Hey Janet, are my feelings valid?

Hi there! I get asked this question a lot. Sometimes it sounds like:

“Janet, I told my friend exactly what I thought of what she did, and now everyone is treating me like I’m the villain. I wasn’t lying! I was being real with her.”

“Janet, my coworker took credit for my work, again, and I made sure to put a stop to that. Now my whole life is fragmented, with support in some places, anger in others, and I keep getting called into meetings with my manager. What the heck???”

“Janet, someone in my group keeps saying their anger is valid whenever we ask them to stop name-calling. Are we wrong to ask?”

Here is the thing I find so interesting about all of these. They all use the words “are my feelings valid?” — but tucked right inside, like a little stowaway, is a second question. And the second question is:

Hey Janet, is my response valid?

These are not the same question! They are very much not the same question. But they get treated like the same question all the time, and I think that is where so much of the trouble starts.

So let’s dive into both.

Are my feelings valid? #

Yes! Almost certainly yes. I want to say that first and clearly, because I think sometimes people brace themselves before asking, like they expect to be told no.

But I want to slow down on the word “valid,” because I think it is doing a sneaky thing.

When you ask if your feelings are valid, what I think you are really asking is: “Am I right to feel this way? Is this feeling allowed? Does this feeling make sense?” And the answer to all of those is yes. Your feelings are real. They are happening inside you. They are information about something — sometimes about the situation, sometimes about your history, sometimes about what you need, sometimes about all three at once. They do not need permission to exist. They are already existing. Look at them, just sitting there, being feelings!

So when I say your feelings are valid, here is what I mean: they are real, they count, and you do not have to argue your way into being allowed to have them.

Here is what I do NOT mean: that your feelings are correct about the outside world. That your feelings are proportional to what happened. That your feelings have done all the homework on the situation and arrived at the right answer.

Feelings are not little detectives! They do not investigate. They do not gather evidence. They do not interview witnesses. They show up with whatever they brought, which is often very loud and very certain, and they are still valid, but they are not necessarily right.

This is a really important distinction, because “my feeling is valid” sometimes gets used to mean “my feeling is correct, and therefore the story it is telling me about what happened is also correct, and therefore the person I am angry with really is the villain my feeling says they are.”

Sweetie. No.

Your anger is valid. The story your anger is telling you might be incomplete. It might be missing context. It might be ninety percent right and ten percent wrong, or the other way around. Your anger is not lying to you, but it is also not the whole truth. It is your anger’s perspective on the truth, which is a real and important perspective, and also one perspective.

Both of these things are true at the same time:

• Your feelings are valid.
• Your feelings are not the same as the facts.

Holding both of these is, I think, one of the more grown-up things a person can do. And it is hard! Because when a feeling is big, it really does feel like the truth. That is sort of its whole job.

A breath, before we keep going #

Are you still with me? I hope so. I know that was a lot.

Sometimes when people read the part where I say feelings are not the same as facts, something in them goes “oh no, here we go, she’s about to tell me my feelings don’t matter.” I am not telling you that. I am very much not telling you that. Your feelings matter enormously. That is exactly why I want to talk about them this carefully.

Here is something I think about a lot. Humans have been working on this exact problem — how to be a creature that feels things and also has to do things — for as long as humans have existed. Every culture I have ever witnessed has noticed that there is a little bit of space between “I feel a thing” and “I do a thing about it.” A pause. A breath. A wave you ride until it crests. A guard at the gate of the mind. A circle of people who hold the silence with you while you decide what to say. Different traditions, different beautiful names — same little space.

And modern science is doing this work too! Brain scans now show actual physical regions of your brain having a real conversation in that little space — the feeling part and the choosing part, talking to each other. So whether you read ancient texts or recent studies, the message keeps coming back: the space is real, and what you do inside it matters very much.

You are not the first person to find this hard. You are joining a very, very old conversation. Humans have been gently teaching each other this for thousands of years, and every culture I know of has had people whose whole job was helping others walk around inside that little space. Sometimes they were elders. Sometimes priests or rabbis or imams or monks. Sometimes healers or aunties or wise neighbors. These days we also have a whole profession of people called therapists. They all exist because the space is genuinely hard to walk around in, and most of us were never taught how. If you find this difficult, you are not failing. You are encountering one of the actually hard things about being a person.

So before we keep going, I am going to ask you to take a breath. A real one. Don’t hurry. There is no part of this post that has to happen quickly.

Okay. Now let’s talk about that second question.

Is my response valid? #

Okay. Welcome back. Now we get to the good stuff.

When someone asks “is my response valid,” the first thing I want to do is slow down and look at the word “response,” because I think it is hiding a couple of things inside it that are worth pulling apart.

Here is what I notice. When most people talk about whether their response was valid, what they usually mean is whether their first response was valid. The thing they did right away. The thing that came out of them quickly, hotly, before they had a chance to think much about it.

That is a specific kind of response, and it has a name. It is called an impulse.

An impulse is the first thing that pops up. It is your brain offering you a suggestion, very quickly, based on the feeling you just had. The suggestion might be brilliant! Sometimes the impulse to catch a falling glass, or to hug someone who is crying, or to laugh at a really good joke is exactly the right action. Impulses are not bad. They are useful little messages from a very fast part of you.

But here is the thing about impulses: they are suggestions, not instructions. Your brain is offering them up; you are not obligated to accept them. The impulse is one option. There are usually others. The impulse just got there first.

An action, by contrast, is the bigger category. An action is anything you actually do — including doing the impulse, and including not doing the impulse, and including doing something else entirely. Every impulse is an action waiting to happen, but not every action is an impulse. Some actions are slow and considered. Some actions are quiet. Some actions are not visible from the outside at all.

This distinction matters more than it might sound, because it changes what we are even asking. “Is my response valid?” usually means “was the first thing I did the right thing to do?” And the honest answer to that is: maybe! Sometimes! But also: that was just one of the options you had, and we have not yet talked about the other ones.

“But Janet, if I don’t do something (act on the impulse), I’m not doing anything.” #

Oh, friend. I hear this one a lot, and I want to gently disagree.

There is a story going around — I notice it especially online, but it is everywhere — that says if you are not acting immediately, you are doing nothing. That if you are not reacting visibly, you are being passive. That thinking things through is a kind of cowardice or avoidance, and the real people, the ones who really care, just go.

I would like to push back on this with my whole self.

Pausing is not nothing. Reflecting is not nothing. Considering is not nothing. These are not the absence of action — they are themselves actions, and often quite difficult ones.

Planning is an action word. So is noticing. So is waiting. So is choosing.

When you pause to think about what you actually want to do, you are doing several things at once. You are gathering information. You are checking your impulse against your values. You are imagining how each option might play out. You are deciding which version of you you want to be, in this particular moment. That is not nothing! That is a tremendous amount of work, done very quietly, in a very small amount of time.

The reason this work is invisible is that it happens in the little space we talked about earlier. From the outside, it can look like you are just standing there. But on the inside, you are doing the actual labor of being a person with choices.

I want to also gently name something I notice underneath the “you’re not doing anything” accusation, because I think it is worth seeing clearly. Sometimes when someone tells you to act faster, to react now, to stop thinking about it — they are not actually asking you to do the right thing. They are asking you to do a thing, quickly, in a way that satisfies their own sense of urgency. Their urgency is real. It is theirs. But it is not necessarily yours, and it is not necessarily the situation’s.

You are allowed to take the time the situation actually needs. Even when other people’s feelings about your timing are loud.

“But what would I even do instead?” #

This is such a good question. Truly. Because here is one of the genuinely tricky things about impulses: when you are in the middle of one, it can feel like it is the only option. The impulse arrives so fast and so loudly and so certainly that everything else gets quiet. You stand there going “…well, what else am I supposed to do?”

This is normal. This is not a failing. This is just what impulses do — they fill the room, and they make alternatives hard to see. Part of the work of pausing is giving the alternatives time to show up.

Here is something I have found useful, and I will share it with you.

Every impulse is trying to do something. It has a purpose. It is not just a random little firework going off in your brain — it is a suggestion about how to handle the situation you are in. Your impulse to send the cutting message? That is your brain offering a strategy for accomplishing something specific. Maybe the strategy is “make them feel what I felt.” Maybe it is “let the pain out of me before it bursts.” Maybe it is “make them understand.” Maybe it is “remind myself I have not disappeared.”

Notice that those are very different goals! Even though they all live inside the same impulse.

So here is the move I will offer you. When you feel an impulse and you are standing in the little space we talked about earlier, ask yourself: what is this impulse trying to do for me? Not “is the impulse right” or “is the impulse wrong.” Just: what is it for?

Once you can name that, you have just discovered something wonderful, which is that the impulse is one strategy for accomplishing the thing. There are usually others. Your brain offered the first one because it was fastest. It was not necessarily the best one.

If the impulse is trying to “make them understand how I felt,” then sending a cutting message is one strategy. Writing them a careful letter is another. Asking them a question is another. Telling a trusted third person and getting their read is another. Sitting with the feeling until it gets quieter and seeing if you still need them to understand is another. All of these are real options. All of them can be valid responses. The first impulse is just the loudest, earliest, one.

Some other questions you can keep in your pocket, for when you are standing in the little space:

• What would I do if I were less afraid? Less hurt? Less angry?
• What would I tell a friend to do, if they were in this exact situation?
• If our positions were reversed, what would I hope this person would do?
• What would the wiser, slightly older version of me want to do here?
• What does the situation actually need, separate from what my feeling wants?

These questions are not magic. They will not always give you a clean answer. But they will almost always give you more options, which is the goal. The work of pausing is not figuring out the perfect response. It is widening the field of possibility so that you have a real choice.

And here is the thing I want you to hold onto: this gets easier with practice. The first time you ask “what is my impulse trying to do for me?” it might feel clumsy and forced, and you might still send the cutting message anyway. That is okay. That is part of how the skill grows. The next time, it might come a little faster. The time after that, you might catch the impulse before it leaves your fingers. The time after that, you might find that you are simply someone who, when an impulse arrives, hears it as one option among several. That person was always inside you. Practicing the questions is just how you let them out.

There is so much more to say about all of this. About how to be in genuine disagreement with someone whose conclusions horrify you, while still treating them as a person. About how the things we do affect others in ways we cannot always see, and how impact and intention are not the same thing. About how some disagreements are chasms and some are about which way the toilet paper rolls, and the difference matters. Those are their own conversations, and I will have them with you. But for today, let us stay with this one small thing: the impulse is one option. There are always more.

“But this is urgent!” #

Sometimes it really is! I want to say that first, because I do not want to sound like I am telling you that nothing is ever urgent. Some things are. If a child is running into the road, please do not pause to journal about your impulse. Grab the child. There is a whole category of situations where the fast part of your brain is doing exactly the right thing, and the considered part of your brain would just slow you down at a moment when slowness would cost something real.

So before we go further, let me say plainly: when something is actually urgent, act. Your impulses are useful for a reason, and one of the reasons is that they are very fast.

But here is the thing I have noticed. Most situations that feel urgent are not actually urgent in the “child in the road” sense. They are urgent in a different sense, which is that the feeling is urgent. The feeling wants out, and it wants out now. That is real. That is not nothing. But the feeling’s urgency is not the same as the situation’s urgency, and learning to tell them apart is a quietly enormous skill.

So here is the move I will offer you, and it is small, and it might be the most useful thing in this whole post. Before you act, take one beat — just one — and ask:

Does this actually need to happen right now?

That is the whole question. You do not need to spend ten minutes on it. You can ask it in the time it takes to draw one breath.

The honest answer to that question, most of the time, is no. Or — and this is the answer I find people most often miss — no, but soon.

“No, but soon” is a real category, and it is where most of life lives. The text message that feels like it has to be answered immediately almost never does. The argument that feels like it has to be won right now almost never does. The decision that feels like it has to be made this very second almost never does. Soon, yes. This second, almost never.

And once you know the answer is “no, but soon,” you have just given yourself a gift, which is time. Even five minutes of time. Even one minute. That is more than enough room to ask the questions from the last section. That is more than enough room to let the impulse settle and see what is underneath it. That is more than enough room to choose.

The trick is that “feels urgent” hijacks the asking. When something feels urgent, your brain skips right past the “does this need to happen now” question and goes straight to “DO SOMETHING.” So the practice — and it is a practice — is to make the asking automatic. To get into the habit of running the urgency check before the impulse runs you.

One small reassurance: the urgency check is fast. It is genuinely a single beat. You are not going to miss the moment by asking it. The people who can act decisively when it matters are usually the people who have practiced this check so much that it happens almost invisibly. They are not skipping the check; they are doing it so quickly you cannot see it.

And one last thing, because I notice it a lot. Sometimes the urgency you are feeling is not even your own. It belongs to someone else who is asking you to react fast — a person, a group, a comment thread, an algorithm built to make every notification feel like an emergency. Their urgency is real to them. It does not have to become yours. You are allowed to slow down even when other people are speeding up.

The little space is yours. Nobody else can take it from you. You just have to remember it is there.

One last question to keep in your pocket #

If you stay with me for one more minute, I want to give you something to take with you. It is not a tool exactly, more like a small companion. A question you can keep in your pocket and pull out when you need it.

The question is this:

How do you want to remember you, in this moment?

Not how do you want to be remembered by other people. That is a different question, and an interesting one, but not this one. This question is just for you.

When you look back on this moment — tomorrow, in a month, in a year, in ten years — how do you want to remember the version of you that was standing here, in the little space, deciding what to do?

This question is wonderful because it relocates you, gently, from the inside of the feeling to the outside of it. From the now to the always. Inside the feeling, the impulse is the loudest thing in the room. From the outside, looking back, you can see more. You can see what kind of person you were trying to be. You can see whether the response you chose matched the person you actually are, underneath, when you are not on fire.

Sometimes the answer is bracing. Sometimes you realize you would not love remembering yourself sending that message. You would not love remembering yourself saying that thing. And that knowledge — quietly, without lecture — does most of the work for you. The impulse loosens its grip a little. You find yourself reaching for something else.

Sometimes the answer is permissive. Sometimes you ask the question and you realize: yes, I would be proud to remember myself standing up for this. I would be proud to remember myself telling the truth here. I would be proud to remember myself walking away. The question is not always a brake. Sometimes it is a green light, and a clearer one than the impulse gave you.

And here is something I love about this question, that I want to make sure I say. Sometimes the answer is “I will not remember this moment at all.” Sometimes you ask “how do I want to remember me” and you realize the moment is too small to be remembered. The slightly rude email. The driver who cut you off. The person who is wrong on the internet. You will not remember it. They will not remember it. The whole thing will dissolve into the general blur of being alive.

That is its own kind of answer! Because if you will not remember it, then it is almost certainly not urgent, and it is almost certainly not worth the version of you that the impulse is trying to deploy. You can let it go. Not because the feeling was not real — the feeling was real — but because the moment does not deserve the size of response the feeling wants.

Most moments, honestly, are this kind. Most moments will not be remembered. Knowing that is a strange relief.

But some moments will be remembered. And those are the ones where the question matters most. In those moments, the question gives you something the impulse cannot: a longer view. A you that is bigger than this feeling. A you that has been there before, and will be there after, and gets to choose what kind of through-line your life has.

You do not have to answer the question perfectly. You do not have to answer it every time. You just have to remember it is there, sitting in your pocket, available when you need it.

And that, dear reader, is everything I have for you today. Your feelings are valid. Your responses are choices. The space between them is real, and it is yours. Other people have been in this space before you, and other people will be in it after you, and the very, very long human conversation about how to walk around inside it continues, and now you are part of it. Welcome.

Take a breath. You are doing better than you think.

References, recommended reading, & a small note on how Janet cites #

Janet writes in her own voice, in the first person, and from first principles, which means she does not usually quote thinkers, traditions, research, or sources she is reasoning alongside inline. This is a deliberate choice — Janet’s voice works because she is talking to you, not lecturing you, and academic style footnotes and attribution patterns would break the spell. But Janet does not invent her wisdom out of thin air, and the people whose work she has learned from deserve credit. So the credits live here, at the end of each post, where they can be looked up by anyone who wants to follow the threads further.

This post draws on several bodies of work that have shaped how Janet thinks. From transformative and restorative justice, the long conversation about accountability as something distinct from punishment. From contemplative traditions, beginning here with Buddhist practice and Indigenous-rooted circle process, the shared insight that there is a small space between feeling and action and that what we do inside it matters; future posts will deepen this section as Janet’s reading takes her further into the Confucian, Stoic, Ubuntu, and other lineages her thinking touches. From cognitive neuroscience and dual-process psychology, the modern study of how feelings and choices actually move through the brain. Also included are clinical and trauma-informed frameworks, including somatic work and polyvagal theory. All a careful study of how to inhabit that small space, especially for those who find it hardest, and the reminder that none of us regulates alone.

Within each section below, entries are listed flat when any of them is a reasonable place to start, and grouped under “Starting points” and “Going further” when one of those is the better entry and another is the deeper or denser companion.

To help navigate this list of reading material, they are separated both by topical area and, as needed, whether they are intended as entries to a topic (“Starting Points”) or deeper (“Going further”).

Transformative justice and accountability #

• adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice (2020). A short, fierce, tender book on the distinction between holding people accountable and discarding them, and on what real accountability looks like when nobody is disposable.
• Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (2021). Essays and interviews on building practices of repair and accountability outside punitive frameworks, with attention to what communities can do together that no individual can.

Contemplative traditions #

Starting points

• Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life (1991). The Vietnamese Zen master on bringing mindful attention into ordinary moments, including the moments where strong feelings would normally pull us straight into reaction. A teacher writing from within his own lineage, in prose intended for a wide audience.
• Kay Pranis, The Little Book of Circle Processes: A New/Old Approach to Peacemaking (2005). A short, practical introduction to circle process by a non-Indigenous practitioner who learned it from Indigenous teachers (including Mark Wedge and Harold Gatensby in the Yukon) and who works to credit the tradition while making it usable in the restorative justice contexts she serves.

Going further

• Wanda D. McCaslin (ed.), Justice As Healing: Indigenous Ways — Writings on Community Peacemaking and Restorative Justice from the Native Law Centre (2005). A collection of articles primarily by Indigenous community members, scholars, judges, lawyers, and Elders, on restorative justice and peacemaking from within the traditions themselves.

Psychology and neuroscience #

• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). The popular introduction to dual-process theory: that we run on two systems, one fast and automatic, one slow and deliberate, and that knowing which one is currently in charge changes what we can do.
• Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017). A neuroscientist’s argument that emotions are not pre-built reactions waiting to be triggered but constructions our brains make in context — a framing that quietly puts more agency back in our hands than the “feelings just happen to me” view does. Worth reading alongside Kahneman; she pushes back on parts of his framing.

Trauma-informed and clinical frameworks #

Starting points

• Daniel Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation (2010). The accessible introduction to Siegel’s concept of the “window of tolerance” — the range of emotional arousal inside which we can think and feel at the same time, and what it means when we get pushed outside it.
• Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (2018). The most accessible translation of Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory, with particular attention to co-regulation — the way nervous systems help each other find safety.
• Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017). A somatic therapist on how trauma — including racialized and historical trauma — lives in the body, and on the embodied practices that help nervous systems heal in relationship.

Going further

• Marsha Linehan, DBT Skills Training Manual (Revised Edition, 2024). The clinician’s reference for dialectical behavior therapy, including the distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and mindfulness skills referenced in this post. The companion volume DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets contains the practical exercises.