Self-Validation

Expressing your feelings is not a weakness. Self-validation is accepting your own internal experience, your thoughts, and your feelings. Learning how to validate yourself can help you cope with tough times. It helps you better understand your thoughts and emotions without judging them. Learning to self-validate is not so easy. Notice that mindfulness and self-validation go hand in hand. Being mindful of the thoughts you are having and the feelings you are experiencing is necessary before you can validate that internal experience.

• Be Present

  To be present also means to ground yourself and not dissociate, daydream, suppress, or numb your emotions. Being present means listening to yourself.

• Radical Genuineness

  In terms of self-validation, this means being your real self and not lying to yourself. It means that you don’t pretend to be someone you aren’t. Rejecting who you are is one of the highest levels of invalidation.

• Accurate REflection

  To reflect means to make manifest or apparent. For self-validation, accurate reflection is acknowledging your internal state to yourself and labeling it accurately. Perhaps you reflect on what triggered the emotion and when the precipitating event occurred

• Normalizing

  Sometimes people who have intense emotions don’t see any of their emotional reactions as being normal. Everyone has emotions. No one is happy all the time. It’s normal to feel sad, angry, hurt, ashamed, or any other emotion