All feelings are valid, but not all behaviours?

[Polyestered]

Hopefully others will have heard this phrase before, often with parenting advice or in therapy. My therapist often says this, and I disagree with her.

Essentially, I have interpreted it as it’s ok to feel whatever you feel, but you have to control your reaction to it.

eg child is allowed to be sad she can’t have an ice cream, not allowed to throw a tantrum about it.

however, I don’t agree with this in principle AT ALL. Some feelings are absolutely not valid! And we shouldn’t be teaching children that it’s appropriate to have any kind of feelings they want - we should be teaching them that NOT all feelings are valid and how to recognise which ones are and aren’t. Otherwise how do you recognise that your feeings or opinions may be wrong?

for example, a partner might feel jealous of their spouse and say they can’t speak to other women. No the behaviour is obviously not ok, but (in a normal healthy relationship with no context) feeling that jealous is also not ok!

or someone might have the feeling to hurt someone for no reason. Men might have the feeling or desire of wanting to rape someone. We wouldn’t say “that’s ok to feel like that because you haven’t done it”

If opinions are somewhat based on feelings, and some opinions are blatantly wrong (eg misogyny, racism) how can we say every feeing is valid?

Surely it's a case of you can't always help how you intrinsically feel, but you can or should control/learn to control how you react to that emotion?

That's not a feeling. It's a judgement.

There is also no such thing as good or bad emotions. Emotions just give us the impetus to respond to a situation.

Eg anger is often described as a negative emotion.

But it isn't. It's just an emotion.

Emotions provide the impetus to respond. The problem is when people react.

Not liking someone is not a feeling. A feeling is an instinctive reaction to an outside stimulus.

My friend feels hatred when she sees a black man. That's because a black man once attacked her. She can't help that feeling and her feeling is valid.

However, she can recognise that a random black man is not her attacker and that racism is wrong. Therefore she treats the man in a normal polite way as she would anyone else. That's the behaviour.

In the days immediately after her attack, she was so traumatised she couldn't stand to be round a black person. Again, that was a valid feeling, that therapy has helped her with.

Are dislike and hatred totally different then? You say dislike isn’t a feeling but hatred is.

I think the thing is you can't control how you feel, but you can control how you behave. So in your example of the jealous partner, they're not choosing to feel jealous. If they wanted to choose an good behaviour as a result of that feeling they could think about what has sparked that jealously. Talk to their partner or a therapist, work things out and improve the relationship.

Similarly with children, you teach positive ways to deal with negative emotions
Eg with anger, it's not OK to hit or throw things. Instead you teach a positive behaviour/outlet to manage it, like screaming into a pillow, deep breaths, a squeeze ball.

I would say that all emotions are real and we then experience feelings that follow on from the initial emotion and we then behave afterwards. For some people that happens so quickly that they are not even aware that they had an emotion, a feeling and the behaviour followed as a result!

Emotions are pretty basic evolutionary responses to our environment. So, to go back to @Polyestered 's original example. Your partner is chatting with someone else in a way that you interpret as flirty. Your emotion is anger and the feeling that comes after is jealousy. Those are real to you in that moment. How you then behave as a result will determine on whether you are dick or not!

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.

I don't like the phrase, either. 'Valid'? 🙄I'd say that you can feel what you want (not that it's 'valid' to feel anything whatsoever), but the emphasis should be less on validating every emotion under the sun and more on working toward positive behaviours.

so what did your therapist say when you asked them this?

Feelings are not always justifiable, reasonable, rational or even understandable. But they are valid in that they are what you feel. Why you feel that way is down to numerous factors based on environment and experiences and events during formative years.
How you act on your feelings is important and can be controlled and should be.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A feeling is something instinctive.

Not something you choose.

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.

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!

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 🤷🏻‍♀️