The Holy Work of Validation

“I’m just not sure how to move forward with her,” my friend Sarah said. She had been telling me about recent struggles with a family member. Sarah and her relative were coming to the table with different perspectives, and I honestly didn’t know if they’d ever see eye to eye. Age, family dynamics, and desired outcomes separated them. Much of the situation was simply out of my friend’s hands.

My mind began wandering back two decades to when my own biological family was dissolving. My parents had divorced, and one of my parents was getting remarried. As a fifteen-year-old with a typical egocentric teenage mind, all I could think was how unfair all of it was for me. Everyone else, though, seemed too busy to hear me out. To be fair, there were a lot of demands on my parents during this upheaval, and I genuinely feel like they did their best to love me through it. But at the end of the day, I sometimes felt overlooked and unheard.

During that upending time, I remember a conversation between my mom and aunt, in which my aunt said, “You know who really loses the most in all this? Allison.” Those words validated my difficult experience. The simple statement of acknowledgment was a game changer for me. I wondered out loud to Sarah if something similar might help her bridge the growing gap within her family? What if she started by simply acknowledging the other person’s experience in the family as difficult?

After all, isn’t validation something we all long for? Think about the posts we make and see on social media. Why do we post? Probably, if we’re honest, because we’re hoping for likes and comments that validate our experience: “Yes, your family is beautiful” or “Wow, that is an amazing accomplishment.” Seeking and giving validation is a universal human desire.

Validation is one reason why counseling can be so powerful—to have another human being look you in the eyes and say, “Wow. What you experienced was really hard. It’s no wonder you’re hurt.” Granted, good counseling also involves rooting out skewed narratives, taking ownership of our own issues, and choosing different thought patterns and responses. But the very small step of validation is necessary and often healing.

What we see in Jesus’ earthly ministry is that to him, everyone—and the experiences that shaped them—had value. He made people feel validated. Wherever Jesus went, he elevated the status of the marginalized. He made it a point to interact with people that the rest of culture disregarded. He acknowledged people otherwise invisible to the culture, people who probably felt overlooked and unheard.

I think of the woman at the well in John 4, whose ethnicity, religion, and questionable relationships should have made her unapproachable to a Jewish man like Jesus. She knew this all too well: “The woman was surprised, for Jews refuse to have anything to do with Samaritans. She said to Jesus, ‘You are a Jew, and I am a Samaritan woman. Why are you asking me for a drink?’” (John 4:9).

But Jesus persisted, even though the disciples’ seemed just as surprised as the woman: “They were shocked to find [Jesus] talking to a woman, but none of them had the nerve to ask, ‘What do you want with her?’ or ‘Why are you talking to her?’” (John 4:27 NLT).

This conversation upended the woman’s shame, rewrote her story—and those of many in her town—as a child of God: “Many Samaritans from the village believed in Jesus because the woman had said, ‘He told me everything I ever did!’” (John 4:39). Jesus validated the worth and value of this woman in his encounter with her, drawing her (and others) into the kingdom of God. It’s as though he said to her, “You are seen, you are known, and you are wanted.”

In a world deeply divided against seemingly insurmountable odds, validation may very well be one of our best paths forward. In his article “In a Divided World, We Need to Choose Empathy,” Jamil Zaki asks “Will you cross the street to avoid a homeless person, or pay attention to their pain? Will you dismiss someone who disagrees with you, or cultivate curiosity about why they feel the way they do?”

Validation is the first step towards Zaki’s kind of empathy. As long as we choose not to look into the eyes of those who differ from us, we can choose not to see, know, or understand them. Empathy is impossible without validation. We cannot want what we do not know; we cannot know what we do not see. And we cannot see unless we choose to look. Empathy must be built on the simple assumption that a human being having been made in the image of God is reason enough to offer validation.

Sometimes we struggle with validation because we think it lets the other person off the hook for being “wrong” or we think, ironically, that it invalidates our own perspective. Validation is hard work, but it’s the holy work of considering others before ourselves.

The opportunity to validate the humanity of someone else is sometimes standing at the corner of a busy intersection in dingy clothes and a scruffy beard. “Am I invisible?” the young man’s sign read. Scrawled out in hasty handwriting was the epicenter of our culture’s collective problem. I hesitated just long enough for my husband, Ben, to roll the window down and ask, “Hey man, what’s your name?” Prompted by the question scrawled out on cardboard, Ben chose to see the man, which was the only gateway to knowing him, to saying, “You are a valid human being made in the image of God with experiences that have been hard.”

I imagine that for most of us, whether it’s a family member we’ve drifted away from, a colleague who sees red where we see blue, or even a stranger on the street, it won’t be hard to find opportunities to validate the reality and the humanity of someone else. May God, in his goodness, grant us grace upon grace as we seek to bring healing and the kingdom here on earth.

Allison Byxbe is a writer and teacher who lives with her family in South Carolina. When she’s not pondering words, she enjoys hiking, learning about natural health, and drinking the perfect latte. Allison loves to connect with others about family, special needs parenting, mental health, grief, and faith. Her writing has been featured on The Mighty and Her View from Home, and you can find more of it on her blog Writing Is Cheaper Than Therapy.