When Validation Becomes Avoidance: The Hidden Costs of Comfort in Modern Therapy

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A young woman told me she had been in therapy for an eating disorder for a year. Each week, her therapist offered affirmations and reassurance. She was told her pain made sense, that her feelings were valid, that she deserved kindness. What she never received was a challenge to the eating disorder voice that dominated her mind. The cruel thoughts that she was not enough, that she did not deserve to eat, that she had to obey the rules of her illness remained untouched.

Her eating disorder remained comfortable and unchallenged. In some ways she even felt relieved, because it meant she did not have to confront the frightening possibility of change. The message, however unintended, was that remaining trapped in her illness was acceptable. Her experience captures something many quietly endure: therapy that soothes but never strengthens, therapy that validates but does not guide clients through the discomfort necessary for transformation.

Female therapist hand on female client's hand

The Age of Validation

“Your feelings are valid.” It is a phrase that echoes across therapy offices, social media feeds, classrooms, and HR meetings. In many ways, this cultural embrace of validation represents real progress. For decades, psychiatry often dismissed patients’ experiences, silenced their suffering, or pathologized their emotions. The turn toward validation, with its emphasis on safety, comfort, and recognition, was a corrective. It told people: You are not crazy. Your suffering makes sense. You deserve to be heard.

A person who feels repeatedly wronged may be told their pain is valid, their anger justified. But without encouragement to examine these emotions or hold multiple perspectives, they can become tethered to a sense of harm. Minor misunderstandings begin to feel like violations. What starts as compassion can quietly entrench fragility, leaving them unprepared for the complexity of real life. Similarly, a trauma survivor might hear that their hypervigilance is understandable, but without gradual support to re-engage safely with the world, their nervous system remains locked in a state of alarm, preventing real healing. Validation without movement toward action can soften pain in the moment but ultimately sustain the cycle of suffering. Comfort, in excess, may quietly erode resilience.

When the pursuit of comfort dominates, therapy can drift into unintended consequences. The goal shifts from building capacity to reducing distress. Clients may begin to believe that the measure of healing is the absence of pain, rather than the presence of resilience. Anxiety becomes an enemy to be eliminated rather than a signal to be understood and worked through. Dependency can also emerge. If every spike of fear is met with reassurance, clients may learn to rely on the therapist’s words instead of cultivating inner confidence. The therapist’s voice becomes a lifeline rather than a bridge to independence. We once spoke of “toxic positivity” as a trap that silenced suffering with forced cheerfulness. “Toxic validation” may be its twin shadow, soothing pain in ways that appear compassionate but ultimately reinforce avoidance and fragility.

Healing, however, almost always requires discomfort. Growth comes not from avoiding fear but from moving through it. This is not a new idea. Research on exposure therapy, resilience theory, and even long-standing wisdom traditions converge on the same truth: the “road to resilience” is often marked by emotional difficulty, not its absence (APA, 2020). Yet today’s therapeutic culture often sends the opposite message. In the name of safety, clients may be encouraged to withdraw from challenges that could strengthen them. In the name of compassion, they are offered comfort instead of confrontation. In this paradox, the more we prioritize safety, the less safe people may actually become, as their worlds shrink under the weight of what they fear to face.

A Cultural Drift

Therapists themselves are not immune to this culture. Many therapists have been trained not to confront directly, instead leaning heavily on over-affirmation and validation out of concern that challenging a client might harm them or push them away. But in protecting clients from discomfort, therapists may also be protecting themselves from the unease of being firm, direct, or momentarily unpopular in the room. What is lost in that dynamic is precisely the moment where a shift or change could occur.

Validation should not be discarded. To do so would be to repeat the harms of earlier mistakes when patients’ experiences were trivialized or denied. The question then is how to integrate validation into a broader process that champions ability. Validation should be the doorway, not the destination. Clients can be told that their pain makes sense, while also being guided to face it. They can be reassured that their fears are understandable, while also being supported to confront them. To challenge does not mean to shame or to bulldoze. It can mean inviting a client to linger with a fear instead of rushing to soothe it, or naming the eating disorder voice aloud so that its hold begins to weaken. These moments are often uncomfortable, but they are also where resilience is built.

In this reframing, resilience becomes the goal. The measure of progress is not the absence of distress but the presence of strength: the ability to feel anxiety without fleeing, to enter grief without losing oneself, to live fully even in the presence of fear.

Mad in America’s mission has always been to question dominant paradigms in psychiatry and psychology, to ask whether the systems we trust truly foster healing or quietly entrench suffering. The culture of over-validation in therapy deserves that same scrutiny. This isn’t about rejecting medication or validation; both can be vital. But when they become the destination instead of the starting point, we risk a quieter complicity—numbing what needs to be understood, soothing what longs to be transformed.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

39 COMMENTS

  1. The problem is no psychological approach is valid unless it really understands the true means toward psychological healing and if they did they would understand it themselves, not in theory but in actual experience, and being that healing can only ever be observed inwardly then they would need to observe and understand this process within themselves. But if they did that they would realize that this is the only true means of resolving the emotional, psychological and traumatic complexes and conditionings would be to observe and understand deeply one’s own psychological phenomena because this understanding is that which resolves them naturally, without having to know how to. So the psychological approach isn’t targeting the real problem. The real problem is that they need suitable social, economic and emotional circumstances to be able to go on this introspective healing journey in the context of a supportive and healthy environment – and this would be the true role of an enlightened social solution to the problems we call mental health. But it’s way too late for a social solution and if you really look around you then it’s obvious. I don’t think mental health treatment innovation would be a sane concern for social activists during the rise of Hitler in Germany, and soon probably you will feel the same. And if there was a civil war to talk about psychological or psychopharmacological therapy would also be insane. Stop shooting each other – that would be the best first-line treatment and the same is true today – stop destroying our lives with vampirism, ideologies, lies and every kind of economic and political exploitation. And swap Trump with someone sane and nice again. That would be a sane response, not pharmaceutical drugs and a vast industry peddling every kind of nonsense approach to socially sustained injuries the causes of which we just ignore.

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    • Therapy .. many years of it…has resulted in my daughter no longer speaking to me.
      I am old and probably dying of cancer.
      With all my might, I did all that I could over the years to help so that she could live independently. I guess for her this is the easiest way. Social workers tell me this is a current trend. There is no way I can change the past and even with the best of intentions always this is the result. What cruelty supports this kind of ” therapy”??

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  3. As a psychotherapist, I completely agree with this excellent article. I have many people come to me having seen other therapists and their biggest complaint is: “All they did was listen and agree with me. I didn’t learn anything.” I think that many therapists are afraid to “do harm” so they avoid challenging or holding clients accountable. This enabling merely ensures clients are stuck in patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that may be unhelpful. Therapist cling onto the Rogerian notion of unconditional positive regard, which is helpful in establishing the alliance, but they fail to move off it into actual interventions. I write a lot about shame and feel many therapists are afraid to shame clients by offering honest feedback, likely because the therapists has failed to work on their own shame issues. However, appropriately presented, direct, constructive challenges to a client’s behaviors and point of view can be very helpful. I’m thinking of a teenager I saw many years ago who one day started swearing, yelling and stormed off slamming the door. I told her very plainly she needed to apologize to me and write a letter to all the other therapists in the office whose sessions she disrupted. She did so and it change everything. I saw her for a few more months, but her mother ended therapy because of her own fears of being uncovered as a narcissist…. Anyway, that teenager showed back up in my office at 26 and stated that my calling her out for her bad behavior was the most important moment in therapy, and she had been in therapy basically all her life. She was headed down a very bad path and had since gone to college, gotten married, and stabilized her life. What would have happened if I had just validated her “anger”?

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  4. As one who has dealt with child abuse covering up psych “professionals,” and has done my own psychopharmacology research. Thus as one who knows covering up child abuse is the number one actual function of the psych industries.

    I will say, as one who was eventually handed over medical evidence of the abuse of my very young child … being handed over the medical evidence of the truth will set you free. Society really should not have a bunch of scientifically “invalid,” systemic child abuse covering up, “mental health industries.”

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  5. Treatments that work that I am aware of are difficult for the “patient” or “client” (there is no good common English word for that role). Past traumatic events must be re-examined and to some extent re-experienced in order to be free of them. Yet these workable therapies are almost never discussed here or anywhere else in the field of “mental health” because they totally reject the medical model and instead use a spiritual or mind-based model.

    This article expresses criticism and a need for change, but does nothing to expose how we got into this mess or how to get out of it.

    It has something to do, I would guess, with most people’s difficulty confronting discomfort of any kind. This includes even doctors. I am reminded of a story told by one great healer of a time he let a doctor sit in on a therapy session. As the patient began to re-experience some past bad incident, the doctor tried to stop the session and had to be shown out. I believe the past incident involved getting sick, and the patient was experiencing fever-like symptoms. The doctor thought that such a thing should not be allowed to happen.

    I am also reminded of how electroshock (now termed “electro-convulsive therapy”) is performed in most “modern” hospitals, with the patient under total sedation. It still causes brain damage, but the patient “doesn’t feel a thing.” This really only helps the doctors and nurses feel better about the harmful acts they are committing.

    The ultimate folly in this line of thinking is seen when some urge that we start being nicer to criminals. That we should either tolerate their criminal behavior or at least not jail them for it. They point to the fact that jail time doesn’t work. But that doesn’t mean that we should not hold criminals responsible for their bad behavior and get them to really confront it. A few criminals who have been treated in this manner got better (became more honest and law-abiding).

    The key is to kick MDs out of the field of healing. But it will probably take more than that, as their delusions about how life works have become commonplace in society. Someone will need to go about the task of removing their false data from the general population, and that won’t be easy.

    This therapist seems happy about how she is doing things in her practice. Well, that’s nice. But she is up against a system that really doesn’t want improvement. And that is our bigger challenge.

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  6. Additionally, validating by default leaves the client in the position of passive victim. In the current culture, it is very difficult to challenge this paradigm and really question what the client’s own subjective involvement was in all the things that happened in their life, especially if it has to do with some kind of trauma.

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  8. I believe that very often people live up to your expectations. Especially those looking for support. Validation of difficulties is crucial but so is forming a positive outlook of whatever the situation.

    Most critical of all is letting someone know that you see them as capable as anyone else of eventually handling their situation on their own, that they are far stronger than they believe themselves to be.

    Too many therapists seem to live for robbing a client’s agency. They need to find other ways of indulging their emotional appetites, IMHO.

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  10. That’s how to make money as a psychologist. Tell them that they are strong, wonderful, beautiful, powerful etc and then they walk out feeling happier. And then they recommend me. But what have I done besides tell them what they want to hear? I’m sure even chatGPT can do that and probably better then a human robot.

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  11. Hi Rebecca, thanks for this article that I think puts into words something I have been sensing for a while!

    I like the way you balance noticing the benefits of validation up to a point, while also noticing the harms.

    One way of putting it is that people have human reactions to things that they encounter and that happen to them, these reactions are understandable and don’t indicate some underlying pathology, but they also may be over-reactions or involve various kinds of mistakes, and so there might be reason to challenge some of them.

    Sometimes people don’t want any of their reactions to be questioned. That’s often because they expect any questioning to be hostile. But friends do question friends when we think they might be making a mistake or headed for trouble – it’s a sign of not caring if/when we tell people to just go ahead when it looks to us like they are headed off a cliff.

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    • Therapy that does not involve challenging the client’s established viewpoints is not therapy at all. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to simply validate someone else’s reality. That’s only the most basic starting point for any real therapy. Making folks feel more comfortable continuing to live and believe exactly as they have doesn’t really help.

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    • Thanks for this thoughtful reflection…so well said. I really appreciate the way you’re holding space for both compassion and accountability. It’s true that caring about someone often means being willing to gently challenge them, not just validate everything uncritically. That kind of honesty can be a real form of support!

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  14. Thank you for this blog which to me seems completely sensible. Of course validation is necessary but with it must be the belief that the person (patient/client) has what it takes to grow. The resilience which enables us to survive despite the odds can be further boosted by a good therapist, who can motivate us to use our innate drive, initiative, talents, and character to lead a fulfilling life again. To rely on validation and empathy alone is like over-soothing a child who has fallen over to the extent that they will never want to walk alone again.
    I think a similar argument may be applied to the exclusive and/or excessive use of psychiatric drugs to ‘numb’ the emotional pain and make symptoms ‘more bearable’. While none of us want to suffer ourselves or want others to suffer either, the influence of these chemical coshes can make it impossible for to fully participate in such challenges. I consider myself lucky that I met a challenging therapist in Colorado at the same time that I very slowly withdrew myself from psychiatric drugs.

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  15. Do people need healing or is it our society that needs help…and lots of it..are we not allowed to criticize our society? When you do your therapist tells you to take personal responsibility and get another job to pay for your rent. Work hard play by the rules which in case you haven’t noticed are their rules. I never agreed to play that game.

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    • There are people who DO feel the need to heal. If you have not seen how some people suffer, you should get out more. But of course, our society is also quite sick, and this started long before “mental illness” became a thing.

      But what do you propose to do about it?

      You give the example of someone being told to get a job so they can pay their rent. Well, that’s life in any society. Before there were landlords and rent, there were other demands made of group members. Why were these demands made? Because the group wanted to survive, and it expected every able-bodied adult (and often some children) to help it survive. What else do you expect a group to ask of its members?

      “Modern life” is admittedly a distorted and confusing version of what human life could be like. But it doesn’t change the fact that people are expected to play along and contribute.

      I find it a small miracle that today a few people have developed some rather workable ways to help people out so they can decide with some confidence whether they want to play along with the current game or work for something different, hopefully better. But I find it a rather large tragedy that so few people involved with the subject of “mental health” or “social justice” know anything about any of these workable methods – which could be called “therapies” I suppose. Most of the population remains painfully ignorant – to its own detriment.

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    • You may have a hard time finding such a friend. The Auditor’s Code covers this point and is very unknown among therapists, to say nothing of the general public. Yes, talking to a friend would be the first step for most people. But what if your friend urged you to read Dianetics? Would you? Sometimes friends tell us things we really don’t want to hear.

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  17. When I was twenty years old I went to college at night CU in Denver about $300 per semester. My used car cost about $400 the insurance about $120 a year, gas was about 26 cents per gallon. My first apartment was $35 per month,
    I worked for GM had health insurance and made $10 per hour. I didn’t have a credit card just wrote checks.

    So do people need to be healed or do we need a new opperating system for our society.

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    • If you were as bad off as some people can get, you would have never gotten that $!0 an hour job. But how do we change society’s “operating system?” Do you have any idea what it actually consists of? The situation on a society level is quite bad. And yet, that alone would not fix up everyone. In particular, we would still have to deal with the criminally insane. They are in terrible shape and became that way a very long time ago.

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  18. Larry
    My 40 year old son died last December 7th. he had been on psych drugs for 15 years and was completely beaten down by the mental health industrial complex. It was not suicide it is a fact that people in that system will pass far earlier then people out of the system.
    Yes I do get out.

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    • Yes, we are all very aware that “the system” kills people.
      Some people here don’t want any “system” any more – that’s their “solution,” but of course that will never happen.
      Others want to change the current system into one that is honest and effective, instead of criminal and destructive. That is a big job, but in the long term, that could hold; it could survive for a long time.

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