A primary biological mechanism of close relationships is emotional attunement. Unless we resist the process, emotions automatically and unconsciously attune to loved ones when in proximity.

Unfortunately, attunement has a negative bias. If one partner comes home feeling positive and the other is feeling negative, the latter’s emotional demeanor will moderate a little, but that of the positive partner will change a lot. Many partners develop defenses against emotional attunement, which they interpret as dragging them down. These can range from distraction (phone addiction) to avoidance (talk about the weather) to less subtle ways of shutting each other out, such as cold shoulders and stonewalling.

Emotional validation is an attempt to remove barriers to emotional attunement. That is, if your partner doesn’t seem to feel you—inadvertently or on purpose—you tell your partner what you feel, in expectation that your partner will validate your feelings. Whole schools of couples therapy have developed to facilitate the validation process. Though effective for many people, couples find it easier to practice validation techniques in their therapists' offices than in their homes, where habitual coping mechanisms (mostly blame, denial, avoidance), dominate stressful interactions.

In my clinical experience, the major barriers to emotional validation are partners conflating:

• Feelings with judgments
• Bids for validation with blame
• Comfort and connection with accountability
• Hurt with facts
• Perspectives with standards

Common examples of masking feelings with judgments take the form of:

“I feel unheard, ignored, judged.”

These are not feelings; they’re judgments about partners’ behavior. Judgmental discourse is more likely to get a negative reaction than a validating response. In contrast, sharing the feelings that underlie the judgments has a better chance of stimulating compassion, validation, and connection. For example:

“I feel sad, hurt, ashamed, lonely.”

On the other side of bids for validation, a barrier forms when partners confuse sincere expressions of feelings with judgments and blame.

The “Accountability” Barrier

We all want accountability in our relationships, although cognitive biases make us demand it from our partners while overlooking our own failures of accountability. The essential element of accountability in close relationships is compassion. Genuine accountability follows compassion, that is, your partner cares that you’re hurt or feel bad and wants to help you feel better. Disingenuous accountability is your partner admitting fault, with little sympathy for your hurt. Compassion is the key to accountability in love, but it’s difficult to feel compassion for someone blaming or accusing you. The closest you might come is remorse.

The problem with remorse is that it’s self-obsessed. (I feel bad that you’re hurt, so I want you to get over it so I can feel better.) Put another way, my compassion for my wife is about her hurt; my remorse is about mine. Since most hurt in relationships stems from self-obsession, demanding more of it in the guise of accountability is ill-advised. Remorse eventually turns into resentment, as the hurt of a partner is seen more as a burden than a cue for compassion.

Many clients have trouble validating feelings when they disagree about the perceptions or interpretations that stimulate the feelings. As one client put it:

“I wish I weren’t right. It would be so much easier to get along if I weren’t right.”

Feelings are valid even when perceptions and interpretations of facts are incorrect. Validation of feelings must come before information about perceptions and interpretations. Failing that, the subtext of your information will be:

“You have no right to feel the way you do because of these facts.”

Worse,

“There’s something wrong with you for feeling the way you do because…”

Perspectives vs. Standards

Intimate partners have different temperaments, life experiences, and family histories, and often different core vulnerabilities and coping tactics. As a result, the emotional components of their perspectives differ significantly. A major barrier to validation lies in ignoring these differences and assuming that your perspective is the standard for all humanity.

“I don’t understand you. I wouldn’t react or feel the way you do in your circumstances, so you shouldn’t, either.”

Clients who hold this view recognize, on some level, the narcissism of it, so they seek agreement from family and friends that their partners are defective in some way for feeling the way they do. The most difficult couples to help are those in which partners spend a great deal of effort trying to get me to see how bad their partners are. The great therapeutic task is to shift the energy wasted on devaluing partners and focus it on deeper understanding and sympathy for each other.

The Choice

At the end of the day, partners must choose to make it easier to validate each other by sincerely sharing vulnerability or to make it more difficult by masking vulnerability with blame, accusations, or defensiveness.

When there’s a history of hurt in relationships, it’s perfectly understandable that partners are reluctant to expose vulnerability without masking it with blame, accusations, or defensiveness. Reluctance to respond to a partner’s vulnerability with compassion, rather than defensiveness or criticism, is equally understandable. However, relationships will not improve, and are likely to deteriorate, until partners overcome these understandable reluctances.

A useful guide for making difficult choices is to consider which will make you like yourself more.

Will you like yourself better by sincerely expressing vulnerable feelings or by using feelings-words to mask negative judgments, blame, or accusations?

Will you like yourself better by accessing the part of you that deeply cares about the well-being of loved ones, in order to validate their feelings, or by invalidating their feelings, due to differing perceptions or interpretations of facts?