Not all feelings are valid

And not everything needs to be pathologised

Contemporary mental health discourse features two prominent tenets: that all feelings are valid, and that pretty much anything that affects us in some way can be labelled an impact on our mental health.

I can come up with two interpretations for ‘all feelings are valid’. The first is that the feeling the person is experiencing is real; this definition is truistic: well yes, duh, someone who is feeling angry is really feeling angry. To say that the feeling is valid in this sense doesn’t impart any new information, and is therefore useless. The second interpretation is that the feeling is reasonable or justifiable: it’s its cause that is valid, and its intensity is not to be criticised. The person is right to feel angry or sad or happy. But this is as obviously false as the first definition is obviously true.

To see why, let’s examine a few feelings, starting with anger. There are often valid reasons to be angry, most notably injustice: it’s reasonable to feel angry if you (or someone else) are being treated badly. But anger is often either triggered by or directed towards people who have done nothing to deserve ire. I vividly remember a poster against domestic violence, showing victims of abuse: one showed a battered mother and child, with the quote ‘because the soup was too hot’. Is it in anyway valid or reasonable or justifiable for a husband and father to feel that angry for such a trivial cause, let alone to express their anger with violence?

The same is true with positive emotions, such as happiness. One of my son’s friends was giddily telling her friends how she has fun getting her brother in trouble, by rilling him so he misbehaves, or by straight up lying to her mother. Should I have told my son that this is a valid feeling of joy? Of course not: I did what any reasonable person would have done, which is to explain that being happy by making other people miserable is bad, and should not be celebrated and encouraged.

I don’t think I’ll get much pushback on these two, but here comes the contentious one: sadness. The case against validating all feelings of sadness is harder, because unlike anger or joy, sadness does not directly harm third parties: it’s a much more personal feeling (though it can cause pain and harm relationships indirectly). But I think it’s wrong to claim that all feelings of sadness are justifiable for two reasons. First, I think that such feelings can be disrespectful. There are people who lack food or shelter or clean water. There are people caught in war zones. There are people growing up without loving families. There are people drowning in debt and living paycheck to paycheck. Claiming that the sadness felt by a white collar worker in a stable loving relationship because they had a stressful day at work is valid in the same way that the pain felt by those in truly unfortunate circumstances is valid feels deeply insensitive and wrong to me. Of course, it’s true that no matter who you are and how difficult your personal situation may be, there is always someone whose lot in life is even worse; does this mean you’re never entitled to feel sad? No, of course not. But it does mean you should always remind yourself of your context, and you should always have some perspective. (I’m a big believer in the glad game!)

Second, I believe that constantly validating your own feelings of sadness, or being surrounded by friends who do so for you, only reinforces these feelings. Going from ‘this feeling of sadness is valid’ to wallowing in self-pity isn’t a giant leap.

(All this doesn’t mean that your response to a friend or family member who is feeling sad has to lack compassion. You can acknowledge their feelings, and help them examine them, without agreeing that they are right to feel the way they feel. My son will sometimes say he doesn’t feel loved; of course I’ll listen to him, and ask him what makes him feel this way, and talk to him about it. But I won’t tell him his feeling is valid! It’s absolutely not! That child has been drowning in love since the moment he was born, when the hospital room was flooded with visitors and flowers (much to my wife’s annoyance).

The same applies when processing one’s own emotions. Of course I get sad, and of course the causes of my sadness are extremely trivial compared to someone who’s country is being bombed. This doesn’t lead to self-loathing for feeling an undeserved sadness, but it does arrest any creeping feelings of self-pity.).

This brings me to the habit of treating everything as a serious detriment to mental health. I’ve seen an analogy between physical and mental health, which is to say we should be as aware of and careful with the latter as we are with the former. However, some people have really stretched this: ‘no-one blinks when you have a check up with your GP, so why shouldn’t it be the same when you see a therapist?’ But I don’t go to my GP every time I sneeze; nor do I have weekly check ups. Similarly, having a bad day at work, or feeling blue after a bad break up, or even feeling scared after a traumatic incident are normal occurrences and reactions, and not something to be pathologised. I’ve heard of people taking sick days off work for mental health reasons after a bad meeting; this seems wrong to me. Feeling sad or stressed isn’t abnormal. I fully understand that some people are not cut out for high-pressure jobs, and I also agree there can be exceptionally stressful events at work which call for prolonged leave; but the answer to the former is to pick a less intense job, and the latter should be rare.

I know I risk coming across as a damn-these-snowflakes boomer (even though I’m a millennial); but although I have to admit I do occasionally feel frustration at what I perceive as abuse of mental wellbeing policies, my primary concern here is not that people are using ‘mental health’ as an excuse to slack off: it’s that we are not teaching people to be self-reliant and resilient. We are not teaching them to process normal emotions in a healthy way. We are telling them they are incapable of doing so, and that they ought to seek help from experts and professionals at the first sign of trouble.

So, no, all feelings are not valid, nor do you need to seek professional help whenever you experience them. And even when feelings are valid, they can be damaging if they are not processed. Envy or even resentment can be justifiable feelings; but holding on to them, and letting them turn into anger and bitterness is worse than pointless, it’s damaging to your psyche. When you feel envy, you can let the feeling take over you, kill your motivation, and use it to make excuses for yourself; or you can process it and push yourself to do better. At the end of the day, you have a choice on how to respond to your emotions. As my son was told at school, feelings are fish swimming in a pond: remember that you are not the fish, you’re the pond¹.

1. I really should end on that note, but I can’t help adding that when my son told me this, my question was ‘why can’t I be the happy fish?’