All feelings are valid, but not all behaviours?

Having feelings and emotions is human and simply part of our existence. However how we react our behavior can become maladaptive.
stubbing your toe, feeling pain, yelling out, hopping on one foot and checking to see if it’s broken is normal. Turning around punching a hole in the wall throwing furniture around isn’t. Somewhere in your life trauma has led to maladaptive and your behavior is not healthy to relationships.

But feeling angry at them is still unreasonable

This is the essence of CBT. Your feelings can be harmful, and they often stem from your thoughts. "They all hate me" is unlikely to be true, but leads to "I feel worthless". "I feel like my arm belongs to someone else" is a very harmful feeling, especially if accompanied by "I feel like my arm should be chopped off".

but @StrawberrySquash this is where it helps to understand the process that happens.

You've had a shit day, so the emotions you experience are anger and maybe sadness. You feel annoyed, irritated, resentful, indignant and that leads you to behave in a rude or thoughtless way towards someone entirely innocent. The behaviour is unreasonable, not necessarily the emotion or the feelings.

@swifttara hmmm, I'm not sure you can describe emotions as good or bad. An emotion (which I think is what you mean) is an instinctive reaction to the environment. It is neither good nor bad. When the emotion of fear arises inside of us that isn't good or bad, it just is our instinctive reaction. The feelings & thoughts that come about afterwards may be useful or may not be and they in turn can lead to actions which could be seen as good or bad.

Or I'm just hungry and want chocolate.
We've all had moments when we get mad at someone/something that is not the right target. If I've had a rubbish day and I get angry with a slow cashier, I'm still unreasonable to be angry with them. Sure I can cut myself some slack for that bad day, but it doesn't change the unreasonableness.

But you are angry, no matter how irrationally. That anger is real and needs looking at.

I imagine it probably comes from a deeper place connected to not being paid attention to or having your needs properly met.

I think that you seeing a therapist to unpick all this is a good idea.

I completely agree with the therapist that all feelings are valid. As in they are feelings arising in people, and they exist, and are a natural response in the mind. Some feelings lead us toward happiness and some lead us toward suffering or harm.

So you have a point - feelings like anger (I don’t like you because xyz) and jealousy (I feel unhappy when someone else gets something good) - not good feelings, don’t make the feeler of them happy, or people around them, can lead to harmful behaviours. Even if not acted upon they are emotions that harm us. But they are valid as in they come from a valid place - we have reasons to feel what we feel and we can’t really get rid of them unless we acknowledge them. You sound like you may be advocating repressing feelings that one ‘shouldn’t’ feel - I don’t think it works for long to do that.

Validating a feeling doesn't mean you have to agree or approve of it. It just means recognising it exists.

If someone says they dislike someone because they're black, then that is a real feeling that needs dealing with. For that person's own emotional and psychological wellbeing, it would be helpful to understand why and where that feeling came from and try to challenge it, rather than just shame it away.

I agree to an extent. It's not reasonable of me to be angry with my boyfriend for not buying me a large bar or chocolate out of the blue, however much I might suddenly decide I fancy one ten minutes before he gets home. Some feelings are actively not valid and the best thing to get over them is to recognise they are unreasonable.

I don't really see them as oversimplifications. More as a core idea or starting points that Introduce an idea to explain and explore further.

No therapist is going to say, "Our brains lie," or, "All emotions are real/valid," and leave it at that.

But it seems that that was all the OP took from the conversation 🤷🏻‍♀️

I think the word valid is doing a lot of work in this sentence and it has a lot of shades of meaning not all of which are helpful.

for example, if you eat something that makes you feel ill and vomit you will often have a reflexive response of nausea to the thought of eating it again.

this is valid in the sense that it happens. It may or may not be valid in the sense that the vomiting was actually caused by that food (you might have had stomach bug or have drunk vast quantities of alcohol).

in the same way, most emotions are generated at an unconscious level and feelings of anger, etc are always valid in the sense that they exist at that point in your mind, but they may not be valid in the sense that the emotion is actually a reasonable response to reality.

learning to control your behaviour is much easier than learning to control your emotions, although both things that people have tried to do.

A related therapist simplification is that our brains lie. That one bothers me much more. I prefer the approach that it is ok to have whatever feelings you are having, but you need to control your behavior and examine your thoughts.

Let’s say I have a thought like “I hate people with green eyes.” I shouldn’t hate myself for having that thought. I shouldn’t become depressed because I had that thought. To me, it’s not even that my brain lied to me. That thought came from somewhere. As a person that wants to care about people and not hate them for physical features, I would personally rather just ask myself where that thought came from. Why did I have it? What could I work on to keep from having it again because I don’t like it? Most importantly, yes, I need to tell myself that even if I do have a thought like “I hate people with green eyes”, I can’t go around being mean to people with green eyes. Behavior matters.

in reality, I know the therapist is talking about anxiety traps in our brains are lies. I don’t care. I hate over simplifications.

I think there is a great deal of confusion about feelings here. Emotions are the instinctual things. They are what happens first and are our evolutionary gut responses to what is happening around us. Feelings are what happen next and they are our interpretation or thoughts about the emotion.

I don't think we can change our emotions but we can change our feelings and often do! If my work colleague, Veronica, is sniffling away, my instinctive emotion might be disgust (as a base human reaction to sickness) and I then feel repelled, offended and irritated that she is sniffling away and my actions are to distance myself both physically and aurally by putting on my headphones. Two minutes later another colleagues tells me that Veronica's dog died yesterday and she is really upset. My feelings change to sympathy instead and that drives me to behave by going over and saying some kind words.

They are different. I dislike (opinion) green peppers, I'm disgusted (feeling) by avocado. I dislike (opinion) people who very loud, I feel hatred (feeling) for domestic abuse perpetrators. You can dislike/like something without it causing you to have emotions around it.

@Polyestered
I disagree.
I do think that in this sense though, saying an emotional response to something is “valid” doesn’t mean “positive” or “helpful” just that the response is “what it is”. The emotion is “real”.

There are things that that some people do which make me feel disgust, but unless I show this in some way, on my face as an expression or in my words or actions then the emotion , “disgust”, is only mine.

Yay, thought crime!

Of course all feelings are valid. If you feel something in a moment, then you feel it, and that's not something you can help.

But an emotion being valid doesn't necessarily make it a good thing to feel. But telling yourself your feeling isn't valid just makes you try and push it down and ignore it, whereas acknowledging the emotion, accepting that you're feeling it right now and interrogating why that is, is a much better route to not feeling that in the future.

There's a guy I work with who I took an instant dislike to on his first day. Like a visceral hatred, within seconds of meeting him. Now ,I could have just pushed that feeling down, not investigated it, tried to work with him despite this utter loathing bubbling under the surface.

Instead, I worked with the feeling, questioned it, tried to figure out what exactly it was I hated about him. Eventually I worked out that there was something about the way he spoke that reminded me of my sister in laws rapist. The moment that realisation hit the loathing just dropped away. Had I not acknowledged the feeling in the first place, I'd probably never have worked out what it was the bugged me so much about him.

Telling a kid that their feelings aren’t valid doesn’t stop them from feeling those feelings though - that’s not how humans work and no one should be telling someone else how to feel. All you do by telling them their feelings are wrong is make them think they have to hide their feelings from people or other people are in charge of validating their feelings - not the healthiest options! Jealousy is normal, anger is normal. As your therapist says, it’s what you do with those feelings that matter. Your hurt doesn’t become someone else’s.

You’re much better off asking kids why they might feel that way and teach them ways of managing their behaviour. So no judgement, just curiosity. It’s also important to teach kids that uncomfortable feelings pass and it’s okay to feel ‘bad’. The aim is to help kids (and adults) look inward and be curious about why something is upsetting/annoying to them. Sometimes it’s an external trigger (someone being unkind is going to hurt). Sometimes it’s something internal (insecure attachment will make you jealous/fear loss). If more kids understood that the feeling is okay and why its come up, we’d have more emotionally mature adults. I think this isn’t a million miles from what you’re saying but telling a kid not to feel something isn’t the way to get there!

The best therapist advice I had once was that feelings are unreliable and ergo not all of them are valid.

Changed my perspective

But that was a couple of decades ago and I think people dont want to hear that as that is quite challenging, the modern narrative is all about every single feeling being valid

I dont believe it is.

A feeling is something instinctive.

Not something you choose.

Having looked up 'valid' I'm not sure it is the correct word to use. I think other posts have said there might be an issue with defining feelings as 'valid' too.

I feel the same and I definitely think my feeling is valid.
There are some really well thought out posts on this thread that discuss differences between feelings and actions and well worth reading. It doesn't matter what prompted the discussion at the end of the day.

I fundamentally disagree that we should be teaching children that their emotions and or feelings are not ok. That is really damaging in my opinion. What you want to be teaching children is how to understand their emotions and feelings and behave in appropriate and healthy ways. So, it ok for a child to be angry and feel outraged that little Tommy has taken their favourite toy to play with. It is not ok to howl with rage and wallop Tommy over the head.

This.

I really, really dislike the word 'validate' used in these contexts. But it seems to be the current buzzword so here goes.

Telling someone you understand that they feel the way they do and the stimulus that caused it is 'validating' their feelings. Some people (looking at you now, exh) feel this excuses their behaviour and that if you challenge the behaviour you are also invalidating the feelings. You are not. They are separate.

Part of my professional role includes supporting parents and children with anger issues. There are many adults who believe that, "But I was angry," justifies their behaviour.

It doesn't.

It's an interesting question and on balance I think YANBU, although I don't know exactly what you mean by the term "valid".

Personally, I think the belief that "you can't help how you feel, only how you respond" is an oversimplification and frequently unhelpful. It implies that our inner emotional state is something that we are powerless to change, and we are helpless and at the mercy of our feelings.

In fact, it is absolutely possible to regulate one's inner emotional state, although it's typically a skill that needs to be learned and practiced. Over time, we can indeed change how we instinctively react to many things. To me, that is literally the point of talking therapy - to change how we feel.

I wouldn't want to work with a therapist who believes differently.

Just what makes this an obvious AI? I'm really tired of having that accusation bandied about on practically every thread now. It's simply not possible to spot posts written by AI that are in some way differentiated from 'real' writing and you are deluded if you think so. Stop trying to spoil a perfectly valid thread.