Sometimes Validation is Doing & Saying Nothing
August 20, 2025 – I’ve said before in more than a few places how important the process and practice of validation is, how effective it is for myriad necessary ways of being for health, secure attachment, emotional safety, emotion regulation, and building trust between people, and building trust with our inner parts. I have been a loud proponent of its cure-all ability. However, the list of guiding principles continues to grow as life situations and interactions occur in which I realize that some of what I proclaim has limits. If I truly believe that validation is a communication superpower and can save ruptured relationships, no matter how deep the rupture (and I do believe this), then I must look at those moments when the validation process does not work. No matter how I stick with it, do everything that has worked in the past for very challenging situations, sometimes it just doesn’t work.
Some recent experiences in my personal life and professional life have me bumping up against the limitations much to my chagrin and frustration. So what does this mean? Do we give up? Just let loose and say whatever it is that our parts want to say? Express our frustrations that might sound like this: “I’m trying to validate you, dammit! And you’re not letting yourself be validated!” Because it does, indeed, sometimes feel like that—that there is a protector part within the person that prevents validation from coming in or pushes it away. It’s like trying to water a garden that is so apparently in need of water and yet when watered, it doesn’t soak into the ground to the roots where it’s so desperately needed. Instead, the water sits on top only to be dried up, or it puddles and runs off into lower ground.
Meet Essence
Essence was an extraordinarily brilliant 18 year old. She had eidetic memory, could sing the lyrics of any song after hearing it only one time, and she was just as proficient in poetry as she was in calculus.
And she drove her parents, her teachers, and her therapists crazy. That’s “therapists” plural—having had more than a handful over the years that just didn’t work out. As Essence moved into her teens, she was “fired” by therapists more than once.
[Please don’t fire your adolescent clients. There is a significant amount of repair that must be done by the following therapist. The betrayal and abandonment teenagers feel after being fired in therapy is deep, even if they sullenly claim that “they weren’t helping me anyway.”]
Essence, of African descent, had been in the foster care system when she came to Nolan and Vivienne, an older White couple, when she was 4 years old. After several years navigating the vagaries, uncertainties, and capriciousness of that system, they adopted her when she was seven. Nolan and Vivienne couldn’t have loved or cared for Essence more than they did.
Vivienne and sometimes Nolan, not Essence, were my clients. The presenting issue was their difficulty with Essence. Each week I listened to the travails and adventures of being Essence’s parents. We worked on validation, emotion regulation — theirs and hers, conscious parenting, natural consequences, all to no avail. We worked on their parent parts, the parts that came up around the racial differences between them and their daughter. Vivienne and Nolan came to understand about early childhood trauma, neurodivergence, and adolescent development. They pendulumed from pride and confidence to handwringing despair to frustration to the point of throwing their hands up in the air. And back round again.
One of the challenging behavioral patterns people encountered with Essence was her victim mentality. She struggled to take responsibility for her actions, often blaming it on circumstances, other people’s choices, or an inability to make a different choice. One of the main dynamics in Essence’s inner system were parts that presented with Rejective Sensitivity Dysphoria. These were challenging parts for everyone, including Essence. Things came to a pivot point one week in late summer when both Nolan and Vivienne came into the office, grim faces, subdued energy, and a defeated slump in their shoulders.
Essence had decided that she was not going to return to high school for her senior year in high school. “I’m 18, an adult,” she said. “I can make my own decisions, and I don’t want to go to school anymore. It’s a waste of time. I could be working and saving.” She’d packed her stuff in cardboard boxes, closed off her ears stoically to Vivienne’s shouting and then tears, and walked out the front door closing it firmly behind her. Her parents were devastated and hopeless, sure that Essence had just shut the door on any kind of functioning and fruitful future.
The Horse Whisperer
In the Internal Family Systems training I’m assisting with this week, we watched a clip from the film The Horse Whisperer. The scene is one in which Robert Redford’s character as the Horse Whisperer makes a crucial repair with a traumatized horse. He sits in a field for hours, being with the horse, not making any effort but just being there.
In the follow up discus I knew that this blog posting was to answer the question, What do we do when validation doesn’t work? I knew the answer was It works when we change our idea about what validation is supposed to look and sound like. Sometimes, validation is when we do and say nothing. But, oh!, there is so much more to that silence and stillness than nothing. It’s everything.
After Essence left, the work that her parents and I did was very different than what we had been doing before. Watching the film clip, I realized that what Vivienne and Nolan eventually learned to do was what the Horse Whisperer did with such patience—just be. Her parents and I learned that sometimes validation is stepping back and holding space. Instead of talking and doing, we found that we had to:
be rather than do;
bring our Presence, stay centered in our Ground of Being;
let go of all agendas;
let the other person find their way back home to their own Self;
trust that they will find their way back home, no matter how long it takes.
When we are able to sit patiently in our silence and stillness, the words whispered into the spaces we hold are:
you have your own agency;
you can be free to find your own way;
I’m safe;
take your time;
I’m here and will be here, I won’t abandon you;
I trust that you know what you need to do.
Be like a river
Sometimes the most validating thing we can do is to be and the most validating thing we can say is nothing. We are patient, a word that has its roots in words that mean bearing, supporting, suffering, enduring, and permitting. The word patience has been used to refer to navigable rivers.
To be patient then is to be like a river, to allow flow, to trust the riverbanks, the pull of the Ocean as each of us must follow something within us. Sometimes it is the struggle that we must have, trusting that there is some kind of blessing at the end of it. Sometimes it is a way that takes us far from home and back again. For those of us who witness someone who must take this journey even against our better judgement and their own, like Essence, we must be patient, stay consistent, hold space, endure, support, suffer, and permit. And we trust.
Essence made it through. Ten years later, she graduated with honors from a prestigious engineering program. She wandered for quite awhile but not shiftlessly. She took paths that she felt she needed to take, not always knowing why but trusting enough to follow. Vivienne and Nolan often validated by just holding space and loving her.
Photo by: Jacob Lund