How to Stop Seeking Validation From Others
…and Open the Door to Sustainable Self Love
When we try to empower ourselves, it can be easy to make sassy declarations like ‘I don’t need anybody, all I need is myself!’
While this kind of rhetoric might make for a great pop song, it’s a little too simplistic for my taste.
Most of us do need other people. We need them to stimulate us, to teach us, to challenge us and, of course, to love us.
So how do we figure out how healthy (or unhealthy) our own dependency on others is?
Healthy Dependency
Finding people to have in our lives who we trust, we can rely on, and we can turn to when things get tough is essential to our well-being.
It Is Healthy To..
- Ask for and receive help, support, encouragement etc.
- Factor the needs of loved ones into our own decisions.
- Enjoy being with people and receiving their affection.
- Feel like our loved ones make a significant contribution to our happiness.
Another one that comes up more for intimate partner relationships is this:
Grow a habitual dependency on each other's strengths and skills.
For example: I hate cleaning the bathroom, and my partner knows how miserable I find it, so he is happy to take on that job.
He, on the other hand, hates speaking on the phone, so I’m the one who usually calls the bank, insurance companies, repair services etc.
Of course, if we each lived alone, we would just have to do this stuff ourselves. We’re both fully capable of being independent.
But at the end of the day, being part of a partnership is supposed to have some perks! We love making life easier for the other. I have his back, and he has mine.
Unhealthy Dependency
We know we’re unhealthily dependent on someone when we…
- Feel like we can’t make decisions without their input.
- Only feel good about ourselves when we receive their affection.
- Hold them responsible for our own happiness.
- Depend on their validation for our sense of self worth.
It’s very common to see this kind of dependency in intimate relationships — but it can also happen in friendships too.
For many years, I only felt good about myself when my friends were giving me attention and validation. I so very much wanted, needed people to like me.
You’d think this would make me a bit of a ‘people-pleaser’ — and it did, but in a very particular way.
The times I felt most confident about myself was when I was in a ‘honeymoon phase’ with a new friend.
That’s right, friends have honeymoon phases too.
You know — you meet someone and you just ‘click’. You’re eager to spend more time with them, you feel excited by them. Whenever something funny happens you think ‘I can’t wait to tell them about this!’ — You end up thinking and talking about them all the time.
It’s basically a crush without the romance — a friend crush!
I loved the feeling of being ‘crushed on’ by a new friend. ‘This person thinks I’m cool! They want to spend time with me! They keep sending me songs and videos, they must be thinking of me!’
But, of course, eventually that honeymoon phase wears off. And your friendship becomes, well, pretty much like all your other friendships. Very nice, but much less intense.
Without that intensity, I would question myself a lot more. I would wonder ‘do they still like me? Am I good enough?’
Losing Ourselves in the Need to be Loved
This need for affection from my friends led to me developing a pretty unhealthy habit. I would always be chasing new friendships — chasing the ‘high’ of the honeymoon phase.
I prided myself on being a ‘social butterfly’ — finding a place in many different groups of people.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having lots of friends, but what was unhealthy about it for me was that I was playing a numbers game. I was collecting friends so that, if anyone rejected me, I would have others to fall back on.
I often subconsciously seeked the attention of ‘high status’ people. The higher their status the more validated I felt when they liked me!
Ironically — these ‘high status’ folks were quite used to people craving their affection, and so they developed an unhealthy habit of their own — toying with people.
I recall a particularly difficult friendship I had with a girl in secondary school. She was always inviting me to do things with just her, and treating me like I was special. But when we were around others she would put me down.
Her behaviour made me crave her validation all the more, and I felt like I needed to compete for her affection. So I ended up putting more effort and energy into that friendship than I did any of my others.
Which meant (again, ironically) that I was actually neglecting my stronger, more stable friendships. I was taking them for granted.
I often found myself changing or acting differently just to please these ‘high status’ people. I would compromise my integrity trying to squeeze myself into the personality mould I thought they would like.
I was bending myself over backwards to please people who were not good for me, and letting my identity be shaped by the newest, shiniest person in my life — losing myself and losing friends in the process.
Something had to change.
Breaking the Habit
Over time, something became very clear to me. Relying on others for my sense of self worth was unsustainable. It would never be enough.
Depending on others for validation is made particularly unstable by our built in ‘Negativity Bias’. As humans, we tend to notice, react to and remember our negative experiences more than our positive ones.
“The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones”
Dr Rick Hanson
This applies not only to what others say about us, but what we say about ourselves.
And this is where my habit of seeking validation from others was getting really dangerous.
As we saw above, my need for validation wound up pushing me to a place where I was losing my identity, I was being mistreated by the people I was trying to please, and I was losing my more stable friendships.
This then made another bias kick in — my Confirmation Bias.
Confirmation Bias makes us pay more attention to information which upholds our already existing beliefs.
In my case — the belief I was trying to run away from was ‘I’m not good enough.’
But even though my new friendships would give me temporary self confidence, when the honeymoon phase wore off, I would be reminded of things that confirmed my bias.
“High status people are being unkind to me — this proves that I’m not good enough.”
“My established friendships are dying — this proves that I’m not good enough.”
And off I’d go to find new friends to drown that voice out — only ending up right back where I’d started.
I was trapped in a never ending cycle of “I’m not good enough”.
When I finally (through therapy) was able to see what was going on — everything became clear.
When we don’t love ourselves, there is no amount of affection from others in the world that can fill that hole.
I wasn’t doing all of this because people didn’t love me. I had many, many healthy friendships and relationships, and many people who thought I was great just as I was.
I was doing it because I didn’t love myself.
And so none of that love, care or affection from others felt like enough for me. None of it was enough to release my negative self beliefs.
I needed to release those myself. And I needed to start depending on myself.
Taking Responsibility for Our Own Emotions
When we are unhealthily dependent on others — it then becomes all too easy to hold other people responsible for our emotions.
We do this to justify our reactions. A good example of this is when we blow up out of anger, and then justify it by saying “You made me angry.”
When other people do things that upset us, they are of course responsible for their words and actions.
But the only person responsible for our emotions (and how we respond to them) is ourself.
This doesn’t mean we should blame ourselves. In fact — self blame is itself a response to the emotion of shame. Instead, we can choose to respond to our own shame with kindness.
When I realised how my own actions had negatively affected me — I certainly felt shame. I responded with blame: “How could you do this to yourself?”
I started to judge myself for judging myself! (Old habits die hard)
But when my therapist encouraged me to move away from blame and into empathy, I was able to see the truth:
I was a young person who (like so many) didn’t feel good enough. I didn’t know that there was an internal solution to this problem, so I sought an external one. I tried my best. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, least of all myself. All this self destruction didn’t come from being ‘stupid’ or ‘selfish’ or ‘bad’. It simply came from a place of need. I needed love.
Once I could see all this, the next step was quite simple:
To give myself that love.
Letting Go of Negative Self Beliefs
Ok — you know how I said the next step was simple? I didn’t say it was easy!
Radical Self Love is a wonderful, never ending journey. But it can’t even get started without a good dash of Self Acceptance (which again — isn’t easy!)
In her book ‘Radical Compassion’ — Dr Tara Brach encourages us to see what happens when we let go of negative beliefs about ourselves.
What would my life be like without this belief?
Who would I become if I lived without this belief?
But people are often scared to release their negative self beliefs, because they think that they are giving themselves a ‘free pass’ for harmful habits or behaviours.
To this, Dr Brach eloquently responds with:
There’s a world of difference between the wisdom of discernment and the aversion of judgement. Discernment tells us, “When I insist on having things my way, my partner withdraws and becomes cold and distant.” Judgement says, “Wanting things my own way means I’m selfish — a bad person.” Judgement brands our fundamental being.
Instead of making a self judgement based on our flaw or fault, Dr Brach advises us to ‘discover the vulnerability that drives it’ and ‘awaken your capacity for self compassion.’
So we can discern our faults without judging ourselves. We can be compassionate to ourselves and also recognise the consequences of our actions.
When we let go of our negative self beliefs, we unlock and open the heavy gates that have kept us from being able to love ourselves, and we start to heal.
We become better friends to ourselves and to those around us.
In A Nutshell
If you think you might have an unhealthy dependency on the love and affection of others, take some time to consider the following:
- It is never healthy to depend on others for our sense of self worth.
- The only person responsible for our emotions is ourself.
- Just because negative self beliefs feel real, that doesn’t make them true.
- When we let go of our negative self beliefs, we open the door to self love.
- Self love is the most sustainable love in the world.
- It’s fine to depend on people — as long as one of those people is you!
You can read more about how to practice Radical Self Love here.
