Have you ever tried to be emotionally supportive to a friend and instead made things worse?
I know I have.
It's easy to say the wrong thing when we are trying to help people handle painful emotions.
Here I give you a guide to the potential landmines that you need to avoid.
I'm going to tell you what not to say when you're trying to comfort or provide emotional support to a friend or a loved one.
I’ve talked to you about the things you should say if you want to provide effective emotional support to a friend, but we've all been on the receiving end of people attempting to support us when they really hurt our feelings or made us irritated or angry because of the things they said. It's unfortunately relatively easy to say the wrong thing when we're trying to be emotionally supportive to people. I will go through a list of the wrong things to say when comforting someone. These are things that research has shown are ineffective.
1. Reassure or Distract
The first set is the least worst things you can say. These are try to give too much advice, to distract the friend from their feelings, or offer reassurance that everything's going to be okay. Research says that these things are of mixed effectiveness, but you want to steer clear of advice most of the time or simple reassurance or distraction. You're really not dealing with people's feelings if you're trying to do any one of these three things, but the remaining ways I discuss research has shown are very ineffective, and you want to avoid them at all costs.
2. Condemn or Criticize Their Behavior
You're trying to support your friend. Obviously, criticism and condemnation are the opposite of support. Anything that tends to be undermining of the legitimacy of the other person's feelings is not going to be perceived as supportive. This includes saying that their feelings are bad, that their feelings are wrong, that they should be embarrassed for feeling that the way they're feeling or that you're embarrassed on their behalf, or that they're immature for the way that they're feeling. All that stuff should be just off limits. It may be tempting to say that you believe that their feelings are wrong or that they're embarrassing themselves, but it's not supportive to say it. Related to that is anything that says their behavior is bad. That by having these emotions, this is bad, unacceptable behavior. You shouldn't say that.
3. Tell Them How to Behave
Telling people how to behave, especially if you tell them to relax or calm down, is not an effective comforting technique. Now, it's tempting to tell people to relax or calm down when they're really agitated, but if you've ever been on the receiving end of someone telling you to relax or calm down, it simply does not work. It's never worked. It never will work to take someone who's upset and say, "Well, just calm down, just relax." This is the opposite of being comforted. This is it's like fingernails on a chalkboard to someone who's upset. If they could relax, they would relax. If they could calm down, they would calm down. To be told that is just to be treated like a child. It's really not effective at all.
4. Delegitimize Their Feelings
Additionally, you don't want to say anything that will suggest that the other person's feelings are not legitimate. When I talked about what to say to comfort a friend, I said, say everything you can to legitimize the other person's feelings. There's a bunch of things that you can do that are the opposite of this. This is minimizing people's feelings, "Oh, it's no big deal," denigrating the source of the other person's feelings. If a person is suffering from a breakup, maybe you say something like, "Oh, that guy was an idiot. Anyway, he was such a loser." Well, if you're still in love with someone and your heart is broken because they're not with you anymore, then someone telling you that they're a loser and they're no good for you doesn't really make you feel any better. Blaming the other person for feeling that way, "Well, it's your fault that they broke up with you. You were too clingy," won’t be perceived as helpful, either.
5. Make Them Feel Inferior
The next thing not to say is to imply that the other person is somehow incompetent because they're feeling the way they are. So something like, "Well, if you had your life together more, you wouldn't be feeling this way. It's your own fault for feeling this way." Or related to that, trying to suggest that it's dysfunctional for the person to be feeling the way they're feeling and say, "You're a mess. You can't keep getting upset like this. You’ve got to stop crying. This is not the way an adult behaves." Finally, claiming that the problem that they're suffering from is small or inconsequential, "Come on. You just lost the game. It's no big deal. Or there's a lot of other fish in the sea. You got to get over it." None of this is going to be perceived as supportive.
6. Tell Them How to Feel
I guess the most classic thing not to say is to just tell other people how to feel. This means telling them to cheer up or telling them to be happy. Anything that tells another person how to be feeling or telling them, "Well, you should be angry at him. I don't know why you love him. You should be angry with him about the way he treated you,” or “You should feel lucky that you still have this and that and the other thing going on in your life." When people are feeling a certain way, they don't want to be told to feel another way. If they could simply turn off some feelings and turn on others, they would. No one wants to suffer with uncomfortable feelings. So telling them how to feel isn't helpful.
7. Focus on Your Own Feelings
If someone's going through a divorce or a death in the family or a job loss or something like that, to tell them long stories about your divorce or the death of one of your family members or when you lost a job isn't really helpful. If you can tell a brief story that shows solidarity with the other person which shows them that maybe you've been through something similar too, and for that reason, you're prepared to support them, that can be effective. But talking about yourself isn't supportive. The active, emotional support is about putting yourself to the side and being available to another person.
8. Over-Involve Yourself in Their Life.
This is the opposite of denigrating them or not caring enough. This is like, "Well, I need you to call me every hour on the hour and tell me how you're feeling, and I'm coming over later so we can talk more about this. I don't know, I think I'm going to call your ex-boyfriend and talk to him about how he's been treating you." This is over-involvement, and nobody wants this.
So those are some simple things that you should avoid saying if you're trying to be emotionally supportive to a friend or a loved one. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Thanks for tuning in.