Validating our feelings!

The other day, I was browsing thru the TV channels, and somehow I stopped at some kids show where a little girl was sitting with a gloomy face, her teacher asked her, “How are you feeling? Are you feeling sad? Let’s validate your feelings!”

Validating our feelings — a concept, I’ve never realized until now how significant it is.

So, what exactly it means by validating the feelings? For a kid, it’s about clearly saying how he/she is feeling and why he/she is feeling it. Saying out loud that I’m sad or I’m angry will help others to know how the kid is feeling and what he needs to feel better. It will help the kid to understand what makes him angry or sad. However, for an adult, validating the feeling is much more than just enunciating the feeling, it’s about understanding why we are feeling it and also accepting it.

How often do we validate our feelings before we react? We encounter an unpleasant circumstance and we panic and react! We feel angry when we don’t get what we want, and we bash out, we feel irritated in traffic, and we instantly react and honk at other people, when we feel offended by the actions of others, we react by disrespecting them back.

We are not fundamentally evil. We are reasonably empathetic when we are dealing with our loved ones. We provide them the support they need, we tell them to calm down, we try to understand them, and we encourage them by listening to them. But more often than not, we fail to emotionally validate our own feelings. We forget what we teach others. Without observing or trying to understand the feeling which is causing the agony, making us anxious, we react.

When we fail to validate our own feelings, we go on a never-ending quest of finding flaws in others. We blame other people, situations and circumstances for our unhappiness. We fail to see that the circumstances and people are just the triggers, but the ability to feel bad or not feel bad is all inside us.

We need to learn to be the friend we are for our loved ones. When we get into an unpleasant situation, we need to learn to separate sentiments to create some distance between our emotions and the situation before reacting to it. We need to understand why something is making us angry or sad or hurt! We need to ask this question, “can you do something to change it?” and do what we can do and if we can’t change it, we need to learn to accept it.

Recognizing and understanding our own feelings, especially the ones which cause suffering is not easy, but it’s the first step towards happiness.