On validating ourselves:
Darling, I promise you it's okay if your partner or the people around you doesn't validate or understand something you experienced. You can validate yourself. You understood your experience.
This need to seek sameness and empathy from others—I’m sure it had its roots in our ancestral instinct to survive by searching for clues in our tribe about who to trust and where to find safety.
But in this modern-day existence, we need to realize that safety comes from within.
So if we don’t intentionally process that instinct for seeking sameness, it will end up creating bigger barriers to mutual understanding. It will drive us further into conflict with one another and widen the rifts we experience in our relationships.
This is because we create a vacuum when we are so focused on seeking from others—seeking their validation for our emotions, seeking their understanding of our experience. Should all those efforts to be understood prove unfruitful or those demands for comfort not get met by the outside world…then the vacuum grows, fed by resentment and pain because we all confuse each othervalidation with love. That vacuous black hole also blocks us from even understanding the other party—so all while we bash those who do not understand us…have we asked whether we understood them?
That vacuum consumes all of our energy—energy that we should be using to build ourselves up from the inside and to create the reality we want to experience.
Two things to prioritize:
We’ve got to first master the practice of understanding and validating ourselves. Sounds easy, but I believe most of us have moved through the majority of our adult life not knowing how to do these two things.
Then, and only then—only from the first foundation—we can then expand into the capacity for understanding others.
Both of these things should precede any act of asking others to understand us.
Because other people’s understanding of us is not an experience that we are entitled to demand from them. Rather, it is a natural consequence of living out who we truly are after reaching an inner understanding of ourselves.
Walking through the world in our highest principles will naturally align us with those who hold in regard the same values. We attract a partner and a tribe whose core principles align with ours and we choose to walk alongside them on this path of life. When we trust ourselves, we trust our choices. Therefore we trust our partner and our tribe…even when they do not perceive the same things we do while walking on the same path. Our direction brings us together but they will see, hear, and speak differently. Their differences enrich this journey. And that—the richness with which we can perceive every second of our reality—that is the greatest validation.