Welcome to episode 185 of the Smooth Stones podcast, validating yourself. I got to tell you first about something really, really exciting. I. I have done over the years, I’ve done free Mother’s Day coaching, and I’ve been able to help a lot of people with free one on one Mother’s Day coaching. But this year I thought I want to help even more people than I can because I don’t have very many spots on my schedule.

So what I did is I have created a 30 day embracing Mother’s Day challenge. And what’s going to happen is you’re going to go and sign up and then. We’re going to start a month before Mother’s Day. Each day you are going to get an email that is going to give you a little challenge, a little activity, a little something to do to help you prepare for Mother’s Day.

We’re going to do this in three categories. We’re going to do self care. We’re going to do emotional intelligence, and we’re going to do. actual, like, pen and paper planning your Mother’s Day. I know we have bereaved Mother’s Day that some people acknowledge and celebrate and do things for. We have Mother’s Day itself.

It’s, and this is, I guess, American Mother’s Day or North American Mother’s Day, whichever one you celebrate. I think this is a great opportunity just to learn how to take care of yourself, which we do not know how to do very well. Sometimes we’re terrible at it. And what happens is we look at this date on the calendar, whether it’s a due date, a birthday, a special occasion, a holiday, and we just start dreading it.

Because we’re afraid of how we’re going to feel on that day. And we’re afraid of what’s going to happen. And I feel like mother’s day is already a bit of a minefield for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. Not all of us have a great relationship with our parents. Not all of us are near our parents.

Not all of us have partners who are very supportive on special occasions. And. You add in grief and loss and there’s just so much going on. So this is my solution for you. I think everyone should do it. I think all of us need a little bit of accountability, a little bit of a push, a little bit of a cheerleader to say, Hey, this day does not have to suck.

It could be okay. And for some of you, having mother’s day be okay would be. The hugest win. It’s unbelievable, but I believe it. And then for some of you who are like, well, mother’s day is just okay. And I want it to be better than that. This will work too. So this is my solution because I do not have so much room in my schedule for everybody that I want to help prepare for mother’s day.

So I’m going to put a link in the show notes. I want you to go click on it. I want you to sign up. It’s only $25. That gives you a whole month of support. And I’ve also got some bonuses that you do not want to miss. So get on over there. And today’s episode is really going to help you actually with some of this, some of the things we’re talking about over in the mother’s day challenge and embracing mother’s day, because.

Why is it so hard to validate ourselves? And first, maybe we should back up and talk about what is validation. Validation is just telling yourself or someone telling you that the way you’re feeling is okay. That they see you, they hear you, you know, we see this in like therapy, when people go to couples therapy, they’re like, I see you, I hear you, I feel you.

But really it’s just reflecting it back because what very often happens is we say we’re feeling a certain way, usually uncomfortable emotions, because we’re not good at that in our society. We’ll say, I’m feeling sad today. And the person we’re telling will try to cheer us up. They’ll try to look on the bright side.

They’ll try to tell you why you shouldn’t be sad. Maybe they’ll take it personally and they will get defensive and say like, well, I wasn’t trying to make you sad. And like, why are you doing this? And they make it about themselves. We’re really, really not great at just validating and saying like, wow, I’m really sorry.

You feel sad. That sounds really tough. Tell me more about it.

The reason why we’re not very good at this is, well, there’s many, many reasons, but some of them are, we are taught that there are good feelings and bad feelings. We are taught that there is an appropriate size of feeling. We are also taught there is an appropriate length of time for feelings to last. And I think this gets very clear when you’re grieving.

At the beginning, people are very kind and they do validate. A lot of them do validate. A lot of them don’t. They say things that aren’t very validating, but you know, people give us space for grief at the beginning, but as time goes on, there’s less and less and less. And we know that we feel that and we are really taught to talk ourselves out of our feelings because like I said, that’s what other people do to us.

They don’t validate it. And so we don’t learn how to validate. We follow their lead. We don’t learn this skill, right? Even though we know that that is what would feel the best, we don’t do it. And we don’t do it for other people. Cause we also get really uncomfortable with someone else sharing uncomfortable feelings.

We get defensive. We want to fix it. We want them to feel better because we love them. And because we believe that there is a feeling better, right? That we should be happier and that would be better. But I’m here to tell you that all the feelings are good. That’s always my message. So we are really, really taught to talk ourselves out of our feelings.

And unfortunately this affects all of us. Most of us in at least my kind of Western culture, um, with men actually taking the brunt of. The not feeling, I’ll put it in quotes, like the not feeling culture while simultaneously kind of being the creators of it because theoretically men are less emotional, but we know that’s not even true, um.

And so then they pass the way they handle emotions on to women, and we are often ridiculed for being emotional. Uh, or we use being like a girl as an insult. I’m actually currently teaching my, so we had girls first and then boys, and I’m trying so hard to actively teach my son, who is almost 11, teach him that using girl as an insult.

is not okay. It’s never okay. Uh, but it’s everywhere. We’ve just been watching some movies together and, and different stuff. And it’s like, it’s everywhere. It’s just. the water we swim in. So we’ve got this kind of structure and culture where, you know, emotions are not welcomed or understood or tolerated very well, right?

This is usually pretty evident when a couple grieves their baby, if it is a male female couple. But also, like, yeah, any couple, there’s usually maybe one that’s more in touch with their emotions, one that’s less, you never know. So, this is, it’s inclusive. But, it seems more prevalent, um, with heterosexual couples.

But, he’s uncomfortable with your emotions. He’s uncomfortable with his emotions, he doesn’t know what to do with them, and you can’t understand why he doesn’t seem very sad, and won’t talk about anything. You feel alone, you question your feelings, or maybe it’s a parent who keeps telling you to stop making such a big deal out of this.

Maybe not always with words, but you sense it.

They don’t know what to do with your feelings.

They hate feeling helpless, not knowing how to fix you. And they were also taught that feeling should mostly be happy. That’s what most of us believe is that we should be happy. Most of the time that we’re allowed to be sad or angry or whatever it is. Some of the time, a little bit of the time, but we kind of got to just deal with it, get rid of it.

Friends who were there at first start drifting off and you know that they think that you should just be over it by now. They want the old you back and you know that that’s never going to happen. You feel judged or like you’re doing it wrong. and you judge yourself. It’s so unfortunate. It really, really is.

It’s so unfortunate because it doesn’t have to be this way. Now, I can’t smash the entire system of our society that has gotten us to this place, but I can empower you to own your feelings and to validate yourself. This is a skill that can be learned. But often it’s not taught to us very well as we grow up, as I just have explained, usually we end up here after things have gotten bad, but that’s okay.

What a great opportunity to grow. So a lot of the time we’ll spend a lot of energy wishing things were different, wishing the people around us were different, wishing they, We’re able to validate us wishing we knew how to be kinder to ourselves wishing we could understand what is happening with all of our feelings when we’re in the middle of something that’s really hard, but you weren’t supposed to learn this earlier.

It would have been nice if you could have. But you didn’t. So we have to combine learning to validate yourself with kind of letting go of that resistance and wishing things would have been different. They’re not different. You can’t change it. You can’t go back. We can only start now and move forward and do it differently.

Okay. And then. You figuring out how to validate yourself is going to help you in so many ways. And I think it’s also going to give you the confidence you need to have the conversations you need to have with the people who love you, right? It is okay to start saying, Hey, I don’t need you to fix this. I don’t need you to get defensive.

I don’t need you to tell me not to be sad. I need you to just let me feel what I’m feeling and validate it. It’s really, really powerful. But like I said, getting good at it yourself first is going to make all the difference, right? Because then it’s not the blind leading the blind. It’s kind of like, oh, I’ve kind of figured out what works for me and it will be different for everyone.

Each one of us is so unique. But once we know how to validate ourselves, Maybe we can model that maybe we can show that and we can start validating the people we care about as well. Okay, so let’s jump in. How do we do this? How do you learn to validate yourself?

The first thing is to increase your emotional vocabulary. So many of us have a very, very limited emotional vocabulary. We don’t understand our feelings. We can’t put them into words. We know the basics like happy, sad, mad. You know, the ones we learned in kindergarten. A lot of us haven’t really gotten past that.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Again, we’re not taught this. But there are things, um, There are emotion wheels. You can get lists of emotions. There’s all kinds of things you can get where, um, it will help you find those words. And a lot of times when I’m working with clients, I actually don’t like to get stuck on it.

Even though as we do models, what I call models, we talk about our circumstance, our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, and our results. In the feeling line, we’re supposed to put a one word, emotion, one emotion, word, and. people get really stuck. And so a lot of times what we’ll do is we’ll just, we won’t get stuck on picking the exact right word, but we’ll go in our body.

We’ll explore it. We’ll describe it. We’ll, we’ll kind of just keep exploring around and asking questions and usually something will come up. But a lot of times what I notice is people are afraid to say, well, this is how I feel, but like, Is that even an emotion? One that, that really comes up a lot, like this, like where they cannot find the word until we talk through it, is trapped.

Now, sometimes, I mean, it is normal to say I feel trapped, but when we think about is trapped an emotion or a feeling, people really get stuck on saying like, is that an emotion? It’s, and I say, sure, if that describes your experience, sure. So there’s a lot of leeway. And I think that’s why working with the coach is so good.

What I’m really good at helping people figure out is their emotions, but. For you, I’m going to encourage you, uh, and I am working on right now, getting an emotion wheel that you can just download. And so check the show notes as soon as that is ready, that will be there, uh, or go to smoothstonescoaching.

com and I will get this for you, but, uh, it’s going to be smoothstonescoaching. com forward slash wheel. I’m going to get you a really cool emotion wheel that you can snatch and print out or have on your phone and use, because I think. This will be a big help when we don’t know how we really feel. We don’t know why we’re feeling this way.

We don’t understand what’s going on and we’re afraid of it. It’s really hard to validate that. But when you increase that emotional vocabulary, it’s going to be so much easier. And the thing is too, once you like start learning how many different emotions and, and start naming them, it’s like, Oh yeah, like I’m okay to feel this.

I’m okay to experience this. And that goes into step number two, which is stop judging your feelings. We have been taught that we should be happy most of the time. And you can ask yourself, what percent of the time do I think I should be happy? What percent of the time does my mom or my dad or my friends or my partner, what percent of the time do they think I should be happy or do they think they should be happy?

, I even think about, I’ve been substitute teaching a little bit. I think I mentioned that, but I look at like, In an elementary school classroom, how, how often are those kids supposed to be just happy and compliant and obedient and, um, you know, participate and be sociable, like they’re not really allowed to have off days, right?

We punish kids who are having off days, we label kids who have a lot of off days, even calling it an off day, it’s just a day. There’s kids who have so much going on at home and it shows up at school and we get punished for it. And so if that happened to you, I’m really sorry. I’m really sorry if you had teachers or mentors or people who punished you for feeling feelings and for being a human.

Um, but we have to take our power back and say, I’m not going to judge how I’m feeling. I see it every day in Facebook support group meetings, in live in person support group meetings, in client calls, people saying, I know I shouldn’t feel like this. I don’t want to feel like this. I don’t like feeling like this.

It’s not okay. I should have figured this out by now. I should be farther along by now. I was doing so good. And now I feel like I’ve gone backwards because I’m sad today and there’s nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with feeling all your feelings. In fact, we want to feel all our feelings because the more we shove them down, the bigger and scarier they get.

And that goes into number three. Let yourself be human. Humans are supposed to feel the entire range of emotions. We are a part of nature, which has all these seasons, right? Like spring, summer, winter, fall, all the seasons. We have times where it’s, we’re lower, we’re resting. We have times where we’re growing and we’re excited and springing up.

And we have cycles as women, where, you know, we have different energy throughout the month. And I need you to learn about this, learn about your cycle, learn about your nervous system and how trauma might be affecting you, especially in grief or in any struggles that you’re dealing with. Now, I think a lot of times.

Again, we’ll judge ourselves for how we’re acting when we’ve been through something intensely hard and we aren’t equipped or haven’t been able to get the help we need to heal that yet. So it makes a lot of sense. That you have big emotions or you have outbursts, right? A lot of times we’re like, why am I so grouchy at my living kids?

I love them. I am so grateful for them. Like losing my child, my baby has shown me how special these kids are. And I still yell at them. And that might be. Because your nervous system is overreacting because your nervous system is taking over because you’ve got some patterns that you’ve learned throughout your life because you’re exhausted physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally, right?

If we’re not able to take care of those base needs, like, am I sleeping? Am I drinking water? Am I eating decent food? You know, how am I taking care of my basic needs? When you take a moment and step back and without judging again, we’re not gonna be like, Oh, I know I should be eating better. But like, all I did was had cereal for, you know, I had Fruit Loops the other day.

I had Fruit Loops for dinner. I don’t know. It sounded good. I never, I barely ever eat for loops. Um, but I did, right. And so I can beat myself up for that. Or I can just be like, yeah, I had fruit loops. It was a long day. It’s whatever. Um, but we need to understand. Where we’re coming from, patterns we’ve been taught, the way our body is reacting, the way our nervous system is reacting, the way our cycle is going, and that we as humans are supposed to have all the feelings.

So let yourself be human. This isn’t an excuse to maybe do things that are outside of your values. Right. We’re not, that’s the thing with coaching. I’ll say something like, let yourself be human. And people will be like, but I don’t, you know, I don’t want to have free reign just to be an awful person. And it’s like, no, you’re not going to be like, you already know that you’re, you’re trying.

It’s just the part where we start having compassion. So that we can validate ourselves, because if we still feel like we’re wrong, we’re going to want to punish ourselves, we’re going to want to judge ourselves. But if you can be more understanding, if you can open up to why it might be really hard to feel happy right now, then it’s a lot easier, this process.

Gets way easier. Um, number four is talk to yourself. Learn how to validate yourself. This one we do automatically. And I think though that it’s that judgemental part. It’s that inner critic. The inner critic unfortunately seems to be. Somewhat learned, right? Sometimes it’ll be that voice from someone in our life who criticized us or said something about our body or how we looked or how we act or, or any of that.

But it also is just this part of being a human is we’re always kind of judging and second guessing ourselves if we’re not paying attention. And so it’s really a process to learn to recognize that voice and to learn how to quiet that inner critic. How to just say, Oh, thank you. I know you’re trying to help.

I know you’re trying to keep me safe. I know you’re just regurgitating things that you’ve been told and you’ve believed for a long time, but I’ve got it from here. I want you to talk to yourself on purpose. I want you to literally say your name, like, maybe I, um, let’s see, I’m trying to think of an example.

Maybe I didn’t get something done that I had totally planned on, that I had on my to do list, and I didn’t get it done. Now, I can sit there and say, And, and I just like just barely passed Lauren’s birthday. So there was some stuff where I was like, eh, but I could say, Amy, what’s wrong with you? Like you had that on your list.

You even just got a new app. So you could like finish all your tasks and you’re trying to be more organized and you’re trying to use your time better. And, um, you didn’t do it like, what is wrong with you? Why can’t you get it together? Like, why can’t you do this? Why can’t you do that? Right. And I can talk to myself that way.

Or I can pause if I find myself doing that, or even if I haven’t been criticizing myself, but say I didn’t do a task that I had planned to last week, then I can say to myself, Amy, you’re doing a great job. Amy, I can see. That you’re trying, Amy, look at all the stuff you did get done. I know it seems like, yeah, you didn’t fold the laundry, but look at all the other things you get done.

Look at everything you do every day and how many people you’re helping. And you know, the kids are okay. They can pull laundry out of the basket if they need to. It doesn’t matter. That’s not folded. I can talk to myself kindly. I can say, Amy, it makes a lot of sense that you’re feeling a little bit off this week.

Cause your daughter would have been turning 12, right? Or you might be off this week because you really didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.

And that’s how we just say kind things and validate. What we’re feeling, what we’re experiencing, and then number five is be confident in your grief. So I want you always, and I hope that this podcast is a great resource. There’s amazing books. There’s obviously working with me. We’ll help you a ton like to get there really quickly, but.

When you learn about grief and you normalize your experience, you’re able to stand up for yourself. You’re able to, because you are validating yourself, you’re able to say, no, I own my grief. When I lost Lauren, I told myself, you have one year to just be really sad. In the olden times, they would do a year of mourning.

I think that’s still hung on as like something, you know, it’s not as obvious because we’re not wearing black, black, and we don’t have a ton of rules around it.

I said, Amy, you get to have a year where you can just cry as much as you want. I didn’t wear makeup. I didn’t push myself to do things I didn’t want to do. I really cut down on some of my outside responsibilities that just didn’t seem important anymore. Um, because I knew that I needed space. And when I learned like, oh, it’s kind of normal to want to just.

Fall asleep and go where your baby is that that’s not necessarily, you know, you wanting to hurt yourself or planning to hurt yourself. It’s just, that’s a normal part of grief is like wishing you didn’t have to be in all this pain and that you could be where your loved one is or understanding that grief comes in waves or understanding that you’re not going to really get away from the grief, right?

That you need to learn to embrace it. That you learn that, you know, the first time you laugh and when you’re happy, you might feel guilty and then you don’t have to feel bad that you feel guilty about being happy. You know, we just pile on all these things because we’re judging and we’re dismissing our experience.

And validation is the opposite of that. It’s saying, yes, this makes perfect sense. Of course. You’re sad. Of course, you’re devastated. Of course, you don’t have energy for people’s crap right now, right? Of course, it’s painful when people don’t acknowledge your baby on special days. Of course it is. And so we just say, yeah, this makes a lot of sense.

I can totally understand why you’re feeling this way. I can understand why I’m feeling this way. So when you can understand grief, understand it as a process that is so unique, and yet it is so universal, the stages. Not the five stages of grief, per se, because that doesn’t apply to the death of your child, right?

That applies to, um, coming to terms with a terminal illness. But there are kind of these parts of grief that we all go through. And so when you can say, oh, this is just grief, that is validating because you are going through it. Okay. Now, once you’ve increased your emotional vocabulary, you stop judging your feelings.

You let yourself be human and you take care of those basic needs and you’re aware of those basic needs, right? Like what are your hormones doing? How much sleep have you had when you learn how to talk to yourself on purpose in your head or even out loud? I really encourage you to do it out loud. Just be like Amy.

You know, my favorite is from Alison. podcast a while ago. Um, Awesome with Allison. You should follow her. But she always says you’re doing a great job. And so I use that all the time. Like you were doing a great job and then being confident in your grief. Cause when we don’t understand it, then it’s easy when people want to say, Hey, you shouldn’t be feeling like this.

You’d be like, Oh, they’re probably right. But when you know your own grief and you know your own self and you can validate your own grief, you can say, no, this is exactly how I’m supposed to be feeling. Right. It gives you that confidence that you need. And the bonus of all of this is when you take care of yourself, when you validate yourself, when you know who you are and you’re open.

To having this experience of being a human, uh, you’ll be able to have those conversations with your loved ones, right? So sometimes we need to work on ourselves first. It could be simultaneous, but a lot of times it’ll go better. If you just kind of work through this yourself, start practicing this yourself.

And then be brave enough to ask for what you need and what you want because you deserve that, um, without the expectation that they’re going to give it to you. Now they might not be able to. They might not be where you are. They might not be listening to podcasts and reading books and trying to better themselves.

They might just be using what they’ve done their whole life, right? They’re coping in a way that they’ve coped and it’s worked even though maybe not very well. Maybe not in the healthiest way, but so we got to give space for everyone being in a different path or on a different journey, even though you both lost your child, but you might not be in the same space.

But I would encourage you to once you recognize. And know like what it’s like to be invalidated, dig deep and try really hard to validate those people, right? You’re not going to try to coach them or use like tools on them to change them. But just notice, where am I getting defensive? Where am I not open to feedback?

Where am I not listening? Like when they say, I wish you wouldn’t cry so much or something, you know, like, why are you still crying every day or whatever it is? Can you ask some questions? Can you explore? Can you want to learn more? Because that is what we all want. We all want to be. Heard and seen and understood because that is true connection and it’s kind of easy to get in a little bit of a victim state where it’s like we want everyone around us to validate us but we’re not willing to do it and I promise you if you try and it will be messy and uncomfortable and like you might not be very good at it at first.

And it might be really, really hard. And I think this is something we all have to work on.

Try it, try validating, try reflecting back when, when someone says, Hey, I don’t understand why you’re grieving so much, or I don’t understand why you’re upset about this, whatever it is. You know, it doesn’t have to be grief. Obviously it’s like, there’s so many other things in our lives, but if they’re not understanding why you’re upset.

Or it feels like they’re attacking you. Can you take a breath? Can you pause? Can you listen? Can you ask questions to really understand how they’re feeling and then acknowledge and validate those feelings?

Right, a lot of times, um, I know there’s a saying in marriage, it’s like, do you want to be right? Or do you want to be married? Do you want to be right? Or do you want to have an awesome relationship, you might not agree with what they’re saying, but dig a little deeper. Give them compassion.

Give them the patience and the love that you wish they would extend to you because it’s only going to be better. And I know it’s hard. And I know it can sometimes feel like it’s, you know, maybe one sided, but all we can do is take care of ourselves. And then model that or share what we’ve been going through with the people we care about.

So that is what I have for you today. I’m going to give you one more reminder. Watch out for that Mother’s Day, uh, embracing Mother’s Day challenge. And then also go grab the emotion wheel, which I am going to have up really soon. Uh, and yeah, let’s start increasing that emotional vocabulary. If you would like some help figuring out what’s going on with you, figuring out why it’s so hard.

Right now, come on in, join me, um, just send an email to Amy at smoothstonescoaching. com and I’ll see you next time.