The Lack of This Will Erode the Integrity of Your Adolescent Services

While there are many aspects to an excellent adolescent service program or an award-winning middle or high school program, one essential communication skill is needed in every program. If it's not there, your program will suffer. The lack of it will erode your kids' trust in your staff and the program in general. It will result in an environment where the emotional safety of the participants and possibly the staff will be significantly compromised.

This vital relational skill is the foundation of all effective communication—validation. It is the initial, vital connecting point. Validation opens the gate for other necessary ways of being with kids, including boundary setting, mutual respect, accountability, and problem-solving.

• Does your staff know how to validate the adolescents you serve?

• Do they understand that validation is a subjective experience of the kids, that the staff does not decide if they've been validating?

• Does your staff understand the full and terrible impact of an invalidating environment on children?

• Are you aware that no matter how positively oriented and supportive your program is, if your staff is not familiar with the process and practice of validation, your program will be undermined by invalidating interactions between the staff and teens?

This experience can be felt on a spectrum from a subtle feeling that they're just not being heard to emotional abuse. Too much of the former can create the latter—an experience of traumatic invalidation.

What is traumatic invalidation?

According to the Boston Child Study Center, "Traumatic invalidation occurs when an individual's environment repeatedly or intensely communicates that the individual's experiences, characteristics, or emotional reactions are unreasonable and/or unacceptable. Invalidation can be especially traumatic when it comes from a significant person, group, or authority that the individual relies upon to meet their needs. Traumatic invalidation threatens an individual's understanding and acceptance of their own emotional experiences and often leads to a state of pervasive insecurity."

These are striking and powerful words. Note that it is not necessarily the intensity of the communication that can cause the trauma but the repetition. If we are always telling our teenagers, in some form or fashion, that who they are in any given moment is not okay, eventually, over time, this is going to be an unsafe environment. The nervous system does not discern between a physically or emotionally unsafe environment. The limbic system will respond to ongoing emotional invalidation as if the individual were in a life-threatening situation.  

It's important to note for the skeptics out there that this is not psychology but neuroscience. We know from neurobiology that these invalidating experiences will change the physiology of the brain and the nervous system. Unfortunately, there are an astounding number of ways that we can invalidate someone. They run the gamut from outright abuse to empathetic and well-intended sentiments. It can be bewildering to find out that we are actually invalidating when we genuinely care and are attempting to communicate our regard for the child.

Ways we invalidate

At one end of the spectrum are the straightforward abusive ways to invalidate. These include:

• Yelling

• Lecturing

• Laughing at

• Scorn

• Swearing at

• Bullying and harassment

• Physical neglect

These tend to be easier to avoid than other ways of invalidation. We know they are ineffective ways of being with adolescents.

It is the other end of the spectrum where most invalidation shows up in professional and caring settings. These sound innocent, acceptable, and friendly or well-meaning. For example, the seemingly supportive, encouraging, and positive-focused sentiment, "I see so much potential in these kids."

I have met with teenagers over the years who know they are loved, spoken of with fondness and respect by teachers, and admired by their former therapists. And yet, despite all the positive feedback, running underneath are pervasive feelings and beliefs in these young people that:

• They aren't good enough.

• Somehow they've failed their elders.

• They have to create self-abusive perfectionist schedules to meet the perceived expectations of adults.

• They just have to throw in the towel and be done with all of it because they can't win for losing.

• All because the ongoing message is "you've got so much potential." This standard phrase can be, for some kids under some circumstances, one of the most invalidating messages they hear.  

Other invalidating messages that we often confuse with validation include:

• "You are the strongest kid I know."

• "You've got what it takes! Now go out there and just do it!"

• "I know it's hard, but I also know you are quite capable."

• "Don't worry. It's going to be okay."

• "Come on! Cheer up! You've got this!"

• "It's really not all that bad." 

So what does it mean to validate?

You validate when you've communicated with the other person in such a way that leaves them with the embodied feeling that you see, hear, accept, value, and love or have deep regard for them in that moment as they are. They will understand that they don’t have to be someone different or have different emotions to be acceptable to you.

What our kids need to hear—before "You've got so much potential"—is "you are good enough just the way you are. You are acceptable. You are valued. You have so much to offer right here and right now. You don't have to become more than what you are right now."

This is a simple concept, and yet it is not easy. As a professional, you are bound to have all kinds reactions that show up in the face of the behaviors, attitudes, and energies of the adolescents you serve. Fear, anger, frustration, worry, anxiety, desires for their success and safety, your professional duties and obligations—all of these can interfere with the validation process. Learning how to manage those fears and recognizing beliefs about life that might be getting in the way of validation is a place to begin. Learning the practice and engaging in the ongoing process of validation will lay the solid and resilient foundation for a powerful program for the staff and the adolescents you serve.

Photo by: marcin jucha