Does “validation” actually matter in trauma recovery?

Does “validation” actually matter in trauma recovery? 

After all, isn’t “validation” just some kind of touchy feely, but not terribly substantial or important, thing? 

It’s true that a lot of people kind of roll their eyes at the idea of “validation.” 

To hear them talk, the only people to whom “validation” matters are “snowflakes” whose feelings are “fragile.” 

I’ve literally had mental health professionals come at me on social media, declaring “validation” to be a “meaningless” concept. 

So— why are trauma informed and trauma focused therapists always going on about the importance of “validation?” 

The short answer to “does validation actually matter in trauma recovery?” is, yes. It matters a lot. 

To understand why, you need to understand how complex trauma wounds us. 

Trauma generally, and complex trauma in particular, isn’t actually about what happened to us. 

What happened to us is important, but terribly painful things happen to lots of people who don’t develop post traumatic or dissociative disorders. 

PTSD and CPTSD aren’t about the events that happen to us— they’re about how those events impact us in the absence of support and safety. 

Nobody reading this could “choose” to be impacted by their differently or less than they were. We don’t choose the environment we grow up in, or the people around us— thus we do not “choose” our vulnerability to trauma. 

What we call trauma responses are reflections and expressions of how we were wounded by what happened to us— and how those wounds deepened in the absence of support. 

What did the “absence of support” look like? 

First and foremost, it almost always looks like invalidation. 

It almost always looks like somebody refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy or the enormity of an event’s impact. 

It almost always looks like someone either silently assuming or— more frequently— explicitly telling us twe “shouldn’t” be hurt like we are or responding like we are. 

That’s like somebody showing up in the emergency room with a visibly broken limb— and getting a lecture on how the fall or accident we were in “shouldn’t” have been enough to break our leg. 

Whether a broken limb needs care— whether it needs a cast, and rest, and pain medication— is not a function of anyone’s opinion about the event that produced the broken limb.

Yet, that’s how some people approach trauma— by reflexively invalidating it. 

By judging it. 

By declaring it “illegitimate,” if it doesn’t fit their definition of “trauma.”

Validation matters because we cannot and will not do what we need to do to recover from trauma, if we cannot or will not accept the extent of our injury. 

Validation matters because trauma recovery, in the end, is us refusing to do to ourselves what our bullies and abusers did to us for years— namely, deny, disown, belittle, or ignore our pain. 

Validation matters because, for many people reading this, the words “your feelings are valid, and I believe you about your experience” were never, ever said to them growing up. 

We are not going to realistically recover from trauma if we cannot validate that our pain is beyond our ability to just “power through.” 

We are not going to realistically recover from trauma if we cannot validate that our pain is not a function of our moral “goodness” or “badness.” 

We are not going to realistically recover from trauma if we cannot validate that we are as deserving of safety, stability, recovery, and forgiveness as any human being who has ever existed. 

So, yes. Validation matters. And it is not some abstract, warm-and-fuzzy, or “meaningless” term. 

Validation is an essential trauma recovery tool. 

Trying to recover without it is like trying to build a house without a hammer.