I started therapy because it was difficult for me to find a job. I started coaching for extra help, and things were getting better. I graduated from therapy, and with help from coaching, I reached out and found a job at a clothes store in Leiden.
Before that, a year ago, I started my blog — With Elli — because I wanted to share my path through therapy and, more importantly, the information and material I was finding for myself. I wanted to gather that information and make it more accessible to people.
Today, unfortunately, the clothes store I was working at is closing for good. And as we all sat together talking about what we would do next, I felt something I wasn't expecting.
I felt like a fraud.
The Moment It Hit Me
Of course they don't read it. But I feel awful. O
f course I use tools like that — who doesn't? But I am trying to make it mine, not to be another copy-paste. Still, I felt awful. I felt like I didn't write it. And I felt exposed.
People around me were making plans for what they would do next, and it felt like they expected the same from me — to have a plan. But I don't, or it's incomplete, and I felt like I had to prove myself but I couldn't. In the past I would have tried and lie. I am trying not to do that now, it's energy-consuming, and I don't want to do it anymore. I want to be true to myself.
I also learned that some colleagues were going to start a business together. And I felt hurt that they didn't include me — there was no reason to include me they know me only for six months, we do not have any other relations rather than colleagues and they don't know my work and me —but of course that was just a trigger. They don't know me. I don't know them.
What I really wanted was the validation that I matter and that my work matters. Because I feel I never had that. And I cannot provide it for myself.
But the truth is — I need to be enough as my own validation. Right?
This is the question I kept asking myself that day. And then I started wondering: is it normal to search this much for validation from the world? Why do we do it? Is it a human need, and if not, where does it come from?
I went looking for answers. Here is what I found.
Is It Normal? What the Research Says
The short answer is yes — completely. Needing to feel seen and recognized is not a character flaw. It is wired into us as a species.
Psychologists Deci and Ryan, who developed Self-Determination Theory, identified three core psychological needs that are considered universal and essential for well-being: autonomy (the ability to direct our own life), competence (feeling effective at what we do), and relatedness (the need for meaningful connection and belonging). These needs are not optional. When they are not met, we suffer — psychologically and even physically.
So needing to feel that you matter, that your work matters, that someone sees you — that is not weakness. That is human.
But Why Do Some of Us Need It More?
Here is where it gets more personal — and more interesting.
There is a difference between needing some validation (universal and healthy) and needing it constantly, from everyone, to feel okay. The second kind usually has roots in something earlier.
Research on childhood emotional neglect (CEN) — a term developed by psychologist Jonice Webb — shows that when a child's emotional needs are consistently unmet, ignored, or dismissed, the child learns a painful lesson: my feelings don't matter. I am not enough as I am. This lesson doesn't stay in childhood. It follows us.
Studies published on PMC show that childhood emotional neglect is associated in adulthood with poor self-esteem, difficulty regulating emotions, reduced ability to understand and trust one's own feelings, and — importantly for our topic — a persistent search for external proof of worth.
As one source puts it: when your emotional needs aren't met and your internal state isn't acknowledged as a child, you will spend years trying to prove your worth through achievements, through overworking, through perfectionism. But external validations never fix the problem. They never leave you feeling truly seen — because the wound is not outside. It is inside.
That resonated with me deeply.
I think about my father. About how many times I needed him to say: I see you. I believe in you. You are enough. And how those words never came — or came with conditions attached. And how, all these years later, I still catch myself looking for those words in the eyes of strangers.
What Freud Said About It
Freud, in his 1914 essay On Narcissism, introduced a concept called the ego ideal — the internal image of who we want to become, shaped by parental expectations, social demands, and the values of those who raised us.
According to Freud, we begin life with a kind of natural self-sufficiency — a primary state of feeling whole. But as we grow, we are forced to abandon that feeling. We are told we are not enough as we are, that we must become something better, something more acceptable. The ego ideal forms to replace what was lost — it promises that one day, if we achieve enough, become enough, are loved enough, we will feel whole again.
This is why seeking validation can feel so urgent and so endless. We are not just looking for a compliment. We are trying to return to something we lost — or perhaps something we never had.
What Lacan Said About It
Lacan goes even deeper. His most famous statement on this subject is: "Man's desire finds its meaning in the desire of the other — not so much because the other holds the key to the object desired, as because the first object of desire is to be recognized by the other."
In simpler terms: we don't just want things. We want to be seen wanting them. We want our desire — our effort, our work, our existence — to be confirmed by someone else as real and meaningful.
For Lacan, desire itself is structured around recognition. We desire things that the Other desires. We want to be what the Other values. This is not a personal failing — it is, according to Lacan, the very structure of human desire. We are social creatures made of language, and language requires an other to receive it.
The Yale University lecture series on Lacan (free on YouTube) explores this beautifully — particularly the concept of the Mirror Stage, where Lacan describes how our sense of self is formed through the eyes of others, beginning in infancy.
This is why the absence of a father's recognition can leave such a specific, lasting wound. The father, in Lacanian theory, represents the symbolic Other — the authority whose gaze organizes the child's entire sense of what it means to be worthy. When that gaze is absent, critical, or conditional, the search for it can echo through an entire lifetime.
What Sapolsky Said About It
Robert Sapolsky — the Stanford biologist and neuroscientist — adds the biological layer. In his Stanford lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology (free on YouTube), and in his book Behave, Sapolsky shows that social belonging and status are not just psychological — they are physiological.
Being socially excluded or feeling subordinate activates the same stress systems as physical danger. Social rejection hurts — literally — because our nervous systems evolved in environments where exclusion could mean death.
Sapolsky also explored how dopamine is deeply tied not to the reward itself, but to the anticipation of a reward — especially an uncertain one. This explains something I recognized in myself: the exhausting loop of seeking validation, getting a brief moment of relief, and then needing it again. The dopamine system is designed to keep you searching. It is not designed to help you feel permanently satisfied.
In other words — the hunger for validation is not a moral failure. It is partly a biology problem. The system was built to keep us connected, motivated, and searching.
So What Do We Do With All of This?
I don't have a clean answer. I am still in the middle of this.
But I think the first step is exactly what I did that day — noticing the feeling, naming it, and asking: where does this come from? Not to punish myself for feeling it. But to understand it.
Because understanding changes things. When I feel hurt that my colleagues didn't include me in their plans, I can now say: this is a trigger. This is the little girl who needed her father to believe in her. That doesn't make the hurt disappear. But it stops it from becoming my identity.
And maybe that is the beginning of becoming my own validation. Not the absence of the need — but the ability to hold it with a little more compassion.
Resources & Further Reading
If this resonated with you and you want to explore further:
Videos (free):
- Robert Sapolsky — Human Behavioral Biology, Stanford (full course, free on YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D
- Robert Sapolsky — "Dopamine Jackpot" (short lecture on reward and anticipation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axrywDP9Ii0
- Yale University — Lecture on Lacan (free, ~51 minutes): Search on YouTube: "Yale Theory of Literature Lecture 13 Lacan"
Reading (free/open access):
- Freud — On Narcissism (1914), full text: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_SE_On_Narcissism_complete.pdf
- Lacan and Desire — accessible explanation: https://www.lacanonline.com/2010/05/what-does-lacan-say-about-desire/
- Childhood Emotional Neglect and mental health (open access, PMC): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7589986/
- Self-Determination Theory overview (open access): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3353314/
Books worth exploring:
- Running on Empty — Jonice Webb (on childhood emotional neglect)
- Behave — Robert Sapolsky
- Attached — Amir Levine & Rachel Heller
If you are also somewhere in this — searching for something you can't quite name — you are not alone. And you are not broken. You are someone who needed more than they received. That is not the same thing.
With love, Elli
