Counselling – “validate your feelings”

This post will clarify a few things around the practice of counselling and its vocabulary.

Counselling means talking about yourself to another individual who is there to listen and to help you to make sense of your feelings. But what does “making sense of your feelings” really mean and what does it include? What does it mean in practice and why it is considered beneficial and therapeutic.

Explore Your Feelings

What Am I feeling and why.? This is a question we very rarely ask ourselves when we are on our own ” how Am I feeling right now?” . Asking yourself this question will be the first step towards a healthy relationship with yourself and the world. Recognising how you feel, is a big step towards recognising yourself, taking control over your life and make peace with the world around you. There is a famous counselling quote: ” in order to heal you need to feel” but in my opinion it is even deeper than this: It is about being aware of who you are and it is about feeling alive.

Validate your feelings

This is the most common advice in the counselling practice but what does it really mean? As a counsellor, I was asked this question many times: what does it mean “validate your feelings” and “how do I do it?”. Validate your feelings means accept them for what they are. Do not criticise them. If you are feeling sad, you are feeling sad. Accept it and try to find the reason behind it. Criticising your feeling means that you do not want to admit you are feeling sad ; means that you have been told by the people around you that you really have no reason to be sad, so you are suppressing your sadness or you are feeling shame for feeling sad. “Why Am I feeling sad? I have no justified reason for it . Maybe I am the problem. Maybe I am too emotional, or too weak or I need to be more resilient”. What you are really doing is validating other people’s opinion about your feelings over your own. And there is where the confusion starts.

Dismiss – Criticise your feelings

There was a scene on Mad Men ( there is so much psychology in the series!) where Don Draper’s young wife, was trying to talk to him about her mother who had recently died but as soon as she touched upon the subject she was immediately interrupted by her husband ” Don’t ! No melancholy. This is your day, you need to celebrate it. Mourning is just extended self pity”.

How many times you have been interrupted in a similar way? How many times people told you “not to go there”, not to feel the pain? How many times they urged you to feel positive, to “man up” and “get it over with”. The insistence on strength and resilience is another big subject but I won’t go there now. I will stay in this: Advice like “do not go there”, “let it go”, ” move on” leads you to criticise the way you are feeling. As a result, you will subsequently try to suppress or change your feeling. You maybe even experience a sense of shame about the way you feel or about your difficulty to move on. This is external pressure which directs you away from your present feeling, it does not allow you to accept and experience it. It does not allow you to validate it.

We often go to counselling when we are experiencing strong, difficult and unpleasant feelings like depression, anxiety, confusion, loss, grief, shame. Nevertheless, in our everyday life, we encounter feelings of a less dramatic scale and we allow them to pass through our body unattended. In other words, we normalise them, we accept them without questioning or we simply ignore them. We only pay attention to them when they become the heavy feelings we are not anymore capable to ignore.

The work of the counsellor is primarily to create a safe space for you to explore, validate and make sense of your feelings and the reason behind them.