Validation

The word that turned off the monitor

Caroline Fleck was twenty-seven, a doctoral student, and quietly drowning. She sat across from a young man, twenty-two, who had just told her in the last five minutes of their session that he intended to kill himself. The session was being recorded and broadcast live to a classroom full of her peers and supervisors. Her hands were probably shaking. She had a whole toolbox of behavioral techniques, and she reached for all of them. Positive reinforcement. Socratic questioning. Modeling. The client wanted none of it. He had just been through a breakup, he didn't want to talk about it, and her questions were making him more irritated by the second. Nothing was landing. And a man's life was on the line in front of an audience.

Then she glanced at the monitor where her supervisor was feeding her notes. One word filled the screen, spelled out letter by letter: V-A-L-I-D-A-T-I-O-N. So she stopped trying to fix him. She said, out loud, that this whole situation sucked, that being filmed while you fall apart is absurd, and she walked over and turned the monitor off. She suggested they go for a walk through the gardens. The five-minute crisis turned into a two-hour conversation. He went home, used the very skills he had refused an hour earlier, and was never hospitalized. Roughly twenty years later he is a therapist himself, and he still sends Fleck photos from the life he almost ended. That single pivot, from changing him to accepting him, is the entire argument of her book. In *Validation*, Fleck makes the case that the most powerful interpersonal skill in psychology is also the one almost nobody has been taught.