The Hidden Cost of Belonging
Internal Validation, External Power, and the Art of Choosing for Yourself
Learning the Cost Early
I didn’t know I was breaking a rule. That was the problem.
I was young, and I understood words far better than I understood people. Social cues didn’t arrive intuitively for me; they had to be reverse-engineered after the fact. If something was said, I assumed it meant what it meant. If a question was asked, I assumed it was an invitation to answer honestly. The idea that there might be a second, invisible conversation happening underneath the spoken one hadn’t occurred to me yet.
So I said what I thought.
The room changed immediately.
Not dramatically. No one raised their voice. No one told me I was wrong. Instead, something subtler happened. The air went tight. Someone laughed a little too quickly. Someone else looked down at the table. The conversation moved on, as if what I’d said had simply… failed to exist.
I noticed the change, but I didn’t understand it. I replayed my words in my head, checking them for errors the way I checked math problems. The facts were correct. The logic was sound. I couldn’t find the mistake.
Later, an adult took me aside.
They spoke gently, the way people do when they think they’re helping.
“You’re very smart,” they said. “But you don’t always need to say everything you’re thinking.”
This confused me. I had been asked. I had answered. I had no clue that there were answers that were accurate but unwelcome, or that some truths were context-sensitive in ways no one would explain.
What they were really teaching me wasn’t silence, but that I needed to see the hidden rules that everyone else seemed to know.
They were explaining—without quite saying it—that the room had rules I couldn’t see. That correctness wasn’t the same as acceptability. That being precise could be socially dangerous. That there was a cost to speaking plainly, and that cost would be paid in silence, distance, or quiet exclusion.
I didn’t feel angry. I felt disoriented. Confused. Lonely.
Slowly and painfully, a new process started running in my head. Before speaking, I began scanning—not for accuracy, but for risk. I watched faces more closely. I hesitated. I learned to delay answers while I tried to infer what kind of answer was being requested.
This didn’t make me better at reading social cues. It made me cautious.
Over time, I learned that belonging could be earned by holding things back. That people rarely tell you the rules directly. And that approval often depended less on what you said than on whether you instinctively knew when not to say it.
What stayed with me wasn’t bitterness. It was clarity.
I learned early that the world doesn’t just reward truth. It rewards fluency in unspoken expectations.
And once you realize that, you’re faced with a choice: learn the rules well enough to disappear into them—or decide, consciously, when you’re willing to pay the price for not playing along.
Who Holds the Remote?
And when did you hand it to the room?
We like to believe we are self-directed people. That our opinions are reasoned, our values chosen, our sense of self internally grounded.
And yet modern life quietly suggests otherwise.
We refresh feeds. We watch reactions. We track metrics—likes, promotions, applause, invitations, silence. Somewhere along the way, many of us outsourced a simple but profound question:
“Am I okay?”
That question used to live inside. Now it often lives in the room.
If you’ve ever watched yourself nod in agreement while something inside you quietly objected, you’ve felt this trade being offered.
This isn’t a critique of community or feedback. It’s a critique of the quiet assumption that belonging should come at the cost of authorship. Humans are social creatures; we always have been. Nor is it an argument for radical independence. It’s an exploration of where validation lives, how power flows, and how to make conscious choices about which voices shape you—and which do not.
Because whether we notice it or not, validation is power.
And validation becomes dangerous when it stops being information and starts being authority.
External Validation: The Old Survival System Wearing New Clothes
External validation is the process of using other people’s reactions—approval, praise, agreement, or acceptance—as evidence of one’s worth, correctness, or belonging. It becomes problematic when those reactions are treated not as information, but as authority—when social response determines what is safe to believe, say, or do.
From an evolutionary standpoint, external validation makes perfect sense. Approval from the group once meant safety, resources, survival. Rejection meant exposure and danger. Our nervous systems still remember that.
The tribe has changed. The circuitry hasn’t.
A manager’s praise can feel like oxygen. Social approval can feel like proof of worth. Even disagreement—if it’s loud enough—can feel existential. We say we want feedback, but often what we’re really asking is:
“Do I still belong?”
At its best, external validation does real work. It:
Reinforces shared norms
Encourages cooperation
Helps us calibrate blind spots
Signals trust and affiliation
There is nothing weak about valuing this. Communities require some level of mutual influence to function.
But there’s a tradeoff most people never name:
The more validation you require, the more power you give away.
When approval becomes necessary rather than informative, you no longer choose your behavior—you negotiate it. You begin to anticipate reactions, edit instincts, and preempt disagreement.
At that point, society isn’t merely influencing you. It’s steering you.
Internal Validation: Freedom, Friction, and the Cost of Autonomy
Internal validation is the ability to evaluate one’s beliefs, decisions, and worth using internally held values, reasoning, and self-trust, rather than deferring to social approval. It does not require isolation from others’ perspectives—only that the final judgment remains one’s own.
Internal validation is often reduced to “confidence” or “self-esteem,” but that misses the point. At its core, it’s the ability to say:
“I understand why I believe this—and I’m willing to live with the consequences.”
That stance is stabilizing. When your sense of worth is internally generated, disagreement becomes survivable. Criticism becomes data rather than a verdict. Silence stops feeling like condemnation.
There is real freedom here.
There is also friction.
People who rely primarily on internal validation are harder to manage. They don’t respond predictably to praise or pressure. Groups sense this—usually without articulating it. Influence works best where there is leverage, and internal validation removes a major lever.
As a result, highly internally validated people often experience:
Subtle social resistance and isolation
Fewer automatic invitations into consensus
Labels like “difficult,” “intense,” or “hard to read”
This isn’t because they are wrong. It’s because they are less governable.
And that can be lonely.
Which is why many people quietly abandon internal validation—not because it’s incorrect, but because it’s socially inconvenient.
From Validation to Check-In
One of the most useful shifts here is linguistic.
Reframe external validation as external feedback.
Validation implies authority. Feedback implies input.
Invite feedback by doing an external check-in:
“I’m curious how this lands with you.”
“I want to understand your perspective.”
“There may be information here I don’t have.”
This reframing changes the power dynamic. You ask, You listen. You reflect. And then you decide—internally—whether to adopt, adapt, or discard what you’ve heard.
A phrase I sometimes use captures this posture cleanly:
“I’m fascinated to learn about what you believe, but I’m not the least bit interested in having you tell me what you think I should believe.”
It isn’t hostile. It’s curious, respectful, and immovable all at once. It makes room for dialogue without surrendering sovereignty.
Think of it as running an internal advisory board. You solicit opinions—but you remain the final vote.
And, frankly, I learn a lot about people by analyzing what feedback they give, and how they give it.
Why This Is Actually About Power
This isn’t just personal psychology. It’s social physics.
Organizations, families, movements, and cultures all exert pressure—often unconsciously. They reward those who respond reliably to approval and disapproval. The more you need affirmation, the more responsive you are to those levers.
People who don’t need it slow systems down. They ask inconvenient questions. They don’t panic when approval is withheld.
That has consequences—sometimes beneficial, sometimes costly.
The point isn’t to escape influence entirely. That’s neither possible nor desirable. The point is to choose where influence is legitimate.
Power given consciously is partnership.
Power given unconsciously is control.
A Few Quiet Mirrors
If you want to see where you currently sit, consider these questions—not to judge yourself, but to notice patterns:
When someone disagrees with you, do you feel curious… or destabilized?
Do you change your position because you’ve learned something—or because the room shifted?
Are there opinions you hold privately that you never voice publicly? Why?
When approval is withheld, do you assume error—or simply difference?
These aren’t moral tests. They’re diagnostic.
The goal isn’t purity. It’s awareness.
Choosing the Trade—Consciously
Sixty years later, the moment still shows up.
The room is different now. The stakes are different. The people are peers or younger folks rather than elders. But the pattern is unmistakable. A pause after I speak. A subtle shift in energy. A look that says, That was accurate… and inconvenient.
Sometimes, someone still pulls me aside.
They phrase it carefully. Kindly. “You’re not wrong,” they say. “But you might want to think about how that lands.”
And now, I recognize the offer for what it is.
Not a correction.
Not new information.
But an invitation to exchange a little internal alignment for a little external ease.
The difference is that today, it’s no longer reflexive. It’s a choice.
Sometimes, I take the deal. I soften, reframe, delay. Not because I doubt myself, but because context matters and relationships are real. Belonging, when chosen freely, is not weakness.
Other times, I don’t. I let the silence sit. I accept the raised eyebrow, the cooling of the room, the absence of applause. Not out of stubbornness—but out of clarity.
What changed wasn’t the world. It was the location of the final authority.
External voices still matter. They always will. But they no longer get to decide who I am, what I believe, or how much of myself I am willing to edit for comfort.
That decision lives where it always should have.
Inside.
Once you recognize that this trade is being offered—not once, but continually—you gain something rare: the ability to choose deliberately. Not to rebel reflexively. Not to conform automatically. But to decide, moment by moment, which costs you are willing to pay.
Because validation is never free. But neither is integrity.
The world will always offer you belonging.
The real question is what it expects you to surrender in return.