I was just reading a Reddit post about emotional intelligence. Someone raised the topic of how to support a person who’s talking about difficult things, without just relaying your own experience to them. I know I do this, so it was super interesting. I’ll expand on this in a future post, but might as well explain this topic a bit more first.
The alternative approach is, if you’ve felt something similar, then you can ask questions about their feelings without needing explicitly state why you’re asking those question. It’s because you have experience in the matter, but it’s best to keep it about them. Your own experience might come up naturally, but it’s not something that needs to be an entry point, or something to focus on.
For example, instead of saying “I went through something like this, and I felt confused and frustrated”, you can say, “It sounds like this would be quite confusing and very frustrating. How are you feeling about it?”. And of course, this is just a jumping off point, as the real goal is just to explore things with them, so you take things from there.
And sure, they may actually want to know how to fix a problem, rather than talk about their feelings, so it’s also worth asking if they want to be helped or heard. Although, in almost all cases, they just want to be heard, despite what our instincts to help fix things might say!
So if you don’t ask specifically, then it’s much better to assume that they just need to be heard. We feel so much better after venting, because it lets us dump the negativity, vocalise the problem, and connect with the listener. But when you’re being “helped” when you need to be “heard”, then instead, you’re given an additional checklist of things to do, on top of existing difficulties.