Putting a Conflict to Bed?

Why Emotional Validation is Often the Missing Piece

Most of us have learned how to explain ourselves, try to win a debate, or convert someone to our perspective. Very few of us were taught how to stay with another person’s experience long enough for them to feel understood.

Conflicts don't end when we've exchanged enough information, defended ourselves or swept it under the rug. They end when the relationship has metabolized the emotional experience.

I’ve watched couples spend half an hour debating facts, intentions, and whose memory is more accurate. They leave the conversation feeling frustrated and disconnected, even though both of them have tried their hardest to explain themselves. It’s easy to assume the problem is poor communication, but there’s often a missing piece to the conflict puzzle.

Being witness to many couples in conflict, I see two people who are often asking for the same thing. They want to be understood in their experience.

The challenge is that each person’s nervous system is seeking to be understood at exactly the same time.

When my partner tells me I’ve hurt them, I can feel the impulse to explain myself before they’ve even finished speaking. I want them to know I didn’t mean to hurt them. I want them to see my intentions. I want them to understand that I’m a caring person who simply made a mistake. If I can explain myself well enough, perhaps we can stop the conversation before it spirals any further.

From the inside, defensiveness doesn’t usually feel defensive. It feels urgent. It feels like a sincere effort to repair the misunderstanding as quickly as possible.

The irony is that while I’m working so hard to help my partner understand me, I’ve stepped over the very thing they’re needing more than information, and that’s validating his experience of the event, while also owning my own.

Until someone feels that you’ve entered their experience, explanations rarely have much impact. They’re still trying to answer a more fundamental question: Do you understand what this was like for me?

I’ve come to believe that emotional validation is one of the most overlooked ingredients in relationship repair. It doesn’t receive much attention because it seems so simple. Yet, I’ve watched it change the emotional direction of countless conversations.

In tracing back my own experience of emotional validation, many memories came to mind. Conflicts with older brothers, missed moments of validation with friends or parents. If we’re not shown what its like to feel validated, we won’t know how to offer it to others, or understand the importance of it.

My mother loved me deeply, and I never questioned that. Yet when I was upset, she often moved quickly toward advice or encouragement to get over the feelings I was having. She wanted to make things better.

As a little girl, however, I could feel the missed step. I didn’t have the language for validation then, but I wanted her to stay with me in what I was feeling, to be with my tears or fears rather than try to stop them. I wanted her to ask questions, dig a little deeper and help me learn how to talk about my feelings, rather than ‘get over them’.

It’s never too late to learn how to offer emotional validation, and understand why it’s a missing piece in any conflict.

Emotional validation and empathy are closely related, but they aren’t the same thing. Empathy is our ability to imagine what another person’s experience might be like. It happens inside us. Validation is what we communicate out loud for the other person to hear and realize, “My experience has reached you.”

But here’s the thing that may hold many back from offering validation in a heated moment, when everything in you is screaming, you’re wrong and I’m right.

You don’t have to agree with your partner’s perspective. What matters is your willingness to understand how their feelings or reasoning made sense from where they were standing. You can argue about facts, but you can’t deny someone’s emotional reality, and sincerely acknowledging their reality is the missing piece.

Keep it real. If you’re using empty words to simply appease your partner, they’ll feel it and your words won’t land for them emotionally. Step into their shoes long enough to connect to their interpretation of the experience.

When the person you’re speaking with feels emotionally validated you’ll sense it in their energy and see it in their body. Their nervous system settles. The breathing slows. They start to soften. The volume of their voice will lower. This is the beginning of a different kind of conversation.

Once someone feels understood, they become much more capable of hearing explanations, considering another perspective, and working together toward a solution. Validation creates the emotional conditions that make problem-solving possible.

This is one reason unresolved conflicts have a way of returning days, months or even years later. Couples are often puzzled when an old argument resurfaces. They think, Didn’t we already settle this? Often they settled the facts without ever settling the feelings. One partner may still be carrying the loneliness of never having felt understood. Until that missing piece is found, the conflict remains emotionally unfinished, and in need of completion.

An Exercise in Validation

The next time you find yourself in conflict, notice how quickly the impulse to explain and defend yourself arrives.

Instead, slow down and become curious.

You might say,

“Help me understand what that was like for you.”

“Tell me more. I want to understand.”

“When I said that, what happened for you?”

“I can see why that landed the way it did.”

If they are using words like hurt, afraid, frustrated, angry etc. Use those words as well.

“If I had experienced it that way, I imagine I would have felt hurt too.”

These aren’t magic words, and they may not be your exact words, but they illustrate expressions of genuine curiosity. They communicate that you’re willing to spend a little time inside your partner’s experience before asking them to hear yours.

Once your partner begins to feel understood it’s time to share your own perspective.

“Can I tell you what was happening for me?”

“I’d really like you to understand what was going on inside me too.”

I’ve found that these conversations unfold very differently. Your explanation no longer has to compete with your partner’s need to be heard because that need has already begun to settle.

The conversation becomes less about persuading each other and more about discovering how two caring people could experience the same moment so differently.

Relationships will always include misunderstandings, disappointments, and moments when we inevitably hurt one another. What changes is how long we remain separated by those moments. Validation is the puzzle piece that deescalates the heat of conflict.

When validation is skipped, conflict can linger, and resentments can settle in. We keep returning to the same conversation, hoping that this time our partner will finally understand what it was like to be us. We think we’re looking for agreement or an apology, but often we’re looking for something that’s pretty fundamental. We want to know that our experience matters, that it makes sense, and that we don’t have to carry it alone.

I’ve come to think of validation as the bridge between hurt and repair. It doesn’t determine who was right or wrong. It allows two people to meet in the same emotional space before trying to decide what happened or what needs to change.

Once we feel accompanied in our experience, we’re far less likely to defend it. Our attention shifts from protecting ourselves to becoming interested in the person sitting across from us. From there, forgiveness, accountability, compromise, and problem-solving all become possible because the relationship itself has become more important than winning the argument.

Perhaps that’s why validation is so often the missing piece. Most of us have been taught how to explain ourselves, win a debate, or convert someone to our perspective. Very few of us were taught how to stay with another person’s experience long enough for them to feel understood. Yet that simple act has the power to shorten conflict, soften resentment, and restore connection. I’ve watched it transform conversations in my clients’ lives, and in my own.

Use this skill set in all your relationships, particularly if you have children. Show them the power of validation. Ask the deeper questions, and teach them how to talk about their feelings without judgement or fixing.

The simple act of validating someone’s experience as being understandable from where they stand, remains one of the most powerful relationship skills and expressions of love I know.