One of the most common things I hear in therapy is some version of the same complaint:
“They just don’t get it.”
Sometimes it’s about a spouse. Sometimes it’s a parent, a friend, a sibling, or a coworker. The details are different, but the feeling is remarkably similar. Someone tries to explain why something hurt, why they reacted the way they did, or why an experience felt significant to them, and they leave the conversation feeling unheard.
Often, the pain isn’t coming from the original event.
It’s coming from what happened afterward.
A partner explains why they didn’t mean it that way. A parent focuses on their intentions rather than the impact. A friend immediately offers advice. A coworker tells them not to take it personally. Before long, the conversation is no longer about the experience itself. It becomes a discussion about whether the person’s feelings make sense in the first place.
For many people, that is where the real hurt begins.
One of the biggest misconceptions about validation is that it means agreement. People often assume that validating someone else’s feelings requires admitting fault, taking responsibility, or accepting their version of events as the only correct one.
It doesn’t.
Validation simply means acknowledging that another person’s emotional experience makes sense from their perspective.
You can disagree with someone’s conclusions and still understand why they feel the way they do. You can have a different memory of an event and still recognize the impact it had on them. In healthy relationships, validation is not about deciding who is right. It is about making space for another person’s reality, even when it differs from your own.
So why does validation matter so much?
Part of the answer lies in how human beings learn.
Most of us think about learning as something that happens in classrooms or through direct instruction. But some of the most important lessons we learn come through our relationships. Psychologists have long understood that people learn from experience. We develop expectations about ourselves, other people, and relationships based on what repeatedly happens when we interact with the world around us.
Relationships are constantly teaching us lessons, whether anyone intends them to or not.
When someone shares a feeling and is met with understanding, curiosity, or empathy, they learn something. They learn that vulnerability is safe. They learn that their experiences matter. They learn that difficult emotions can exist within a relationship without threatening the relationship itself.
When someone repeatedly shares their experiences and is met with criticism, dismissal, defensiveness, indifference, or attempts to immediately fix the problem, they learn something too.
They may learn that expressing hurt leads to conflict. They may learn that their feelings need to be justified before they will be accepted. They may learn that it is safer to stay quiet than risk being misunderstood. Over time, many people stop sharing their experiences altogether—not because they no longer have feelings, but because they no longer expect those feelings to be met with understanding.
These lessons are rarely learned all at once. They develop gradually, through hundreds of interactions over time.
Over time, these experiences do more than shape what we expect from other people. They shape what we expect will happen when we share ourselves.
If vulnerability has historically been met with understanding, most people continue reaching for connection. They learn that difficult conversations can strengthen relationships rather than threaten them.
If vulnerability has repeatedly been met with dismissal, criticism, defensiveness, or indifference, people often become more cautious. They explain more. Justify more. Minimize their own feelings. Withdraw from difficult conversations. Or stop sharing altogether.
Not because they no longer want connection.
Because they have learned to expect disconnection.
In that sense, validation is not just about feeling better in a moment. It influences whether people continue to believe that connection is possible.
This is one reason childhood often becomes part of the conversation.
Our earliest relationships are some of our most influential. A child whose emotions are consistently acknowledged may develop very different expectations than a child whose emotions are regularly minimized, ignored, or dismissed. Those early experiences often shape what feels normal in relationships and what people come to expect from others.
But childhood is only part of the story.
A person can have a loving, supportive childhood and spend years in a marriage where they feel unseen. Someone can grow up feeling understood and later find themselves in a workplace where their concerns are routinely dismissed. A friendship, romantic relationship, family dynamic, or major life experience can reinforce existing beliefs or challenge them.
Likewise, people who grew up feeling misunderstood are not destined to stay that way. Healthy relationships have an incredible capacity to reshape expectations and create new experiences of connection.
We continue learning throughout our lives.
Every meaningful relationship teaches us something about what it means to be known, heard, and understood.
This is why feeling misunderstood can be so painful. It is not simply about disagreement. Most people can tolerate disagreement. What hurts is the feeling that someone important to them is unwilling or unable to understand their experience.
There is a profound difference between hearing:
“That’s not what happened.”
and
“I can understand why that felt that way to you.”
The first response focuses on correcting. The second focuses on understanding. Only one of them creates connection.
What many people are looking for in these moments is not agreement. They are not asking someone to abandon their perspective, admit fault, or take sides.
They are asking for curiosity.
They are asking for someone to spend a moment trying to understand what the experience felt like from their side before explaining, correcting, defending, or solving.
Because being understood does something powerful.
It reminds us that our thoughts, feelings, and experiences exist in the mind of another person. It tells us that we are not carrying our reality alone.
At its core, validation is not really about being right.
It is about being known.
The relationships that shape us most are rarely the ones where we agree on everything. They are the ones where we feel safe enough to bring our full experience into the room and trust that it will be met with curiosity rather than judgment, understanding rather than dismissal.
Perhaps that is why feeling misunderstood can hurt so deeply.
It is rarely just about the disagreement itself.
It is about what the disagreement begins to mean.
When people repeatedly feel dismissed, minimized, unseen, or misunderstood, they often start asking questions that have very little to do with the original conversation.
Do my feelings matter?
Does my experience matter?
Do I matter?
That is why validation carries so much weight in our relationships. Not because it settles arguments or determines who is right, but because it answers something more fundamental.
It communicates:
“What you are experiencing matters enough for me to try to understand it.”
And for many people, that simple act of understanding is what allows connection to happen in the first place.
Because while being understood does not solve every problem, it reminds us of something we all need from the people we care about:
That our inner world matters to them.
Amanda Brindle, LCSW 