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You can be compassionate and kind-hearted while also acknowledging that not every problem should be validated. Sometimes navel-gazing can trick yourself into thinking your molehill of a problem is actually a mountain.

A new tool in my cognitive-emotional toolkit is conceptualizing the difference between emotional validity and correctness. Far too often are the two concepts are left undifferentiated. Disentangling them leaves room for the empathy of understanding how people's emotional states evolve from their perspective, while also accounting for how their perception differs from reality. Why is this useful? By not immediately dismissing emotional states, we can analyze them, dissect them, and ultimately change them without unhelpful knee-jerk reactions which engage defense mechanisms. Don't fall for the trick of people asking for their perfectly valid emotional states to also be seen as correct.

"correct" meaning "your emotion reflect an accurate understanding of the situation"

or "correct" meaning "you are behaving as society expects you to behave in this situation" ?

I was considering the former, but I don't want to discount the latter. We identify incorrect emotions through incorrect behavior.

True. If you (or lots of other people) validate someone's emotional states that are not rooted in correctness (or reality), then they may believe them to be correct.

This may be harmful to that individual in the long run, so we should be careful about how often and how much we validate such feelings.

In a nutshell, some people want to be seen, and some people want to be right.

All too often do we conflate validation with the latter.

In this framework, does "validity" signify anything? Is there such a thing as an invalid emotional state?

I think "validating emotion" is currently a counter to jerks who state "You shouldn't feel that (your current emotion). There's no reason to feel that. You should instead feel X emotion."

This reaction is generally unhelpful for the listener, as it basically asserts that (a) the listeners feelings don't exist / are not important or (b) that the listener is feeling the wrong emotions.

Validating emotion is "Yes, I understand why you feel that, having <thing> happen to <you/me> would certainly make someone feel <emotion> " e.g. "Yeah, when your friend criticized your cooking I bet that made you feel bad."

After validating the emotion (to create empathy, to create a safe space for conversation, and emphasize that you care about the person), you can then (optionally) suggest a different (more positive) thought e.g. "Perhaps your friend only meant to say that they love using melted butter on their own pasta, and was not trying to say that the pasta was dry." or supply context e.g. "Alice has been having a rough time at work the last few weeks, that might have been why she was short with you."

So validation of emotion is used to create acceptance ("we accept that emotion currently exists and is a reasonable feeling to have in that context") and to create a safe space for talking about emotions in general and the situation in which they arose. (It is especially useful when teaching children about emotions and teaching them to look at a situation objectively.)

Invalid emotions could exist, but usually an over-the-top emotion (and the actions that you take because of that) normally seem to occur because either (a) some sort of miscommunication occurred ("I thought we were talking about X") or that some sort of important context was missing ("You know, Bob lost his job last week, there's a reason he didn't come to the party, and it wasn't to slight you.")

My concern is that are two distinct concepts at play. One is "validation", a verb, which seems to be simply the basic application of empathy. The other is "valid", an adjective, which is applied to feelings and emotional states but (as far as I can tell) serves no descriptive purpose beyond "worthy of empathy". But aren't all feelings worthy of empathy? What is gained by such a label?

I suppose there could be. Is it possible to reach an emotional state without perceptual input? Maybe?

While I can see where analogy of "make invalid states unrepresentable" is coming from, but I feel that how we talk about them can get in the way of changing them. "Emotional invalidation" is a good search term to find phrases that shut down opportunities for change.

I think `validation` here is carrying a lot of weight. Like anything, it can be acknowledged, or recognised, or seen...and then you act accordingly from there. Don't decide the priority for someone, just notice that they're dealing with something and say that you see it, and let them continue. Don't get pulled into the involvement or start colluding though, just keep it to what you see from the outside.

I feel like you can swap 'validation' with 'confirmation' and these responses will make more sense. "I see you're struggling with something," vs. "I agree, this is the problem."

edit: In fact, aaron-santos in a sibling post has a more succinct explanation, in terms of correctness.

    it's not the large things that
    send a man to a
    madhouse...
    no, it's the continuing series of _small_ tragedies
    that send a man to the madhouse...
    not the death of his love
    but a shoelace that snaps
    with no time left...
    the dread of life
    is that huge swarm of trivial shit
    that can kill quicker than cancer
    and which is always there--
    [list of trivial shit]
    
    with each broken shoelace
    one of one hundred broken shoelaces,
    one man, one woman, one
    thing
    enters a
    madhouse.

- Charles Bukowski, "the shoelace"

Your really not kidding, what a dissaponting comment section. There could be interesting thoughts about social interaction changing and people are yet again arguing about covid restrictions.

> There could be interesting thoughts about social interaction changing and people are yet again arguing about covid restrictions.

Why would or should social interactions change? I temporarily changed my behavior to help limit the spread of covid. But now that vaccines are doing there thing, I'm going back to my old activities.

Did you read the article? Not everyone wants to go back to how things were before? Simple things like not having people stand on top of me in line. There was a year of no social pressure to do anything and it was nice. No need to feel like you needed to socialize because everyone else is. That's what this article was about.

Some people did some introspection and realized they were caught up in societies bull shit. They should be able to discuss that, instead we have internet tough guys talking about how they think we're babying mental illness or think people who are just expressing them selves are mentally weak and we need to just get back to work, that's how the world is. Except we just has a year and a half where that wasn't the case. In some ways the world was actually easier to deal with.

> Did you read the article? Not everyone wants to go back to how things were before? Simple things like not having people stand on top of me in line. There was a year of no social pressure to do anything and it was nice. No need to feel like you needed to socialize because everyone else is. That's what this article was about.

I read the article, but I will admit it doesn't really "make sense" to me. If I don't like something I don't do it or I try and change it, so it becomes something that doesn't bother me. If you don't want to be involved in certain social settings then don't go. I don't get why "Society" needs to change because some people prefer not to be around people. Its perfectly fine that you prefer less social interaction but many people are the complete opposite and that's also okay.

Not everyone has that control over their life. Like some might be stuck in a cycle of work and exist. Some people lost their jobs and had time to maybe realize they really weren't happy. Some people got bored of the default social location of bars and restaurants. Now there's no more forced work events.

Maybe you had some perfect life before covid where you had a 100% control over your life and you could tell people to fuck off and not have repercussions, but most people don't and they're stuck compromising. So in someway the interruption was welcome. Now some people are demanding everything goes back to how it was, some people don't want that. So they write articles on the internet about it. Its not really hard to get, just have some empathy.

> I don't get why "Society" needs to change

And this isn't just about socialization. People, at least Americans, are uncomfortable with the idea of doing nothing. The protestant work ethic has been shoved down our throats. Its immoral to not work, or if you are working to not be at your most efficient. Covid turned this upside down, it was finally OK to be lazy, to do nothing, and not keep the capitalist wheel of buying and consuming turning. Its been ok to "steal time" from your employer or be on unemployment. This maybe isnt a radical idea to say, but to experience it and see it worked for a lot of people is changing their world view. We can do nothing, we don't need to run at 100%, the world won't collapse and I'm not immoral for it. That is a societal change.

> I don't get why "Society" needs to change

Society wasn't created in a vacuum to create a way of life you feel most accustomed to, that then becomes immutable. It changes all the time. and you don't notice it until it's too late because it happens so gradually.

So it will now. Society could shift to accommodating these other people and you wouldn't notice it, because you already do the thing it is shifting towards, which is maintaining better boundaries for yourself.

My life didn't really change due to the pandemic. I'm not super social. I hang out with the people I like when I like.

But yesterday, for example, I was at the gas station buying a pop and two kids were right up next to me while their mom waited behind me in line. If I had lifted my elbow, I would have caught one of them in the face. I don't hate kids, but I have a personal bubble and that was respected over the last year. I'm really not excited to go back to having strangers brushing up against my hips and sides again. It's not the end of the world, but it unsettles me and I don't feel like a foot or two of space in a store is really that much to ask.

I don't understand how resilience could be grouped under compassion. Resilience it's about an individual's ability to get back up. Compassion is typically about understanding between two people.

Under my own understanding, a compassionate person is acting in the interest of your resilience and isn't merely providing a well-disguised form of sympathy, or enablement, that stops you from growing. Compassion in that form may not feel like it until sometime later on.

I think it's largely a subjective concept and we all take different meaning from it, but I developed some of this thinking after reading The Compassionate Mind.[1]

[1] https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-compassionate-mind

I think there is a big difference between being vulnerable/opening up about those things we are all dealing with, and the "frailty performance art" that OP is talking about. Exemplified by that cringe-worthy viral video of celebrities singing "Imagine" from their multi-million dollar homes early on in the pandemic. It's OK to have troubles in your life and to express and address those troubles without shame. It's another thing entirely to humble-brag about your first world problems on Social Media purely for likes and validation. One is healthy and productive, the other is narcissistic.