3 Emotional Intelligence Tips to Help a Friend in Difficult Times
3 Emotional Intelligence Tips to Help a Friend in Difficult Times
By Jonny Thomson | Published: 2024-11-20 15:38:00 | Source: Neuropsych – Big Think
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week for free.
There are many different ways to define a friend. A friend is someone who helps you get places and lifts you up. They motivate you and want you to succeed. Francis Bacon said that a friend is someone who can do what you cannot do for yourself, including things that matter to you after your death. But one of the most important and universal functions of a friend is to be a listening ear. When you are sad, call a friend. When you’re going through a rough patch, you go for a drink with a friend. When you feel sad, suffering, anxious or suffering in any way, you need a friend.
So, if a good friend is someone who talks to you when you’re going through something difficult, a great friend is someone who knows what to say or do when you come to him. So, how do we support someone who is going through a difficult time? What do we do when someone comes? we Something annoying – even painful?
To answer this, Big Think interviewed psychiatrist Jessie Gold, author of the new best-selling book titled how do you feel? Explores emotional awareness and how to care for yourself and others when it comes to trauma. For gold, there are three things to keep in mind when helping someone through a difficult time.
1. Listen, but don’t solve
When someone shares their traumatic experiences, one of the first things people try to do is solve the problem. It’s easy to think that a good friend – like a good parent – can make problems go away. But friendship is not parenting, and sometimes the problem can’t be fixed and shouldn’t be “fixed” (at least by you now). When we resist the urge to fix the situation immediately, we respect the emotional process. As Gould said: “Trying not to solve the problem right away is helpful because I think it’s a little inauthentic for someone to jump into that right away.”
By simply listening to their feelings and validating them, you create a safe space for them to express themselves without the pressure of finding immediate solutions. This allows them to process their emotions at their own pace. Most of the time, “maybe people just want to tell someone. So, although it’s hard to be that person, trying not to solve the problem right away is helpful.”
2. Set boundaries
Supporting someone through trauma can be emotionally exhausting. Emotional contagion is the phenomenon whereby — if you’re around someone long enough, especially someone with strong emotions — you begin to relate to another person’s emotional state. Sometimes, this is a good thing; The outpouring of laughter of happiness cheers you up. But when someone shares something so painful, it can be difficult. This is usually a possible and even necessary sacrifice on the friend’s part, but sometimes it can be too much. It may even lead to some sort of shock for you. That’s why it’s important to set boundaries to protect your mental health.
“It’s okay to have boundaries,” Gould told Big Think. “It’s going to suck, plain and simple. So just tell your friends about it. Tell them you can’t handle this anymore. You deserve and you need time. So if something like (trauma contagion) happens, I would say make sure you do something for yourself.”
This is not a weakness or failure on your part. By prioritizing your well-being, you ensure that you can continue to provide support without becoming overwhelmed. Setting clear boundaries may feel uncomfortable at first, but ultimately it preserves your ability to help. According to Gould, being honest about your boundaries is essential to getting sustained support. It’s better to be there for your friend in small, manageable doses than to be in a downward spiral and not be there at all.
3. Encouraging professional support
While friends and family can provide invaluable support and are often first responders, professional help is essential to effectively address deep trauma. See your role as a sort of triage. Be as helpful as you can – listen, ask open-ended questions, and offer kind, non-judgmental words of support. But if you ever feel out of sorts, gently suggest getting help. Therapy can often provide a structured environment to explore and treat underlying problems.
“If you really want to get to the root of what’s going on, therapy is the place to go,” Gould said. “It helps you solve the problem in a more strategic way, and in a way that is safer for you.”
The problem is that friends often take on too much. Most of us know at least a little about things like depression, ADHD, anxiety, etc. Our family members, schoolmates, and neighbors likely have one or more of these. But this familiarity gives a dangerous illusion of competence.
“I think people are more knowledgeable about mental health and have more self-awareness than before and are more able to access information, but because they have more access to information, that’s often wrong,” Gould said.
The truth is that therapists are trained in how to handle these situations. Of course, it would be nice to be there for your friend, but a lot of trauma — especially the kind that can lead to years of mental health problems — needs evidence-based research and professional help. I suppose you could spend years studying psychology with a focus on psychotherapy and trauma, or you could hire someone else who has done it.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week for free.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
