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.
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.
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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