Our Mad Need for Validation
And how to prevent Prefrontal Cortex Hijacking
Thanks for asking for what you need. In my last essay, I asked you what I should cover, and 42% of you wanted to learn more about our need for validation.
What a timely choice! (Check the bottom of today’s essay to vote for my next deep dive topic and find more resources).
Also, welcome to all of you new subscribers! Glad to have you here, where I write essays about recovering our human health and spirit with science and common sense.
So let’s jump right into it.
Do you know that warm, fuzzy feeling of being in a concert, stadium, rave, or a political demonstration?
That is the dopamine of being validated. We feel less crazy, less alone, less like fuck-ups, for a brief period.
It is also how the ones who need it the most end up ruling us, especially now, with algorithms that validate us and show us a false image of a validating world.
Those who have not addressed their core needs will become hijacked into an anxious state. Those who do will be able to sustain this wave of change and make it to the other side while staying healthy.
But what if there was a way we could give back to ourselves that feeling we seek and stop chasing money, accolades, and our boss’s validation?
What if we could swap the madness dopamine for the certainty of serotonin?
I know this is possible. Life is a much bigger game on the other side of that. And we can’t access that better place without going back into the past, and asking - what is driving that need for validation?
Where does our need for validation come from?
Like you, someone bullied me once upon a time. Long before I was this confident, this strong, this capable, someone stole my watch, kicked me in the balls, and made fun of me.
Before I was successful, I had spent many hours hearing my parents lecture me about the perils of failing in this world. To them, good grades were the way out of misery, and being a “good boy” who followed the rules was their first step towards nirvana.
I excelled in school, spent hours with books reading my social anxiety away, graduated from medical school with flying colors, and had a six-figure salary at 25 years old.
As I grew older, what was once a guttural fear of middle school playground violence, or an emotional yearning for parental love, had become a very civil Yes sir to my boss or to a healthcare industry that was crushing me, sucking my gumption dry.
And then my body started breaking down.
It said No. Oh fuck no!
Depression, back pain, and pre-diabetes.
Once it did, I had to account for all the “Yeses”.
That accounting.
That accountability to myself.
It changed everything.
I found a new compass, one that was internal, albeit less socially palatable. Following this newly acquired internal GPS brings me to my life today - one where the material possessions have all washed away, and forced me to realize my true worth.
My self-worth runs in an elemental layer underneath the degrees, the bank accounts, and the number of followers. It carries me beyond who I know, what my school grades are, and what everyone thinks.
It straightens my back, boosts my metabolism, and nourishes my soul and purpose.
Many people who validated me before don’t seem to like it when I experience life that fully. That is the tradeoff, I lost a lot of people. It threatens them. Our whole society is running on that validation.
However, I also realized that one does not need a million friends.
You need one good one, maybe two, three if you’re lucky.
All the others are waves that come and go in the unforgiving sea of relationships powered by our need for validation.
Maybe I’m just getting old.
But I like it.
And myself.
A lot.
Questions of the Day:
1- Do you notice yourself saying “I am fine” when you feel like shit?
2- Do you notice yourself missing a meal, skipping sleep, or even holding on to your pee to finish work or send out an email, etc.?
3- Do you catch yourself when scrolling social media, after comparing yourself to someone else?
What my clients teach me
The more I work with immigrants who have achieved everything we are told to yearn for (the house, the children, the cars, the Bay Area home), the more I see how this need for validation pushes us to do unnatural things.
People tell me a lot of their stories now that are all too familiar on the webinar series I currently run: A pharmacist that skips lunch while working with patients, a tech HR leader sees pictures of others in their jobs and feels like she isn’t as good, and an engineer keeps denying the truth of what he wants to please his boss in the face of layoffs.
It is easy to judge them (or judge ourselves) when we observe such strange behaviors..
However, when I ask them about the underlying needs, their answers usually sound like:
I needed to feel secure
I needed to feel safe
I needed to feel needed.
I needed to feel seen.
These are very human needs. We all have them.
As immigrants, especially those of us coming from collectivist backgrounds, we often leave home with a longing - a desire to receive validation from our community, family, or friends.
A client from India recently told me that the trauma work we did was about “unraveling the layers of the onion” that he had accumulated over his years in Silicon Valley.
That reminded me of a story shared by Tara Brach about the golden Buddha covered in clay. As the story goes, a group of thieves heard that there was a Buddha statue made out of gold in a temple. They broke into the temple to steal it, but ended up finding a worthless clay statue in its place. Frustrated, they left the scene and blamed their sources.
The story reveals in the end how the temple caretaker had outsmarted them: the Buddha statue was indeed made of gold, but the caretaker covered it with clay to make it seem worthless.
You have the golden Buddha inside of you, we all do.
But something happens along the way and creates a layer of clay that we then have to remember how to uncover.
While we learn to persevere and overcome our insecurities, something gets left behind.
And boy, do we need to address the madness of validation right now
An Unaddressed Need for Validation Begets Violence
Today, at 37, I look at a world of “good boys and girls” who work their assess off, pay taxes on time, own their homes, do their HIIT exercises, and floss their teeth, and yet find themselves unable to enjoy the lives they have created.
Even worse, find themselves bedridden with cancer, heart disease or a crippling anxiety at the ages of 40, 50 or 60.
I have had to lose everything that supported my narcissistic image to realize that beneath an innocent need for validation, lurks a neurotic nature: One that propagates violence, bullies, and delusional narratives.
On a small scale, the need for validation generates envy, isolation, and discomfort.
On a systemic scale, it generates fascism, genocide, and war.
In a world where those who seek validation (and have unaddressed traumas) rule the world, there has been no more of an imperative for us to overcome the madness of our need for validation than today.
Elon Musk was beaten up as a child, Trump grew up with a cold and distant mother, and Hillary Clinton had a mom who scolded her for crying after being bullied by children. It’s true, look it up! We vote for the most traumatized.
These are the popular examples.
However, our lives are filled with people who were bullied when they were young, and end up being toxic bosses or partners. This violence is in our politics, and our work environments, and it is in our language.
We live in a culture of violence, brewing under a veil of victimhood, and that whole complex is one of the heads of a Medusa that lives inside of us with all of her unmet needs. She tries to satisfy them through validation from others.
We are not brave enough to feed our inner monster, and we project her onto the world.
Mainly under the guise of work.
Some examples of how we identify with violence through language at work are:
“Crushing” the deadline.
Running the “campaign”.
“Targeting” your audience.
Being a straight “shooter”.
Do you see how violence and our need to be validated intertwine with business and marketing terms?
Some may say that violence exists in our bones, is a part of our legacy, and was a historical imperative to bring humanity to its techno-orgasmic existence.
But the way I see it, our violence is a matter of unaddressed validation.
Validation that we could not give ourselves, and therefore, we demanded it of the world.
And that is how we are controlled.
That is how we turn against each other.
That is how we forget our dreams, hobbies, and visions.
As identity politics continue to separate us, there has never been a better time to reclaim our prefrontal cortex from the news and the fangs of “influencers” who prey on our old wounds and replace our need for validation with meaningless products, courses, and…headlines.
The Science of Validation (and neurosis):
The future belongs to those who can overcome anxiety. I firmly believe that.
First: The Neurology: Pre-frontal-what-now?
Please refer to Exhibit A - your brain:
That red area in the center of your brain is one we share with animals and is one of the oldest parts of a mammalian brain. It’s called the Limbic system, and one of its roles is detecting threats based on memories and emotions.
When it does, it activates the brain stem (the bottom red area) that connects it to all the functions of your human body (heart, lungs, nerves, hormones).
This works really well for animals: You may remember my goats. When they see a coyote, the limbic system tells them to run, and they activate the fight or flight mode and escape.
This part of our brain has no idea what the difference is between a lion, a news article about deportation, or the stock market crashing.
It responds in the same way: Flushes the system with stress hormones, activates the nervous system, and prepares us for running.
It is great, except in today’s world, we activate it all the time.
Enter your Prefrontal Cortex (the green part), responsible for rationality, personality, and other cognitive functions. This part is a more recent feature of humans. It gives us the edge to create systems and build the world that we live in.
It is a double-edged sword because it can also give false messages to the limbic system. If it is hijacked by a news headline, or the feeling of being “an imposter,” then it translates something we read into “DANGER”!
It then activates the limbic system, and there we go again, putting our nervous machinery into action!
However, there is a way out of this, and the pre-frontal cortex is also our way out of this, if instead of Danger we use it to direct our body to calm us the F down (see below!).
Second: The Psychology of yearning for validation
I had the pleasure of meeting a popular author and psychiatrist named Dr. Mark Goulston, who taught me about the syndrome of disavowed yearning.
Disavow: To deny responsibility for or connection with something.
Yearning: A strong feeling of wanting something.
“They often come from parents where their dad was too busy with his job or career and their mother lacked warmth. Often these were not bad parents. The dad was worried about earning a living and so was focused more on his boss or his customers and clients than his family. The mom came from a mother who also lacked warmth (it was often a condition passed on for generations).”
We lose the ability to reconcile our old fears and instead disavow that yearning to our bosses, politicians, and work.
So what can we do about all that jazz?
1- Make your prefrontal cortex work for you, not against you
The next time you recognize yourself worrying about something you have no control over, use that beautiful rational prefrontal cortex of yours to engage your body and sensations instead of your fear response. Feel your muscles, breathe, hold yourself, remind yourself that you are ok right now, do something that gives you more resilience, even if the future is looking dim. Avoid over-identification with the fear.
2- Measure Stress and Inflammation in your body
If you are wondering how stressed you are and whether that somatic healing stuff is working at all, or just more BS wellness stuff, then get some labs done (especially C-Reactive Protein, Homocysteine, and Urine Cortisol). A wearable can also be a useful tool to measure Heart Rate Variability and Resting Heart Rate. More on all that in a future essay.
3- Face your Fears. Heal Your Wounds
Easier said than done, but you don’t need a lifetime of therapy either. Look up an IFS or Compassionate Inquiry, or Somatic Experiencing practitioner, and start understanding the root need for validation in your system. Change the narrative. Build a new future!
If you are an immigrant working in the STEM field, you can measure your over-identification levels, get me to order you wholesale labs, get IFS coaching, AND join a group of other people doing that work together.