How to support a friend

Photo: Adam Niklewic

Every so often, I’ll see some content floating around the internet encouraging people to ask their friends and loved ones how they’d like to be supported. 

I think that’s a great conversation to have, but in practice, it’s often best to have that conversation **before** anybody actually needs support. If your friend is crying on your couch, that’s often NOT the time to ask them how they prefer to be supported; people who are actively in pain often are not in a state to do the mental work required to educate others on how to best support them. 

So, how are you supposed to know what to do when your friend IS crying on your couch? I’ve gathered some tips here based primarily on my suicide hotline training.

1. Take care of your own needs.

At the suicide hotline, they drilled it into our heads that self-care was the most important thing we could do for our callers. And I didn’t fully understand how true that was until I tried supporting people while hungry and on three hours of sleep. You can still do it, but I’m willing to bet that you will be less effective and it will be more draining on you if you support others before your basic needs are taken care of.

Here’s a simple trick for triaging everybody’s needs: Imagine that you’re (very temporarily!!) taking on your friends needs and wants, yourself. Now, organize all those needs-- both yours and theirs-- into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Fulfill all those needs in order from the bottom to the top, which is from most basic/urgent to most nuanced.

So, if you’re thirsty but your friend is struggling with some emotional needs, tell your friend you need to grab a glass of water and then you’ll be able to support them. If your friend has some emotional needs on the docket and you have more pressing or more intense emotional needs you need fulfilled-- say, your friend is bummed about a stubbed toe and you’re mourning the loss of a parent-- you might want to tell your friend that you care about them and that they deserve support, but you’re not able to support them right now.

2. Validate their feelings.

That means telling people that it’s okay that they’re feeling however it is that they’re feeling. This is a step that people often skip because of how obvious it feels.

But usually, due to cultural pressure, our feelings often come with secondary difficult feelings about those feelings. Sadness can come with guilt for feeling sad about something when there are so many other sad things in the world. Anger can come with shame for having negative feelings toward someone. So, it’s often easiest if you can make things less complicated for the person you’re supporting by right off the bat by telling them that whatever specific feeling they are experiencing is valid.

Do NOT try to get creative here and imagine what secondary feelings this person might be feeling and tell them-- that is, don’t say something like, “I bet you’re feeling guilty about your sadness because of how many people you’re burdening with it. It’s okay to feel sad!” While that second sentence is helpful, the first might plant ideas that might not have been there in the first place.

What you can do is get creative in how you show the other person that their feelings are valid. You can say something like, “It totally makes sense that you're mad-- your mom totally disregarded your preferences!” Or, “I can see why you’re so sad-- it’s hard to lose a relationship.” Or even, “If I were you, I’d be just as anxious. Giving a talk is tough if you’re not used to it!” 

When I was at the suicide hotline, I would make it a point to validate any specific feeling that a caller would explicitly mention experiencing. If a person mentioned that they were feeling sad, I would validate their sadness. If a person mentioned something making them angry, I’d validate their anger. I think that’s a pretty good rule in general.

One trick that I came up with during my time at the hotline: if possible, validate pretty much any feeling except for guilt. Validating guilt can sometimes make people feel worse if you’re not incredibly careful about how you do it. Think about it: it probably wouldn’t feel great if you told me you lied to someone and felt guilty about it, and I responded with, “Yeah, it totally makes sense that you feel guilty! Lying is bad!” And it doesn’t really give anyone any additional information; you already feel badly about it, so it’s not like you’re gaining any insights you didn’t have before. So, with guilt, it’s sometimes best if you use the next step instead.

3. Reflect what they’re saying.

This is another supportive thing that sounds absolutely wild if you aren’t used to doing it, but stick with me on this one. There’s a ton of research out there supporting it, and I’ve been awed first-hand as I watched it work wonders with suicidal callers. 

Here’s all it is: Summarize, in your own words, whatever they said.

It’s that simple.

So, if your friend says, “I’ve been furious at my coworkers lately-- they keep screwing up and it leads to a ton of extra work on my plate that I just don’t have time for.” You could just respond, “It sounds like you’re angry that people at work keep making mistakes that leave you with even more work to do.”

It might feel clumsy the first few times you do it, but practice makes this feel a lot more comfortable. And even if it feels unnatural to you, it usually will feel just fine to the person you’re talking to.

Sometimes, if you reflect something to someone, they might correct you. That’s GREAT. Often, that means that they learned a new detail to their situation just by hearing it reflected back to them, or that they realized that some part of their story was more important than they initially realized.

If your friend corrects you, just reflect back the correction! So, let’s say you offered that previous reflection: “It sounds like you’re angry that people at work keep making mistakes that leave you with even more work to do.” Your friend responds: “Actually, it’s not that I’m angry about how much work I have-- the problem is just that I don’t have enough time for all that work.” You can say, “Ah, got it-- it’s that you have too much work on your plate compared to how much time you have.”

Once in a while, in response to a reflection, someone will say, “EXACTLY!” Or something equally enthusiastic. That’s awesome. They probably feel like you understand them, and that goes a long, long way in helping people feel better.

But more often, after your reflection, people will just continue talking. That’s awesome, too-- it usually means that they’re feeling comfortable and understood by you, so they are feeling safe enough to continue opening up. So, if they keep talking after a reflection, you’re probably on the right track. 

4. Ask strategic open-ended questions.

Try to ask questions that can’t just be answered by “yes” or “no,” with the intention of helping the other person explore their feelings.

One motto at the suicide hotline was, “Steer into the pain.” A lot of people’s reactions to hearing that someone is suffering is to help the other person focus on the positive. Unfortunately, this often backfires and leaves people feeling misunderstood and alone. So at the hotline, we were encouraged to ask questions to help people talk more about their pain.

Some questions I’d often ask include:

• What was the hardest thing about that for you?

• What were some of the saddest moments about that for you?

• If you could say anything to that person right now, what do you wish you could tell them?

As you might notice, these questions can feel pretty intense. So definitely save them for after you do plenty of validating and reflecting so people feel comfortable enough to answer them. And once people give you answers to your questions, validate and reflect those answers, too!

Once you’ve explored some feelings by asking open-ended questions and validating/reflecting the answers you get, I also recommend using open-ended questions to move things in a direction of more pragmatic problem-solving if necessary. In my experience, the vast majority of well-intended listeners move to problem-solving before they’ve explored the other person’s feelings fully enough. A sign that you may have moved into problem-solving too soon is if you feel resistance toward problem-solving. Sometimes this comes in the form of long silences, or, “I don’t know’s” without any interest in finding answers. If that happens, no sweat! Just go back to validating and reflecting some more, and try problem-solving later.

Once you do feel like moving to close things up and possibly do some problem-solving, here are the sorts of questions you might want to try out:

• What sort of things seem to help you feel better when you’re feeling this way?

• What’s something you might want to do after I leave in order to take care of yourself?

• What boundaries do you think might feel best for you to set?

5. Acknowledge the other person’s strengths.

Especially as you wrap things up, it can be powerful to say out loud any of the relevant nice things you think about this person. At the suicide hotline, I’d often express admiration for the courage it takes to call the hotline. For friends, I’ll often tell them when I’m impressed by their resilience, their coping abilities, their emotional awareness, or anything else I notice while talking to them.

Sometimes, you have to hunt around a little bit for something positive to say. That’s perfectly normal! If you think creatively, there’s almost always something honest and positive you can say about someone after they share openly with you. In fact, you can almost always point out that it can take a lot of courage to be vulnerable when someone’s struggling, and you can express your admiration for their ability and willingness to do that.

So, acknowledging someone’s strengths can look like: “I’m impressed at how self-aware you’ve been about this whole thing! You were able to say out loud how much your partner has been hurting your feelings, which can be really hard to notice while you’re in it.” Or, “It takes a lot of resilience to go through everything you’ve been through and still be willing to be vulnerable and talk about it.”

6. If it feels like whatever they were talking about is a big deal, you can ask to check on them in a day or so.

At the hotline, we offered “check-in” phone calls to people we were worried about. If they agreed, we’d have someone give them a call the next day to check in on them and see how they were feeling. Even those who didn’t say yes deeply appreciated that we asked. So, if you like, you can offer your friend a check-in text or call. 

I recommend saving this for if your friend is struggling with something difficult and ongoing. If they’re just venting about work or something equivalently light, it’s probably best to hold off on this step. But if they’re struggling with loss or something similarly heavy, it can be a very meaningful gesture as long as you’re willing to follow through.

So, this can sound something like: “I’d love to text you tomorrow to check in on how you’re doing if that’d be helpful. What do you think?” Or, “How would you feel about me giving you a quick phone call tomorrow to check in on how you’re feeling?”

Do make absolutely sure you’re able to follow through, though. If you’re not sure, don’t offer. It can be doubly hurtful for your friend to have you not follow through on an offer while your friend is already hurting.

Believe it or not, the entirety of our suicide hotline phone conversations (aside from a few clinical questions about suicidality) consisted of the above steps.

Before I started volunteering at the hotline, I never would have guessed just how powerful those three tools were. But I can’t count the number of times I got on the phone with someone and I thought to myself, “Wow, I have NO idea how this person is ever going to feel better— this situation is really dire,” then I followed the above steps anyway, and then 10-30 minutes later, I left the call with the caller telling me they felt better. 

If you don’t already use the above tools when you’re supporting friends, I cannot properly express how highly I recommend that you try them out. It might feel clunky at first, but the more you do it, the more you’ll get to experience first-hand the magic, friendship-building conversations that using these tools can bring.