Just the other night.
It was sort of sad that my son was all of a sudden upset.
About possibly being on the naughty list,
Santa's naughty list.
He was saying.
I'm a bad boy and I'm on Santa's naughty list and I'm not going to get any presents.
And I felt the urge to try to just make him feel better,
To reassure him.
Oh,
You'll definitely get presents.
You've gotten presents every year so far.
I promise you,
You'll get presents for Christmas.
But this wasn't working.
I was trying to reassure him to change the way he was feeling.
I was trying to take away.
His sad feelings.
Partially,
I think,
Via my own discomfort with him having that feeling.
I wanted to take it away to.
.
.
Ease him but also to,
I think,
Ease myself.
And then all of a sudden I remember the possibility for something different.
What you might call emotional validation.
Which is to not try to fix the problem or do anything about it or to try to make the person feel different at all.
Rather just to validate the emotion.
And so I was realizing this was not working.
And so then I shift it into.
Something more like Oh man,
So it feels like you're on Santa's naughty list?
What do you think about it?
What's that like?
I don't think I said it quite like that,
But it was just validating and saying,
Sort of indulging the sad fantasy that he might possibly be on Santa's naughty list and just kind of going along with it.
And then that suddenly shifted everything.
The sadness kind of stopped.
And he moved into just telling me about it a little bit.
And then we quickly sort of found ourselves on something else.
The feeling kind of just dissolved and went away.
And it was via the shift.
Oh man,
That sounds really hard.
I'm sorry to hear that you feel that way.
Um,
That sucks.
And then just to kind of have that understood and reflected oftentimes maybe is the most powerful thing you can do for a feeling.
And so this is not only for someone else.
But it's also really for yourself and for your own inner child who might often have an experience like this.
And you might want to do so many things to make the feeling go away or to distract from the feeling.
Just like you might with a child.
Oh,
What about this?
Let's go do this.
Let's play this game.
To take away from that feeling.
Maybe it feels scary or maybe it feels like you just can't do anything about it.
But sometimes just to notice it and to validate it is the most powerful thing.
There's one way to describe it,
Which is like.
.
.
Just being in the mud.
With the other person.
There's a person who's stuck in the mud and everyone's trying to pull them out and it's really just making it worse.
It's not working.
But then one person just decides to go down and get in the mud with the other person.
And that makes it totally different.
The other person all of a sudden feels just a little bit better because there's someone here with me.
So the option to not always have to pull someone out of the mud,
Including yourself.
And to just be in the mud together for a little while.
So I just thought I'd share that experience with you and try to remind myself.
To relate to him like that,
My son.
As much as I can and to relate to others and certainly the people that I work with in my therapeutic work.
But also myself.
Sometimes the option just to be in the mud.
With yourself,
With others and simply validate the reality of the feeling.
