Validation is a word I hear a lot between couples.
“I just want you to validate me.”
“How am I supposed to validate her if I don’t agree?”
The common therapeutic knowledge is that validation does not require agreement with a person’s logical conclusion, but an acknowledgment of their emotional reality.
But sometimes that feels dissatisfying. Think about receiving an apology that says “I’m sorry you feel that way,” or “I see that you’re upset,” versus “I was wrong and you were right.”
Sometimes, when we ask for validation, all we need is to be seen in our hurt. Other times, though, what we’re looking for actually is agreement. It’s probably important not to use these words interchangeably, and to be honest with ourselves and our partners about what we actually need.
There are plenty of situations where a person needs agreement rather than emotional validation. Foundational worldviews, ethical stances, and plans for the future, for example, likely require some logical alignment.
But when it comes to everyday issues, why might we feel the need for our partners to share the same logic as us? Why might we need them to agree that the guy at the party was being weird, rather than just listening and recognizing our perception of him?
We sometimes seek agreement as an antidote to loneliness. Having someone tell us they think the same thing can offer temporary relief from the existential fact of separateness. But overreliance on this relief can become a kind of addiction, putting us in a fragile position, dependent on the whims of another.
We experience our own minds from the inside. Other people’s minds we only access through inference, imagination, and approximation. We take in data from their words, expressions, gestures, and stories, and make the best guess we can about how it feels to be them. What fills the space between the available data, which is limited to what can actually be communicated, is often our own experience.
Theory of mind, mentalization, and projection are separate but related terms. The way I’m using them, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand that other people have minds of their own: their own thoughts, feelings, beliefs, etc. Mentalization is the process of trying to make sense of another person’s observable behavior based on the awareness that their mind is separate from ours. Projection is the term most open to interpretation; as I’m using it, projection is the inevitable contribution of our own internal experience to the picture we construct of someone else’s.
From this angle, projection is not the opposite of theory of mind but an intrinsic part of what we do with it. If inference is inevitable, then what keeps us grounded in shared reality isn’t avoiding or conquering projection, but staying aware of it.
This means that even when two people are looking at the same thing, they may not experience or interpret it in a similar way. I might see the guy at the party and think he was being weird; my partner might see the same interaction and think nothing of it. There is a gap between our minds that can never fully be closed.
Being distinct subjects doesn’t require us to be separate in a deeper, metaphysical sense. We’re different from each other in that your experience isn’t mine, and mine isn’t yours. The distinction between self and other is real, at least as we experience it, even if it isn’t absolute.
When we see a partner sigh and infer that they’re tired, or read a friend’s pause as sadness, we’re projecting our own internal map of emotion onto their external cues, making an educated guess about an experience that we can’t directly know. Without this imaginative capacity, we’d have no intuition, no appreciation of art, no empathy.
But when projection is driven by fear or insecurity, it can become overpowering, misleading, isolating, hypervigilant, rigid, and, in extreme cases, paranoid. This difficulty tolerating uncertainty can make us especially vulnerable to the need for agreement; recruiting a partner or someone else into our interpretation is a way to bolster a sense of certainty we can’t tolerate losing. This is one way codependency can develop.
The goal of intimacy in this view isn’t to erase the distinction between two people, but to become secure enough to tolerate, and eventually enjoy and feel inspired by, each other’s different internal experiences and ways of interpreting the world.
Validation may not be immediately soothing in the same way agreement is, but in the long run it offers something bigger. Where agreement tells us we are not alone because we are thinking the same, validation tells us we are not alone even though we think differently.
