The Lundberg Company

From I Don’t Have to Make Everything All Better,

Excerpt from Chapter One
by Gary and Joy Lundberg

Everyday throughout the world, in nearly every situation, people constantly are trying to express their feelings to someone. Consider the following examples:

• It is a cold winter morning as you awaken your child. “I don’t want to get up. It’s too cold,” the child says. You reply, “It’s not that cold. You just need to get up and get your blood going and you’ll be just fine.”

• You come home from work and dinner isn’t ready. Your wife, a stay-at-home mother of three, says, “I don’t feel like cooking dinner tonight. I get tired of it day in and day out.” You come back with, “You think you’ve got it hard. You just don’t know how lucky you are. You get to stay home. I have to go to work every day.”

• Your athletic son comes home looking sad and dejected. “I didn’t make the starting lineup,” he says. You reply, “Well, just keep doing your best and you’ll make it eventually.”

• Your young married daughter complains to you, “Married life is hard. There’s just not enough money for anything extra.” And you reply, “Honey, you don’t know what hard times are. When your dad and I were newlyweds we . . .”

• Your friend, a cement finisher, says, “Man, it’s hot out here. Sometimes I feel like a piece of chicken in a frying pan.” And you, a cement truck driver, reply, “You oughta be sitting in this truck, then you’d know what hot is.”

Unfortunately, too many of us respond exactly the way the people in the above examples did. We fail to recognize the universal need within each of us to truly believe that I am of worth, my feelings matter, and someone really cares about me. This need begins to be fulfilled when you are able to recognize and express your own personal feelings.
Identifying one’s own feelings is difficult for some people, especially men. Some of us, male and female, have not been allowed to express what is going on inside of ourselves. Sadly, when we were growing up, many of us were told by our parents, teachers, or friends that we have no right to feel the way we are feeling. One client told me that every time he tried to talk about his feelings his parents would say, “Children should be seen and not heard. So be quiet and go play.” He explained that, “I learned it was not safe to express my feelings or needs. If I did, they were used against me to embarrass me.” He went on, “ Sometimes when other adults were visiting our home one of my parents would say, ‘Do you know what our son said?’ Then they would repeat what I had said and make fun of it.”
Another client said every time she started to talk about her feelings, she was told the feelings she expressed were not right and she shouldn’t feel that way. Her parents would then tell her what feelings were right for the situation.
On an Oprah Winfrey talk show, two women were discussing their feelings concerning their childhood. They were explaining to their mother they often felt of little worth due to the way she had responded to their feelings when they were children. One daughter said that when she had shared a feeling with her mother, her mother had replied, “You shouldn’t feel that way, you should feel this way.” The daughter said, “I went away believing I didn’t matter as a person and my feelings didn’t count for anything.” The daughter looked at her mother sitting across from her on the show and, in tears, said, “All I needed to hear was that you understood what I was feeling. Then I would have gone away feeling like I was worth something.”
As I have seen the sorrow and lack of self-esteem similar situations cause, I have wished to help people understand the principle of validation. The principle is based on the personal understanding that I am acceptable just the way I am, and you are acceptable the way you are. Too many people believe, “I am acceptable and you will be acceptable when you believe, see, feel, and talk like I do.”
All of us want to be listened to and understood. We want to be appreciated for who we are individually. We need to be heard completely and not judged, corrected, or advised. When those who are meaningful tous will not take the time to hear us out by genuinely listening, we experience a profound negative effect much like the two examples above.
In many families, tradition has dictated that children, no matter the age, are to be seen and not heard. Parents are the possessors of all knowledge and wisdom. Children remain children until the parents die, and until that time the children are to look to the parents as all-wise and all-knowing. The children are to accept and follow the parents’ counsel without question. These are extreme statements and yet, to some degree, they exist in most families. This attitude is stifling to personal growth and does not show respect and understanding.
There is a parallel in interpersonal relationships. Much like the “all-knowing” parent, most of us want to be looked to as being wise. Most of us want to be able to help others solve their problems. We automatically think that when someone brings up a problem, we must immediately solve it for them. In fact, as the person is sharing their problem with us, rather than listening fully, our minds are racing ahead to find solutions for them. We can hardly wait for them to stop talking so we can tell them what they should be doing about it. We care about them and we think it is our responsibility to help them in this way. And yet, all this does is place a strain on communication between friends and family members that need not be there.
Similarly, the need to always have the answer also exists in some business situations. If I am the owner, or supervisor, I must have the answer for all needs or problems. In fact this may be necessary when it comes to policy or final approval, but in problem solving, this can be a terrible burden for one person to carry. Some business owners believe workers are to do what they are told and leave the thinking up to the boss. Companies with this philosophy have been having harder times than those with a more listening-ear approach. New ideas, which often come through the process of validation, are vital to success.

DEFINING VALIDATION

Starting with the first part of the word, “valid,” some of its dictionary definitions are “well grounded or justifiable; being at once relevant and meaningful; appropriate to the end in view.” Adding the second part of the word to make “validate,” two of its meanings are “to confirm the validity of,” and “to support or corroborate on a sound basis.” Taking the entire word, “validation,” one of its meanings is “an act, process, or instance of validating.”
By using a combination of these definitions, we see that validation is the act, process, or instance of confirming or corroborating the meaningfulness and relevance of what another person (or self) is feeling. To put it more simply, it is being able to empathetically listen and understand another person’s point of view without having to change it.

Another way of stating this is that validation is the ability to walk with another person emotionally without trying to change his or her direction. Robert Bly, an American poet and founder of the men’s movement including retreats called “A Gathering of Men,” was interviewed by TV commentator Bill Moyers on a PBS television show. He said, “In a conversation there are little turns, you can turn up or down. When one says, ‘I lost my brother five years ago,’ at that point, you can say, ‘Well, we all lose our brothers,’ or you can touch a hand, or you can go into the part of you that’s lost a brother. You can follow the grief downward in this way.” When we walk with another emotionally, we treat that person gently, kindly, and respectfully. In other words, we treat him like we would like to be treated. When a person is allowed to follow his emotions down as far as he needs to go with someone walking beside him emotionally, then he will bring himself back up.

(Note: At this point, I must acknowledge that there is a wide range of emotional problems. Some will only respond to medication, some will only respond to counseling, while there are others that will require a combination of both medication and counseling. One wide spread problem is clinical depression. This is a condition of deep, ongoing depression that needs medical attention. When someone is diagnosed as having clinical depression, that person may need to have medication to balance out their physiological system. In most cases, medication alone will not solve the problem, but it will allow the chance to develop coping mechanisms from which solutions are possible. Validation helps in the process of developing these solutions.)

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