Validation

Why have I done this? My analysis of myself has been an ongoing process that has lasted around three decades. During this time it has become evident to me that many of my problems have originated in my current life, but equally evident has been the realisation that several very intractable issues came with me when I was born. The only feasible way to explain these latter issues is to accept that I had lived on planet Earth before my current life, so that these issues had developed in my previous lives [¹].

In my understanding of life, I accept that God is the origin of everything. My concept of God is not the same as that of the Western religions. God is a monist entity, and yet the reality we live in is a dualistic one. Traditional theories about spiritual reality focus primarily on how we get from dualism to monism (or how we attain union with God), and offer ideas on the spiritual means of attaining this. There is usually little concern with everyday material life, apart from giving a moral code to live by. My concern is different; I see everyday material life as part of a journey, an evolutionary journey. I am more interested in why dualism exists in the first place – I am orientated on the journey, not the destination [²].

Spectacle

I see material life as a spectacle: the manifestation and expression of reality as an evolutionary drama. In this spectacle, the journey is just as important as the destination. The part of the journey through the material life is just as important as the part of the journey through the mystical life. In this journey, each human is participating in an evolutionary process, meaning that each human is thereby evolving too. It is consciousness that is evolving. Hence each human is undergoing his/her own personal evolution of consciousness.

In my view, the main purpose of a material life is to learn to understand the mind and all its powers. It is in our social relationships that we usually become aware of the confusion in our mind. The experiences of confusion are valid kinds of experience in their own way, because by learning to understand them we can aim to resolve them, this being our first steps to mastering the mind in an holistic manner. This approach towards mastering the mind is quite different from the approach used in Eastern meditation.

The focus of this book is on the negative, maladaptive issues that arise in a person’s mind, and so I ignore the positive aspects of life.

A person’s sense of identity is based on deeply-held core beliefs about himself, his relationships, and his place in the world. If any of these deep beliefs are repudiated and criticised by other significant people, then the person may become vulnerable to a lesser or greater degree. His sense of identity may become unstable and/or fragile in those areas of belief that have been challenged and repudiated. Problems that arise during the development of identities revolve around feelings of fragility and instability, which make the ego vulnerable in various ways. However, not all people are affected by negative criticism. This is due to the differences in the level of sensitivity that people have. The more sensitive a person is, the easier it is for him to experience either fragility or instability. A person going through psychological distress can easily become upset and confused by insensitive and/or disparaging people.

All problematical issues revolve around the two fundamental themes of fragility and instability, or in philosophical terms, validation/invalidation and authenticity /inauthenticity. Invalidation centres on social difficulties and creates problems over issues of power within ego consciousness. The most problematical emotion that has to be managed is that of self-pity. Inauthenticity centres on difficulties with being an individual and creates problems of having excessive sensitivity within ego consciousness. Here the most problematic emotion is that of fear.

Validation and Empowerment

Usually psychological problems start from the issue of validation, which is the objective factor of vulnerability. As a child grows up, two important supports that it needs are love and caring. If the child receives sufficient love and care, then it feels accepted and will develop an adequate social side to its personality. Then as it begins to create its own personality it will never feel the pain of rejection, even if its beliefs turn out to be different from its parents’ beliefs. This overall process of being accepted for whatever the person is like I call “validation”. The result of being validated by the parents means that the child can grow into an adult capable of facing the stresses of life in as good a way as its social ties and circumstances allow. Validation is maintained by adopting suitable and respectable social roles, such as “husband”, “engineer”, “office manager”, etc.

Why does validation assume such an importance in the child’s life? To answer this we have first to consider the initial issue that confronts the new-born baby. At the beginning of its life the infant has to create an ego. It is helped and hindered in this task by its parents and other significant adults. Its relationships and its own sense of individuality are the principle means that the infant uses as its path to shaping a new ego. However, if these relationships are problematical then they will create some degree of vulnerability in the resulting ego. The stresses and negative states of mind of the parents’ own lives can easily be transmitted to the fledgling ego of the infant [³].

Now I can return to the issue of validation. Validation creates personal power. If the child attains a sense of validation from the parents then it becomes empowered. The child uses its power to create its personality or ego. In this sense, power means “psychic power”, or the ability to sustain its willpower in order to participate in life. When it is empowered, the resulting ego can become mature, stable and adaptable. When the child has power, he assigns positive valuations to his experiences: he interprets them as being varieties of happiness. Validation brings the person happiness.

Power can be used in two ways. At first the child uses its power subjectively to master itself as best it can, depending on its degree of evolution. For example, some children have better self-control than other children. Self-mastery develops character traits and abilities like concentration and creativity, and a focus on the pursuit of an education or the pursuit of adventure. Then it may use power objectively to try and master the external situation, as in science, and to master other people, as in its relationships [4].

Friedrich Nietzsche produced the view that power is needed in order to create a stable ego which can exist in a world of perpetual change. The person imposes Being (the concept of having a fixed ego) on the process of Becoming (the process of constant change). The means of doing this is the cultivation of a consistent will that clings to the same evaluations: unchanging values produce an unchanging ego [5].

Invalidation

If the child’s ego is invalidated in some ways then it becomes dis-empowered and so may feel worthless and unvalued, resulting in weakness in some parts of the character of the developing ego. This powerlessness leads to long-term flows of negative emotions through the mind, the most dominant of these being self-pity. Self-pity is the most difficult emotion to counter-act since the person may lose whatever motivation he has. He cannot be bothered to make any effort; he cannot be bothered to do anything. He may just lie on his bed all day. The child may try to overcome its self-pity by switching to resentment and resorting to belligerence and bullying. If it fails, it may sink into helplessness, becoming submissive or attention seeking.

When a person becomes invalidated to some degree, his sense of fragility means that he cannot harmoniously handle situations where his repudiated beliefs become high-lighted, thereby causing him distress. For example, if he has suffered from authoritarian people in the past, then he cannot handle harmoniously any dealings with an authority figure, even if he has never met the person before. More accurately, the person can relate well to an authority figure so long as that figure is in a good mood, but once the authority figure’s mood turns sour and critical, then the person shuts down into a defensive state of mind. He finds that his behaviour in such distressful situations becomes deterministic. The determinism is created as a subconscious shield to protect his vulnerability [6].

Invalidation rarely affects the whole ego. In aspects of the ego that are not invalidated, it may be able to achieve some degree of maturity. Then the adult’s character will be a mixture of some mature aspects along with some weak aspects. Hence when it has become an adult, in some ways it will be able to handle its sense of power in a mature manner, but in other ways where it has been invalidated it will fluctuate between feeling powerless (from the underlying self-pity) and feeling coercive and domineering (from the underlying resentment).

The result of invalidation is that the person assigns negative valuations to some significant relationship experiences – he interprets them as being varieties of sorrow. He cannot think of such experiences as positive ones since he feels that he has become subject to degradation. If invalidation has been severe, then hopelessness may eventually be experienced.

Another way of looking at invalidation is that the child feels compromised in its psychological consciousness. He feels that his social boundaries have been violated. There is no love or care (or at least not enough love and care) in his relationships with significant people. The desire to seek the approval and emotional support of other people may become important. Now issues of social identity become the main concern. In his attempts to overcome his problems, he will usually become absorbed into a group consciousness, or we can say that the child identifies with a group. Since he could not wholly bond with the parents, so he tries to bond with a group. The sense of inclusion in a group masks any previous sense of exclusion.

The most common way of invalidating a child or an adult is by the act of exclusion. A child may be excluded by its parents or by its peers from some social activities. A powerful source of exclusion is relative poverty: a child may only have second-hand and worn clothes to wear to school, or an adult may feel shut out of the material benefits of a materialistic society. The child or the adult may feel that he is a failure and cannot fit into a competitive society.

When the child is growing up, it needs to trust people in order to develop an harmonious social identity. A sense of trust minimises self-pity. A sense of trust allows it to adapt its relationships in harmonious ways as it matures. An inability to adapt can give rise to a need to control, hence to a desire to be authoritarian and dominating.

If the child does not feel at home in its various groups, then it may find it difficult to compete against others. It learns to dislike competition. It may fail more times than it succeeds in its various tasks. And so it may develop its capacity to generate resentment as a response to authority figures. As a result, the child, as it grows into adulthood, usually doesn’t learn to handle failure in healthy ways.

Responses to Invalidation

a). One passive response leads to the sense of being victimised. This in turn can induce listlessness and a lack of trust. Other effects may be helplessness, attention seeking, and submissiveness.

b). Another passive response relates to the person’s code of morality. He may find that the morality he imbibed from his parents is out-of-date with his needs in the modern world. One way that this manifests is when the person feels excessively inhibited in his social and sexual relationships. He may long to be able to be spontaneous and free in his relationships. This indicates that his moral code is based mainly on fear – it is the fear that causes the undesired inhibitions. In other words, his self-control is based on fear. The moral rules that are obeyed through fear have the effect of stifling a person’s self-confidence in social and sexual matters, preventing his attainment of emotional satisfactions and thereby building up his sense of frustration. I am not implying that morality is bad, only that moral codes eventually become out-of-date and fail the challenges of modern life. The person needs to understand the reasons for his fears so that he can either update or change his moral code. His self-control can then be based on intelligent ethical judgements, and not on fear.

c). One active response leads to the need for the person to justify himself and his behaviour, which in turn induces thoughts and desires of revenge.

d). Another active response is to produce a need for status and a sense of authority, especially in structured organisations. Power is attained due to rank or wealth (and not by ability), as in gangs and financial cliques.

e). Another active response is for the person to search for someone or something that can enable him to verify that his ideas, his hopes, his aims are sound and acceptable. He searches for a support, for something that can validate his hopes. This way he can re-evaluate his beliefs and assign them positive value. This is what faith does. Faith re-orientates his beliefs and shows him that sorrowful experiences can have positive value. Faith validates his states of mind. The person searches for someone, some organisation, some ideology to have faith in. Faith works in both secular and religious ways; faith is not limited to religions. For example, belief in Darwinism can be a secular faith [7].

One of the ways in which the subconscious mind operates is that it likes to switch between pairs of opposites. Hence the person can switch from passivity to activity and back again; from feeling victimised to needing to justify oneself, and back again; and from lassitude to desires for revenge, and back again. The subconscious mind ebbs and flows from positivity to negativity and back again, in various rhythms. Hence during a positive mind flow, the person is likely to dream of revenge, whilst during a negative mind flow he may retreat into lassitude.

Invalidation will generate dreams and phantasies of being a loser, a victim, a martyr. If the invalidation is deep, then such phantasies may become obsessive and last for weeks and months at a time. They will temporarily fade when the person goes through periods of optimism, but return when he becomes pessimistic again.

In order to control the confusion caused by invalidation, one method is to follow a code of morality. In other words, a major purpose of morality is to enable the person to contain his confused behaviour. Typically, the kind of morality espoused by the person will be a right-wing one, perhaps modelled on authoritarian teachers, and based on desires for revenge against people who are different from oneself. A typical belief in some right-wing moralists is that their enemies will roast in hell after they die. In contrast, left-wing codes of morality require either some form of humanitarian or spiritual idealism or a more developed psychological balance.

Validation of a person means accepting that the person’s belief systems have positive value for that person. Validation is not concerned with truth but with the pursuit of happiness (which may be in short supply for an invalidated person).

Overall, the child feels a sense of validation when it receives love and care from its parents. The parents should refrain from making any disparaging judgements and emotive criticisms. Any discipline that needs to be given to a child should be fair. If the child attains a sense of validation from the parents then it becomes empowered. The child uses its power to create a stable ego. When it is empowered, the resulting ego can become mature and adaptable.

If the child’s ego is non-validated in some ways then it becomes dis-empowered and so may feel worthless and unvalued, or develop long-term feelings of resentment. Hence when it has become an adult, in some ways it will be able to handle its sense of power in a mature manner, but in other ways it will fluctuate between feeling powerless and feeling authoritarian.

The way that these ideas filter down to psychological therapy is that reactions to a person’s confused behaviour should not entail judgemental attitudes, punishments and victimisations, but should be based on acceptance of that person and a focus on rehabilitation if possible.

Political examples of Invalidation

It is not just an individual that can be invalidated. Groups can also be. Usually it is on the political stage that groups are invalidated. I give some examples of group invalidation.

f ). Authoritarian systems
One way of generating invalidation is through authoritarian methods of control. The authoritarian manager invalidates his subordinates. The subordinate who is being controlled finds that his motivation to be a good worker or party member fades away. The writer Franz Kafka was good at depicting this kind of situation and the confusion that it generates.

g). The American experience after Vietnam
Many of the soldiers lost their ideals during the savage fighting in Vietnam. Then when they returned home, they found themselves dishonoured by the anti-war movements. Instead of being heroes, they were regarded as villains. Hence the anti-war movements invalidated the soldiers, and so many of them spent the next few years in regular states of complete lassitude and listlessness, often staring at blank walls for hours on end.

h). Muslim terrorism against America and other Western countries
In regions of the world where people are poor, usually all that a man has in the way of valuing himself is his character, his religion, and his respect for tradition. This has serious implications for Western capitalism. The bottom line of American capitalism is that the value of a person is determined by how much money he has in the bank. This belief seriously invalidates any person who believes that a man is to be valued by his character, by observance of traditional community standards, and by noble or religious ideals.

Hence it is not necessary to have met and mixed with Americans in order to despise them. All Americans are assumed to uphold capitalism, and so all Americans become despised. And the idea that America should be responsible for shaping and even controlling a Muslim country becomes an abomination for a poor Muslim.

i). Martyrdom
Persecution always invalidates the victims. In some situations of political persecution, the members of a religious church or sect may choose martyrdom as the ultimate form of passive self-empowerment.

[4]. I have three articles on Power, beginning with Power in the book Patterns of Mind. [4]

[5]. Blackham, H. Six Existential Thinkers. Routledge, 1952 and 1986. This gives an excellent summary of Nietzsche’s view on pages 24-25. [5]

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Ian Heath
London, UK

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