I think validation is important to pretty much all people.

Whenever we have strong feelings about something, and we have some sort of experience that results in those strong feelings, we want to feel like others are seeing us and hearing us and not dismissing our experience out of hand simply because they don't understand what happened to us.

Of course not all experiences are positive, and people often end up traumatized by those experiences. The wounds that result from trauma are often with us for a very long time, and they tend to inform our choices and actions later in life.

A lot of people who seek counseling are initially looking for validation of their experiences. That validation is — at least in a healthy situation — tied to a sincere desire to heal and move past the past problematic situation.

But sometimes it's very challenging to "unpack" what people are really bringing to the therapeutic situation.

It's not that unusual for me to get counseling clients who come in and it seems like their primary objective isn't that they want to heal, but they want me to validate their perception that they are helpless in dealing with the situation from their past, and therefore they don't need to actually address the details directly.

It can be a delicate and challenging process of bringing somebody around from a belief of looking for validation that actually constitutes avoidance rather than actual validation!

One of the most difficult aspects of unpacking trauma is the fact that it likes to "disguise itself" as other things, and most people — by the time they've reached the point of seeking counseling — are deeply entrenched in avoidance patterns. They know something is wrong and they want to get better on some level, but they're afraid of looking directly at the problem so they tend to skirt issues and chase after lesser problems to "mask" the deeper issue.

It can become really problematic when they basically want me to "give them permission" to not do anything differently, meaning that they want me to emotionally sign off on the fact that they are "too damaged to be helped," and they just need to suffer and deal with their helplessness.

Whereas that isn't true, of course, some actually end up leaving without being helped because I didn't serve them up the answer they wanted as opposed to the truth of what it takes to heal. It's not that they're beyond help, it's just that they're not prepared to undertake the painful work to be helped and to help themselves.

Sadly, it is very difficult to recover from trauma without at least revisiting the original pain to some degree. As it were, we have to look at the monsters before we can get them out of our lives.

Thanks for coming to visit my blog, and bright blessings to all!

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