The Validating Ecology of a School: It Starts with a Handshake

November 11, 2027– I've written and spoken about my dream of being instrumental in creating, maintaining, and nurturing validating ecologies. In a previous blog posting, I wrote:

“An ecology of validation, then, is a relationship in a particular place that creates, contains, and sustains relationships between and among the individuals who interact in that space such that there are ongoing and multiple opportunities to validate and be validated by others.”

An Ecology of Validation Begins with Relationships

This fall, I got to be in one of my most favorite places—a high school classroom! My next favorite is a middle school classroom! I know for some of you that might sound tedious, but I felt like I was in my element. I was invited to present on effective communication to the 9th grade classes that my brother teachers at a local high school.

We explored how we all make assumptions about things, situations, and people upon first glance. One of the things that struck me most about this class was that everyone has to be a greeter sometime each quarter.

Two students stand just outside the classroom door in the hallway at the beginning of class.

They say hello, offer their hand for a handshake, and say one positive thing to the person:

"I like your smile!"

"Nice jacket!"

"Great to see you!"

When I, a stranger, was standing in the classroom as students came in, some students came up to me, offered their hand, shook it firmly, and said, "Thank you so much for coming. I'm looking forward to your presentation."

A couple of kids made sure to come forward and thank me again at the end, if there was time. And then a week later, my brother showed up with a bag filled with handwritten thank-you notes from the students.

Thoughtful, intentional notes. I could see the effort that had gone into them.

How amazing is this!?!

The Enormous Responsibility of a School Community

A week later, I was a keynote speaker for a large group of district support services staff, the Caring Collective at Stafford County Public School District. During the morning updates and reports, it became apparent that this was a group of intensely committed people, in the trenches every day, all year, serving students and families and navigating the various, sometimes volatile, emotions and psychoactive material that gets stirred up in the cauldron we call a school community.

Next to the family, I think we could safely say that, at least here in the United States, school, and the people within a school, are among the most important, influential, and impactful forces on a student's health, welfare, well-being, mental health, safety, and sense of identity. That is an enormous responsibility, and possibly an enormous burden for schools to hold. 

Our schools are not just factories where kids come and sit, absorb curricula, and then go out into the world to find jobs and become functioning members of society. Far from it. As we can tell from the continued nightmare of mass school shootings.

It is as though schools have become magnets for violence, unresolved trauma, and terrible, terrible woundedness. And as we know from the statistics, many of these acts are perpetrated by kids themselves. We must not look away.

Looking Beneath the Surface

The problem is complex. The issue is multisystemic. There is no one answer. Gun control would go a long way toward solving some of the problem. But it does not address the infection, if you will allow me that word, that festers underneath.

Here is where our curiosity comes in. The curiosity that comes from that infinite capability of Self energy to hold all that might be possible. Dan Siegel calls this the plane of possibility, and good mental health allows us to stand on that plane of infinite possibility for a while and take in the view. We must become curious and ask the hard questions:

What is at work in the individuals who perpetrate this terror?

But more than that, what are the roots of it?

My voice is a very small little whisper in this conversation.

But what do we have if not our voices?

And so I will use mine here.

I would propose that one of the answers to the question of what lies at the root of all of this—the violence, the isolation, the bullying, the need for guns—is that at the root of all of it lies children being raised in traumatically invalidating environments.

I am not suggesting that traumatic invalidation is the sole cause of violence, or that every child who experiences it will become violent. Rather, I am looking at the larger systems and relational environments that can contribute to woundedness, disconnection, isolation, and, in some circumstances, violence. Adults plod through their days in those same environments, with more resources, more maturity, and more impulse control to manage what simmers just beneath the surface.

We are all victims of this. But let me say this clearly: we are all perpetrators as well. One of the curiosity questions that comes from Self energy, so that we can hold the answer, look at it, and make change, is: Where is our accountability?

We point the finger at the children. We point the finger at the parents who buy them the guns. We point the finger at the gun owners. But no one is pointing the finger at the system that nurtures, breeds, and fosters the ongoing machinery of traumatic invalidation in our schools, families, communities, country, and across the globe.

What If We Imagined Something Different?

When we imagine all of the possibilities, I invite you to imagine a day in a school building where every single person—from the principal and administrators to the security guard, the lunch crew to the support teams, parents and family member, and every student—feels seen, heard, accepted, valued, and cared about for who they are, in that moment, as they are.

And it starts with a handshake, meeting someone's eyes, a handwritten thank-you note, a pause and a breath, and that beautiful, beautiful question:

Tell me about you. I am listening.

Photo: By standret