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The Importance of Validating Your Feelings
And what really means validating your feelings
Ok, I finally have something to say. Something that I think it’s important and that is shaping my life for the better.
I am not the type of person that talks to my friends about my problems; I save them for my therapist (and my partner). But although my therapist has been doing a good job with me since 2020 (the same for my partner), other people’s perspectives can be really insightful.
I am also not the type of person that likes texting. I actually hate it. As my father once said: “Whatsapp is for quick messages, not full conversations”. And I have always used Whatsapp to say Hi, how are you? Then my message and I have always needed to say goodbye to end the conversation. But not anymore.
Very recently, I started sending audio to my oldest friend (we have known each other for almost 30 years) talking about my problems, and I don’t say goodbye, so our thread is constantly open. I reply when I can, and she replies when she can, with no pressure. I still feel slightly guilty when I do, and I always make sure that she knows she can count on me as well.
Anyways, my problem is with my parents. They made a decision I didn’t agree with and didn’t like, and I felt that I was wrong to feel this way. And I never talked to them about how it made me feel. Talking to this friend that has a totally different life dynamic (she has two sisters, and I am an only child), she said she would have felt the same. And that was liberating.
I have talked to my therapist about these feelings, and she could never say to me how she felt, and my partner is the most British person I know, so he prefers to stay out of my Brazilian family drama. So up to this moment, I didn’t have anyone that actually said to me that the way I was feeling was 100% validated, and they actually would feel the same.
When my friend said to me that she totally got it and she was not even an only child (I thought I was just jealous and couldn’t share my parents with other people), it felt better for the first time, it felt like gave me a voice, and I actually feel the courage to talk to my parents about it.
Sometimes we just need one other…
