told me I needed to stop giving my anxiety this name, because some other people’s anxieties result in way more severe panic attacks and much more serious depressive episodes than what I was going through. It sounded like other people’s experiences were somehow more valid than mine. Like the seriousness of what they go through is supposed to make me swallow in my own anxiety and man up instead. Because others had it much worse. I remember going home that day loathing this whole therapy experience because of how I thought it only made me want to victimize myself more, when I so obviously did not have it this bad in comparison to others. I remember I felt angry at my therapist for a while, because maybe she was the one convincing me that I had a problem after all, when I really just didn’t.

But then I talked to my therapist about it and she slowly helped me understand that if it personally took me all those months to comprehend my own pain and learn to accept it, I can’t really expect other people to get it all within one-hour chats. It doesn’t make them bad people, it only means that they aren’t able to relate. That they still don’t understand what validation is and why it’s so important. And that’s okay. I, myself, did not understand it this clearly just a few years back. And that’s also very okay.

Another one of them listened to me talk about some of the toughest experiences of my life and their first reaction was “you need to take it easy.” This is one of the most extremely invalidating sentences you can ever tell someone who struggles. It’s paralyzing. And if it’s coupled with something along the lines of “you’re so sensitive”, it can mess so bad with this person’s thoughts for the longest time. It might sound like you’re coming from a good place; trying to help them calm down or relax. But this “taking-it-easy” doesn’t come naturally to most people.

More on what validation is all about, on my next post inshaAllah!