Validate The Person In Order To Have A Relationship

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           I love to look at my daughter as she is, an emotionally and physically 16 month old toddler. This means she doesn't understand everything I say, and she needs patience and compassion. Life is hard for her in her own right- having to figure out the world and what basic things we do and say mean and are. I cannot expect her to understand that she will break or spill things and that makes me have to work hard to clean up. She is just exploring and seeing how things work. Sometimes she cries and screams when she doesn't get her way, and I cannot expect her to understand that it is only temporarily bad and things happen. Kids are very emotional and live in the moment, so they are very strongly affected by everything. Paired with feeling incapable of doing things for themselves, and the frustration of wanting to learn, makes it easy for them to get hurt. She understands who she is, a child learning things and day by day exploring with her mother how the world is, and I need to respect that. Thinking that she needs to know how to do things before her time of knowing is unrealistic, and will cause her to feel inadequate in how she is. I cannot say things that hint at her being incapable in the present, such as, "Poor you that you cannot get dressed on your own." It is just a fact and not a bad thing. Validation for who the person is is key to having a relationship.

        I wish my adoptive mother would have acknowledged that I was an orphan and lost my birth mother growing up. It would have saved me from feeling fake for having sadness all the time, because she did not validate that it was okay for me to be sad. It made her feel like a bad Mom if I was sad. But it had nothing to do with her, it was just who I was because of my trauma. Now I am left trying to please everyone all the time because I don't always see my self, and it's worth because I was never validated for whom I was. I noticed this this morning when I thought of whom I was, because I have so much depression that blocks me from feeling good. It is because I was never acknowledged as a person so I feel phony and out of place all the time. Even now, I am doubting my feelings as true because I may just be "overdramatic." But if I don't let them be real, I will keep denying myself of love and connection because I need the full me if I want to feel fulfilled around others. We cannot accept from the outside what we do not give ourselves inside. So I keep holding my pain and looking at it, so that others won't have to do the job for me and feel bad for me all the time. It's time I lived for myself. It's not selfish to see your needs, we need to in order to live. I am so used to tellin myself to shut up, that my emotions "don't belong" because of how others took them, that I stifled my voice. Here's my voice, and I will keep hearing myself as long as I need to.

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