Your Feelings Aren’t Valid

I saw a reel this week that said something I’ve been waiting for someone to say out loud: your feelings are valid because you’re having them, but that doesn’t always make them reasonable. In other words, just because you feel disrespected doesn’t mean someone was being disrespectful.

Finally.

Sometime in the last few years, "therapy speak" left the therapist’s office and moved into the group chat, the pickup line, and at least one third-grade birthday party. Is it okay to be tired and overwhelmed? Of course. But sometimes the people you love just want to help, and “I need to protect my peace” isn’t always the right answer when they do. If your kid didn’t get invited to that birthday party, is it because no one likes him, or because the family had a budget they couldn’t go over?

I say this as someone who believes in therapy, and as a woman with ADHD who spent most of her life without words for why her brain worked the way it did, so I know how much it helps to finally have the language for something. But “your feelings are valid” was supposed to be a starting point, a permission slip for a generation of women raised to smile through things, and somewhere along the way it became the end of the conversation.

What I like about asking whether a feeling is reasonable is that it doesn’t dismiss it; it just gives it a follow-up question. Was the text late because she doesn’t care, or because she has three kids, a dentist appointment, and a phone at 4%? The answer is almost always boring.

Most of the time, nobody was thinking about us at all.