Forum Supporter Guide: Validation

Hey guys :) I'm trying out this thing where I post topic guides to common issues forum supporters encounter. This one is about validation. if you like it, I may post more! ~MonBon

What Does Validation Mean?

What is âvalidation and what does that mean? In a 1-on-1, we are encouraged to validate the member/guests feelings and experiences, which a lot of people mistake as assuming they are right. While to invalidate a persons experience is to say they are wrong or their feelings and experiences dont matter, validating a persons experience is merely to say: Hey, if you feel this way, thats okay and it matters. It happened. As this article says, Validation doesnt mean agreeing or approving. Instead, validation is acceptance of your or someone elses feelings, choices, actions, or thoughts as understandable and as fact.

What are some common misconceptions and mistakes we make with validation?

Saying that an action, decision, or feeling is right. Say a member is angry with a friend and lashed out at them. As a supporter, we can say I understand youre frustrated or I can see why you might have lashed out. But a mistake would be to say You were correct to lash out or You should be angry.

Condemning the other person involved in the interaction. The only people who know what happened are the member and the other person involved. We, as supporters, do not know what happened so a mistake would be to say, Your friend acted incorrectly or Your friend isnt being reasonable. We do not know what happened, we cannot act like we do. In 1-on-1s this doesnt seem as obvious as a problem. Only you and your member will see the conversation, so it doesnt really affect the other person in question.

In the forums or in group chat settings, this dynamic completely changes. The listener or member being discussed can quite possibly see this interaction between you as a supporter and the member or listener that you are validating. You risk invalidating the other persons experience while not really achieving your original purpose.

Take a common example seen in the forums:

Member: My listener was awful and didnt seem to understand me at all. Then they blocked me so now I cant even report them. This site is definitely going down the toilet.

As supporters, we tend to jump in and say, I am so sorry that happened to you, I agree they are a terrible listener and if you need to message me you totally can because I wont be like that!

But there are a few problems with that. You are assuming that everything that member is saying is fact, and while we never assume they are lying, we cannot *know* that they are telling us the whole story or that they didnt misunderstand the situation. A unique situation that arises in the forum or in the group chatrooms is that the other participant in the 1-on-1 will possibly see this complaint. The only two people who know what happened in the 1-on-1 are the member and the listener, so when you assume that the first person to complain about the situation is the one in the right, you risk invalidating the other participant.

A better way to handle this is to respond similarly to this:

You: Im sorry that you had a negative experience, sometimes a member and listener dont click well for any number of reasons and that can be very frustrating :( If you feel your listener acted incorrectly you can report them by submitting a support ticket here. I encourage you to try again with another listener! I hope your experience is more positive in the future :)

In this way you are not assuming either party acted correctly or incorrectly while still validating the members experience.

Another common example in the forums and in the listener group chats:

Listener: My member was totally unreasonable and now Im going to get a report, thats unfair!! Why do I always get the troll members??

Again, we tend to jump in and say, I understand! It sucks to get terrible members. Dont take it personally.

Do we know what happened between that listener and member? Is it fair to call a member terrible? Even if they are being unreasonable? The answer to all of these is no. It is true that sometimes a member and a listener dont mesh well and that neither of them should take it personally. The forum post "Knowing when to distance yourself" [L] outlines this very eloquently. While keeping that in mind, there is no way for us to know that this is the case, so we cannot in good faith tell a listener that they are or are not at fault, and we especially cannot shove the blame onto the member.

As before, this member might see this post whether its in the public forum, listeners only forum, or the listener chatrooms. If we shove the blame onto the member, we are invalidating their experience and assuming things we simply cannot know.

I hope this post helps you to understand what validation is and how we can all validate each other in a more helpful and positive way. Thank you for reading. ~MonBon

[L] indicates a Listener only thread