When you struggle to make sense of yourself, being validated for your experience feels like the mirror before you finally wiped clean by someone else. The clearness of the mirror makes your reflection vivid—you stand before it seeing much more of yourself than you ever had, in greater depth and clarity. That is how the power of true validation really feels like. And to have this done by someone else, is a mark of true compassion.
If you have experienced validation, they say it is like having a mirror held up to your experience. The person skilled at validation compassionately allows themselves to become the mirror itself and nothing more in that moment; they have no desire to possess your image by intellectually analyzing it, by providing advice, or by forcing the image to be different than what you see—in other words, they let go of any need for power.
And strangely enough, when validation is done well, it is more than a mirror that simply imitates you—it is mirror that allows you to see more of yourself than you did before. The intent of the validator is so pure and receptive, that it is like having waters so clear you can see to the depths of your soul behind your own reflection.
Love is the absence of power, Carl Jung wrote. A true validator has a love so deep, and power so absent, they become but a well in which you can safely lower your bucket to collect your own wisdoms that are already there, but that you have not consciously discovered yet.
Is this saying too much about validation? Isn’t validation a form of coddling? Allowing for weaknesses? Even enabling a person to continue their mistakes?
Not so when validation is done right. Validation is a clear mirror of experience, not a contorted mirror of it. A true validator does not read more judgments of others who have hurt you than you see, nor do they tell you to do more of what you do that make you get stuck—all in order to please or patronize you. This, like the tactics of intellectualizing or advising, are false ways of validation that actually confuse the person receiving validation more, and muddies the waters of reaching their own higher paths.
A true validator is present to a broad view of our own experiences as it unfolds before them. They can see beneath it how our higher selves are navigating the way through our experiences underneath our judgments about ourselves, others’ expectations of us, and the noise of our minds.
When these judgments, expectations and noise get reflected back to us without judgment, and our constant trouble with them is seen as part of the normal human experience—it becomes easier for us to not judge them ourselves, and see beyond them to our higher selves, which more clearly emerge before us from the deep.
A true validator gives us a pure, transparent access to this broad view of ourselves. They trust you with it, because they see and honor you as you are—as someone with a higher self and awareness who has a right to it. A need to keep people from becoming aware of their inner experiences comes down to a basic lack of trust that people have higher selves they can access; higher selves that are accessible by coming into gentle acquaintance with their experiences.
Thus, they speak with you, human-to-human, an equal to them. They know that for all human beings, including they themselves, the way to higher self and awareness can get obstructed. Yet they have the undying trust that when our experiences are accessible to us rather than negated, ignored, twisted, or patronized—our higher selves emerge to see the path forward more clearly.
Paradoxically, when you are allowed to see the broad view of your own experience as is rather than another’s idea of how it should be, you are then able to find your way forward from parts of your experience that make you feel stuck. This is all done by allowing a deep, patient look beyond the surface of the water, deep into the well of our own being.
