Do you desire to be supported or approved of? Have you ever found yourself yearning for support and got approval instead?

In your relationships, is support or approval more prevalent? If you want support but don’t have it, how can you move toward it?

Sometimes a desire for support is so real it’s a feeling. Or really, the lack of support is more a feeling than support itself. You know what it is when you don’t have it.

Support is what should be a normal exchange in a relationship.

But it has a less healthy counterpart, and the counterpart does a good job of looking a lot like it.

The counterpart is approval.

The Fine Line Between Support and Approval

Approval is the shadow of support. Support is what you want in your relationships—it’s what everyone wants from their inner circle of people—but approval can often be what you get instead.

Because they look so much alike, I started wondering one day what the differences are between support and approval. I saw the two as existing with a fine line between them and I wanted to understand why.

So, I started asking myself questions. I needed to understand the relationship between support and approval, how the two are different, how to tell them apart and how to shift my relationships toward support and away from approval.

Because relationships require consistent effort and discernment, a willingness to learn and a whole ton of other things, it’s important to ponder the characteristics we see in our connections with others. Not every relationship will be healthy. Not every connection will last forever. Some are meant to end long before we have the strength to move forward.

All of this, in my opinion, means everyone has to be willing to evaluate and change course if need be.

What Support Feels Like

As I thought and pondered the differences between support and approval, I wanted to describe what they both feel like when you have them, and consequently when they’re lacking. Both support and approval have profound effects on our relationships. This is because both effect our emotions in big ways.

We can’t neglect the power we hold in our approval and our support.

Support feels like three things: safety, security and peace.

All three of these characteristics I find hard to describe to those who have never gone without, and also for those who never experienced them (whilst deeply desiring them). However, in my experience, I find that you know you possess these characteristics in your relationships because you can feel them—even if you can’t describe them.

To have safety is to have the knowledge that everything about you is safe with another person. There is no judgment passed. No ridicule rendered. And no unguided words dropped on your heart to cause long-term damage.

Security is the equivalent of maintaining the belief that there is nothing you or the other person could do to upend your relationship. The ground you both stand on is steady. It’s rock solid. When it’s solid, there’s a sense that the relationship will stay intact even as both of you grow and change, and when disagreements happen, and when emotions are all over the place. There’s a contract of duty signed by both of you to keep one another secure.

Which leads to peace. Or rest. You only know what peace feels like if you know what it doesn’t feel like. Peace is something not fabricated. It’s real. It’s as if the striving is done. You’re no longer working double time to gain the approval that you know will never come.

What Approval Feels Like

If support feels safe, secure and peaceful, then what is everyone feeling the majority of the time? What physical feelings and emotions does approval evoke?

In my own experience,