While the therapeutic techniques we talk about in our other blogpost about how to support a friend are phenomenally helpful for anyone going through a rough time, we want to give you some more casual but equally powerful ways to help out your friends and loved ones. So, here are two simple but important things that might be helpful to hear for pretty much anyone going through a tough time.

“It’s not your fault.” Shame has a habit of hitchhiking on pretty much any other intensely experienced emotion. So if your friend is feeling anything other than “pretty good,” there’s a decent chance they’re experiencing some shame about something, too. This isn’t always the case 100% of the time, but it’s a pretty good bet.

If you can use our strategic open-ended question techniques in our previous blogpost to find out what, if anything, your friend is feeling shame about, you can then follow it up by helping your friend see how that feeling, behavior, or something else, is not their fault.

Now, we don’t want to encourage you enabling your friend to dodge responsibility. But there’s a huge difference between something being your friend’s fault and something being your friend’s responsibility. Rarely is anything truly someone’s fault. And only by accepting that and dissipating any accompanying shame, can we sustainably move onto accountability and changed behavior.

So, when you get to a point where your friend seems like they may be open to hearing your input, after you use some therapeutic techniques from our previous blogpost, and once you’ve figured out what they might be feeling some shame about, it can be helpful to tell them that it’s not their fault.
“You are loved.” Even if you are absolutely certain that your friend knows that they are loved, you might be surprised at how easy it is to temporarily forget the good things in their lives when they’re feeling low.

When I was volunteering at a suicide hotline, I learned that people often forget how cared about they are when they don’t feel at their best. So, if you’re in a position to remind them that you love them, and/or that others love them, you might be amazed to see how much strength they might draw from that.

Now, it might be best to remind your friend that they’re loved only once you’ve already done some well-executed active listening— otherwise, it’s easy for your friend to shrug you off if your friend isn’t feeling great. So to give yourself the best chance possible, use some of the therapeutic techniques in our other blogpost, and then in a moment that feels right, remind your friend how much they are loved.

Another variation on this is to remind your friend how much they are loved through your actions. This can be as simple as offering to make them a snack or reminding them of something you appreciate about them. Anything you can do to really hammer home the point that you love them and care about them can make a huge difference.

This is by no means a complete list of ways to support your friend when they’re going through a difficult time, but I think they serve nicely as some standard go-to’s whenever you’re supporting a friend or loved one. And if your friend doesn’t respond to it in exactly the way you’d hoped, please remember to have some self-compassion. It might take a few tries to express these in a way that click for your friends, but once it does, I think the results will speak for themselves.

2 things your friends need to hear when they're struggling