Psychology Today: How to Validate Your Emotions

"Emotions are central to most, if not all, mental health concerns, and this is particularly true in the case of disordered eating and eating disorders. Disordered eating behaviours often serve to manage or avoid uncomfortable emotions, whether in the case of restriction, or overeating. Thus, cultivating awareness of and learning to validate emotions is important in building a healthier relationship with food and emotions.

1. Build awareness of your emotions

In order to validate and regulate emotions, it’s necessary to be aware that you are experiencing them in the first place. There are three questions you can ask yourself to prompt your awareness of emotions: What am I feeling physically? What am I thinking? What emotional label would I put on this experience?

Paying attention to physical sensations is a helpful starting point because emotions usually present themselves in our bodies to motivate us to action.

2. Acknowledge what emotions are communicating

Thoughts are also helpful to attend to because they provide some context as to what your emotions are communicating to you about your needs and whether or not they are being met. Usually, underneath anger is an experience of sadness, shame, or fear that we are trying to protect ourselves from.

Feeling “mad” at someone for not respecting your wishes is often a way to defend against sadness that is present if you don’t feel heard or understood.

3. Allow yourself to be present to the experience

Even though they don’t always feel comfortable to experience, emotions are not inherently dangerous either. There’s nothing wrong with you for feeling them, nor is anything bad going to happen if you do. Allowing yourself to feel your feelings—to lean in, rather than lean away—can show you that you’re capable of riding the waves of emotion.

4. Validate your right to feel what you feel

Three simple words can go a long way in working to acknowledge and validate how you feel, and they are as follows: “That makes sense.” “Get over it” or “you’re overreacting” might be common sentiments that you tell yourself, but the thing is, we never experience emotions for no reason. They are a reaction to something that is happening in our environment, a threat detection system as it were, and they don’t pop up out of nowhere.

5. Plan a course of action, if necessary

Having paid attention to your emotions and what they are communicating, allowing yourself to feel what you feel while acknowledging your right to do so, there’s one final step, which is effectively to decide if there’s anything further you need to do. In some cases, after being present to your feelings and allowing them to run their course, you may realize that this in and of itself was all that you needed in that moment. Other times, after the intensity of the emotion has reduced, you may want to address whatever led to the emotion in the first place.

The key here is to wait to problem-solve your way out of an emotion until you’ve actually gone through it.

Read the full article here!

Reflection:

Do you validate your emotions when you've hit a rough patch?

#EmotionalRegulation #Emotions #Awareness #MentalHealth