How self-validation increases self-confidence

Validation is the act of treating someone's experience as real and understandable. When you think about it, validation is at the core of healthy human relationships. Despite its importance to mental health, in all my years of grad school, I didn’t learn about validation specifically. It wasn't until I started learning DBT in 2016, that I started to comprehend what validation is and how necessary it is for successful therapy and human health in general. If it’s not emphasized in psychology doctoral programs, I guess it’s not surprising that so few people understand the concept. And sadly, our health and relationships suffer for it. 

At our core, humans are social creatures. Some of our most basic neural wiring drives us to stay connected because we need each other to survive. We all have a need to be accepted, understood, and to be close to others. Validation is core to what helps us achieve those things. When someone says, “yeah that makes sense” or “I saw what just happened to you and I’m so sorry,” we feel that connection. We feel a sense of relief that we don’t have to argue, defend, or prove our experience. The same is true with self-validation. To have a healthy relationship with ourselves, we need to believe our experience and see it as understandable.

Our struggle to validate others and ourselves leads to a lot of problems. The ones I am going to focus on here are around the impact on behavior change and self-confidence (see future blog posts for other issues related to validation!). One reason we may not know how to self-validate, is because we have experienced a lot of invalidation from others in our lives. When we are young and we are experiencing chronic invalidation (either from family, school, friends, or perhaps because you have one or more identities that are invalidated by society at large), we can internalize the message that our experience must not be real or understandable. Maybe dad says you get bad grades because you don’t try hard enough in school even though you are trying as hard as you can, so you start to believe you must not be trying. Or your friends say you’re too sensitive and the things that upset you don’t make sense, so you start to doubt your emotional reactions. When this happens, we can learn to chronically invalidate ourselves. One of the problems with this is that it impacts self-esteem. Another, is that we don’t learn to understand ourselves and our challenges so we can’t effectively problem-solve to change them. 

Let’s take the example of trying to set a goal to go to the gym four times a week but you aren’t doing it. You might think to yourself, “I don't understand what's wrong with me. Other people can get themselves to go to the gym, so why can’t I?” The truth is that there is something understandable behind why you're not going to the gym and if you can understand what that is, you are more likely to be able to change your plan to achieve your goal. Being frustrated makes sense. But judging yourself is a really unhelpful form of self-invalidation. When you say “what's wrong with me?”, you are focusing on a vague sense of character flaw (good luck trying to come up with an effective strategy to change that!) instead of focusing on the behaviors and facts that might lead to effective problem-solving. 

Consider this scenario: let’s say that the specific goal you’d set was to wake up at 5 AM four days a week to go to the gym but you're not doing it because you’re exhausted every time 5 AM rolls around. And let’s say you respond with “what’s wrong with me?” In that case, you’re not treating your exhaustion as real or valid. But it may be the case that you need to go to bed earlier to change that exhaustion. Or maybe waking up at 5 AM actually isn’t good for your circadian rhythm. When you say “what’s wrong with me?” instead of “what could I learn that might help me change this?”, you block yourself from meaningful growth and lasting change. The self-invalidation approach might temporarily create enough shame to get you to go to the gym at 5 AM, but it will be miserable and short-lived because eventually you’ll want to avoid it. One of the roles I care about most as a therapist is in helping people stop motivating themselves through punishment and start motivating themselves through positive reinforcement. In behaviorism, we know that while punishment and reinforcement can both lead to behavior change, reinforcement is far more effective at creating behavior change that lasts. Self-invalidation is a form of punishment that increases feelings like shame and anxiety, increases avoidance, and blocks the ability to see reality clearly enough to create functional plans to reach our goals.

So what does this have to do with self-confidence? People who are self-confident see themselves as capable. They are confident in their ability to do hard things. Seeing that you are capable of achieving your goals, increases self-confidence. It makes sense, right? As I just said above, self-validation is key to effective problem-solving, effective problem-solving is key to achieving goals, and achieving goals is key to self-confidence. Through self-validation, you can stop dismissing and denying your experience, embrace what’s real, and understand better how to do what needs to be done. If we revisit my earlier gym example, a self-validating approach might look like saying “OK, you know what? My body isn’t cut out for 5 AM. I’ve never felt good that early and there’s no evidence that will change. So maybe the problem is the timing and it would make more sense to go after work instead.” With an approach of self-acceptance and genuine curiosity, I can come up with a helpful idea of next steps. 

Let’s acknowledge the importance of self-compassion in self-validation for a minute. Compassion is a sympathetic awareness of distress with a desire to alleviate it. Can you see how that might be connected to self-validation? If you are seeing your pain as real and understandable, it is only natural to want to help yourself. You are seeing yourself as deserving, as worthy. I want to highlight the importance of self- compassion in self-confidence. In our culture, I think we tend to mistake arrogance for self-confidence. But there is a huge difference. When perceived self-confidence is actually arrogance, any obstacle in the way can lead to unhealthy reactions like aggression, denial, or giving up. But when self-confidence is built on self-compassion, we believe in ourselves in a deep way. We believe in our inherent worthiness and capacity, which can help us navigate many hardships. So if you are wanting to improve your self-confidence, please consider building it on a foundation of self-compassion and practice self-validation every chance you can. And remember, practice makes good enough!