Why Your Feelings Are Always Real And Your Actions Still Count

Ever been told “your feelings are valid” and felt both seen and confused? We dig into that tension with a clear, compassionate guide to emotions, awareness, and accountability. As a child and adolescent psychotherapist, I walk through why feelings are always real, why behavior still carries consequences, and how the space between the two is where growth actually happens.

We start by reframing emotions as signals from the brain and nervous system, not verdicts or moral acts. Then we tackle a common trap: assuming that valid feelings justify any reaction. From there, we explore awareness as the middle ground that turns raw affect into insight and choice. You’ll hear how kids “borrow” an adult’s mind to learn whether big emotions are survivable, and how our face, tone, and posture either transmit safety or shut a child down. Mentalization takes center stage as we practice seeing the mind behind behavior—asking what anger protects, what fear signals, and what cannot yet be said in words.

The conversation gets practical for adult relationships too. We look at joining the dots: understanding what underpins another person’s reaction while owning the impact of our actions. Along the way, we unpack how suppressed emotions don’t disappear; they leak through displacement, irritability, control, and repeated patterns. Clear boundaries help: anger is not wrong, but harming others is; jealousy is human, but controlling someone isn’t; fear is natural, but letting it steer every choice narrows your life. By naming feelings, staying with them, and choosing a response aligned with values, we build psychological safety for ourselves and for our children.

If you want to raise emotionally resilient kids, unlearn old scripts like “don’t cry,” and make your relationships safer and more honest, this conversation offers a grounded roadmap. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs it, and leave a quick review to tell us which insight helped you most.

Transcript

Valid Feelings Versus Accountable Behavior

How Children Learn Emotions From Adults

Mentalization: Seeing The Mind Behind Acts

Joining The Dots And Taking Responsibility

Repression, Displacement, And Leaks

Patterns Born From Buried Emotions

Anger, Jealousy, Fear: Feel Versus Act

Building Emotional Safety For Children

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello, this is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist. Welcome back. This podcast is about feelings, those emotional states that don't conform to logic. I learned very early on that others seem to have some kind of authority where what one should or should not feel is concerned. As I grew up, I learned that that's really not how it works. And as shocking as it may seem, no one person can define that which is or is not the legitimate feeling. Feelings are emotional reactions which are aroused by the central nervous system and the structure of the brain. Now, sometimes people will say things like, Your feelings are valid. In other words, we'll just say, Well, thanks very much. And I want to explore why, in a sense, it's true and also why at first glance it doesn't quite make sense. So let's begin somewhere clear. Whatever you feel, it's not wrong. Not sometimes, not depending upon approval and not depending on whether or not others agree. My feelings and people's feelings exist without the need for validation. If you feel sadness, it's real. If you're angry, it's real. If you feel fear, jealousy, relief, resentment, love, confusion, it's real. A feeling can't be incorrect because a feeling isn't a judgment. Sometimes I hear people say things like you are making me feel, or what you're saying is making me feel, or what you're doing causes me to feel. Okay, that's a starting point. I'm not questioning the fact that you feel what you feel, what you do with that in terms of the responsibility for its origins is something else. So a feeling can't be incorrect because it's not a judgment, it's not a decision, it's not a moral act, it's an internal event. And internal events do not require permission to exist. But here's where the confusion often begins, because when people hear all feelings are valid, they may very well assume that this means all reactions are justified, all behavior is acceptable, all impulses should be followed, and that just simply isn't true. So although the feelings are legitimate, they're real, behavior is accountable. And between feeling and behavior lies something profoundly important, and that's called awareness. Now, feelings can't be judged, but they can be understood because a feeling is a signal. It tells you something is happening inside you. It may tell you something hurts, something matters, something feels threatened, something feels lost or unseen. But the feeling itself is not the problem. The difficulty arises when feelings are denied or disowned or acted out without awareness or projected onto others. Hence the you made me feel. Actually, I did something and you felt. They just simply feel. And in the beginning, they can't manage those feelings alone. So it's almost as if they borrow the mind of the adult. Because when a child is overwhelmed, they look toward the parent not just for comfort but for meaning. When the parent's face, tone, posture, and emotional responses tell the child, is this feeling safe? Am I safe? Can this be understood and survived? When the adult responds with calm awareness, the child learns, My feelings are real, but they don't destroy me. When the adult responds with fear, anger, dismissal, rejection, shouting, the child may learn my feelings are wrong. I'm too much. Therefore, my feelings must be hidden. And from this point forward, emotional life becomes distorted. Now the term mentalization is something I've used in previous podcasts, and those who are interested, Google Peter Fodegy, who was very influential in the developing of the concept of mentalization and mentalization-based therapy. But mentalization is the ability to understand that behind the behavior there is a mind. Behind reactions, there are feelings. Behind feelings, there are meanings. And this applies not just to ourselves, but also to our children. So when a child is angry, we do not see defiance. Well, we may see the defiance in terms of the expression of the feeling. But we might also ask, what is the anger protecting? What's going on underneath? What can't yet be said in words? And when adults mentalize themselves, they begin to ask, why did that affect me so strongly? What does that touch inside me? What did I feel before I reacted? And these are very intelligent questions, intelligent in the sense that in order to do that, we have to move from the feeling state into the thinking state. And so, for example, in adult relationships, when a person reacts to something we've done and expresses what they feel, the question here is what is it that underpins that? What explains that? And it might be hard to do because if the person reacts towards us with anger or distress, on the one hand, it is relevant to think about what is underneath all of that, but also we have to think what was my part in that? What was it I did? That's called joining the dots. And when people can join the dots, it's really important because it helps their capacity to mentalize. Because how we behave and however we justify how we behave, our behavior impacts upon others, and it is going to arouse feelings. And there and that's fine, but what's also fine is to take responsibility for how our actions have affected others. And whatever they're feeling, we have a part to play in that. Now, this is not about being responsible for the other person's feelings, it's about being responsible for our own actions. This is very important because when we translate this into the way in which we want our children to grow and to be able to have healthy relationships, even if as a parent you can't manage that yourself very easily. What we're doing is we're equipping our children to be interpersonally robust. And this is where awareness begins. In my work and in my own life, I've learned some very important things. One of them is that feelings do not disappear when ignored or rationalized, they don't go underground. And if they do go underground, they don't become weaker. They become unseen drivers of behavior and they fester. That means they get more powerful. When Freud was developing his groundworking, his groundbreaking work in psychoanalysis, he talked about a defense mechanism known as displacement. And he went back to Greek mythology and quoted Archimedes, the Greek mathematician, who was the person responsible for understanding and communicating the theory of displacement. And it was when he jumped in a bath and observed the water that went over the edges of the bath that he realized that a mathematical equation to do with mass and pressure could be understood in terms of displacement. Psychologically, in very simple language, Freud said, well, if you push stuff down that's come gonna come out over the sides, feelings are no different. Push them down, they will find expression. I've seen parents terrified of their own anger. I've seen parents ashamed at the way they treated their children when their children were very young. And those feelings when not realized, acknowledged, and understood get repeatedly expressed in one form or another. I've seen children ashamed of their sadness. Adults who learned long ago that certain emotions were unacceptable, and so they buried them. But as I've said, varied feelings don't vanish, they leak out. They come out as irritability, withdrawal, anger, control, emotional distance, and often the person doesn't know why, but they just keep repeating the same patterns of behavior, which then cause them to re-experience those feelings. And what changes everything is not controlling feelings, and it's about turning towards them with curiosity and with compassion. Now, the difference between feeling and acting, and let's be clear about this: feeling anger isn't wrong. If you've been treated badly, feeling anger is perfectly reasonable. But if you hurt someone as a consequence, that's wrong. Feeling jealousy isn't wrong, but controlling someone because of it is. Feeling fear isn't weakness, but letting fear dictate your life is going to be limiting. Feelings are signals, awareness gives you choice. And when adults develop awareness, they pass something invaluable to children. That's emotional safety, because the child learns big feelings can exist and still be held. Now, when we say I can see you're upset, or that feels scary, or you're angry and you're struggling, we're not approving behavior, we're just simply legitimizing the experience. When experience is legitimized, the child doesn't need to fight to prove that it's real. And this is the beginning of emotional regulation, self-understanding, and psychological safety. When adults struggle with feelings, some of them were taught, don't cry, don't be silly, you're being too sensitive, be strong, if only you were like your brother or your sister. So the adult grows, but the emotional system remains unhurt. And often what's rejected in that is the self, which becomes difficult to tolerate in the child. And the parent who can't bear their own anger may fear the child's anger. The parent who learned to suppress sadness may struggle when the child cries. But here, awareness becomes transformative because when adults allow their own feelings to be seen safely, they become more able to hold the feelings of their children. Whenever she unraveled, I never questioned, I listened and I stayed still. And what that told me was here was a person who had never been in a situation where she had learned that her feelings were tolerable. Therefore, when she experienced them, she couldn't tolerate them. So what matters is not whether or not you feel, because you will feel, it's not whether your feelings are logical, because that's not how it works. What matters is can you notice the feeling? Can you name it and stay with it without being overwhelmed? Can you understand what it's telling you? Can you choose your response rather than be driven by impulse? And this is awareness, mentalization, and psychological maturity. Your feelings aren't wrong, your child's feelings aren't wrong. Feelings are messages, not verdicts, they're signals, not commands, they're experiences, not dangers. And when feelings are understood, they become manageable. When feelings are manageable, relationships become safer. Thank you for listening. I hope this helps.