Help Someone Better
Welcome to Takeout Therapy. I'm Rebecca Hunter, an anxiety specialist private practice therapist, and total mental health geek. Stick with me for the next few minutes, and I'll teach you what you need to know to have emotionally healthier and more peaceful way of life. I promise a little free mental health education can't hurt. We should have had it much earlier, but It's never too late to learn.
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Let's dig in. Hello there, my friend. I've got a good one for you today. Okay. So you know when a friend or your partner or somebody at work is like really struggling.
It is so hard sometimes for people to understand, like, how to be a not counterproductive for the other person, but also like just had to be helpful. Now I'm not saying that every time somebody struggles, it's your responsibility to help. Of course, no. But I think like if you're somebody who gets kind of triggered by other people's struggles or you tend to take things on or you feel like a lot of us and just kind of sometimes feel really unprepared to help stick with me for the next few minutes because I'm gonna tell you some really simple ways to just reach out and help someone without a huge time investment or dealing like you have to take on somebody's junk. Yeah, let's get into this.
I think it's really important because the other side of it is that I see people in therapy all the time that don't feel like they have good support. And so, yeah, let's learn to be better support. I always have things to learn myself, so I'm sure that today's episode will help me as well. Before I start the episode, I want to invite you because I made something. It's a little mini book on basics stress relief techniques basically.
So if you're interested in a visual aid that will teach you how to be present which to be honest with you is needed for personal growth, and how to stop replaying every conversation a million times in your head I've got you friend. I have created a free download for you that you can go and grab immediately at takeout therapy dot com. You're welcome. I'm here for you. Just trying to pass along some really helpful information I think people think things are much more difficult than they are, and my little graphic representation sometimes just help people go, oh, yeah.
Okay. I can do that a little bit every day. Right? So let's get into today's topic. How how in a heck do we help when somebody is really hurting?
You know, oftentimes we have friends that are going through things or coworkers or perhaps the person that we live with or the people that we live with are kids. Right? Life is hard. We all go through stuff. And frankly, sometimes it's kind of annoying to be around.
Sometimes it's kind of overwhelming to be around. Sometimes it's incredibly triggering to be around people that are in emotional pain. You know what I mean? And maybe they're not even saying they're in emotional pain. Maybe they're just behaving poorly because that's what we do when we're in emotional pain.
Right? But I think we have to be helpful if we wanna have relationships, then we wanna have connection. Right? And if we get really uncomfortable when the people that we care about or are around all the time, are hurting, then we're not being very helpful. And we're also just avoiding kind of dipping in to somebody else's experience.
And I think that that makes it worse. For us, I think it makes it totally worse for us because we can't connect to somebody who's in pain. If we don't want to get any of their pain on us, and it makes it worse for other people because it's unbelievably invalidating, right, to, like, be really struggling and maybe you're looking up this up from the other side, which is like to be really in pain and struggling. And people just don't know how to help you and they do all the wrong things and that's super annoying too because we're trying to connect and we're trying to support each other. And sometimes, to be honest, we just don't know the hell you're doing.
We just don't know what we're doing. We don't know how to do it. We don't know what to say. We don't know what to do. People come to us with their problems.
We try to listen, but, like, you know, I don't know about you, but sometimes people have the same problems over and over and over again. Right? And your friends come to you and they talk to you about the same thing over and over and like, it's like, Come on. How can I be helpful here? Right.
And so part of it is like, when the people that we care about and spend time with are suffering, it causes us suffering. And we're like, can you knock that off? Because you're getting your suffering all over me. Right? And so here's the deal.
If you wanna be in relationships and you wanna be connected, you need to be seen and validated too. And so if you start till to do that better and have a better them kind of for doing that, then you'll get it back. You get what you give friend in relationships generally. And if you don't, run like hell. Okay.
So that being said, I wanna talk to you about what are some of the most helpful things you can do when someone you care about is hurting? And frankly, like, Send this podcast to someone you know when you're in pain. Because you need support too. So here's the first thing that I think is really, really important. And I hear this all the time in my office.
And it's basically like People feel like the most helpful thing they can do for someone who's suffering is to give them their ideas for solution their opinion of the situation? Right. A little advice. Never heard anyone. Oh, yes, it does.
Oh, that was my puppy groaning in the background. She's finally settled down and stopped chewing on my laptop cord. Yeah. So the first thing we wanna do or, like, kind of, what to do always and across the board, when someone else is in pain, is lose your opinion. We don't need your ideas and you're not here to solve a problem.
You wanna be supportive? Do you wanna be helpful? Then all you have to do is let go of those things. Because when we come in with those things, it makes someone feel like they don't know what they're doing and they're literally, like, unable to conduct their lives, which is why we've showed up to help them out. And that's not true.
Right? Because you know as well as I do. When you're in the hole, it's just you're in the hole. It's just you're feeling how hard life is. You're not necessarily looking for ideas, solutions, or other people's opinions.
Right? You're just looking to be seen and heard and maybe even validated Right? And so the best thing that we can do really to help someone in pain and what we can actually ask for when we need support and we are in pain is active listening. Right? So if someone comes to you and they wanna talk to you about what they have going on, right after you lose your opinion ideas and solutions, be good listener, which means right?
Like, listening is a really important skill. To learn how to do. It's funny. In the in the Takeout Therapy Club this month, we're talking about communication. And I'm talking with people about how to talk to other people and how to listen to other people because learning to be an active listener is so so important.
So if you wanna work on your communication skills, come on in. Join us in the club. But when someone needs you, they don't mean to hear you talking. They just need you to listen, to look at them, to hear what they're saying, And honestly, this is where empathy goes. I'm all about the empathy first method, which will be presented to you in about three weeks on this podcast.
In the meantime, what I'll tell you is If you want to provide somebody with support, you just need to listen to them and relate to them. Because that's what empathy is. It's saying like, yeah, man. I'm a human too, and I've been through something like this. And you don't really have to say all those words to be empathic.
You can be curious Right? You can say, how is this for you? How are you coping? What are you doing to take care of yourself? And most importantly, What do you need?
When's the last time somebody asked you? What do you need? Friend? Besides me, because every single time I have this podcast, I say, what do you need? We have to know what we need in order to ask be able to ask for support in relationships.
And so a good way to kinda start to figure that out is to show up for other people and ask them what they need from you. Like, I see you. You're really suffering. This sounds so hard. What can I do to be helpful?
It's all it takes. Here's the thing is that you actually don't have agree with somebody's problem to be a good source of support for them. You know? And so I think that's where it gets really tricky. Right?
Because sometimes people are reaching out and they need support in these situations that we don't think they should be in any way. And so we give them our opinion, and we tell them our ideas, and we present them with our solutions. And that is not good listening, not empathic at all, and it's not being supportive. So we have to ask, do you want my suggestions? Are you open to ideas?
Do you want to talk about what's next? Right? This is how to help someone in pain. Be honest, with them. If you are out of your depth, like, I'll be honest with you.
I don't really like to do grief so much. I don't know about you, but I just I'm not into it. Okay? And so when somebody has grief going on, I get really triggered. I I, like, have trouble not being absorbed.
And so I will just say, I really struggle here too. I might not be a great source of support, but can listen. Right? And so, like, if it's something that's kind of triggering for you, and someone is asking for your support. It's okay to just be honest.
Just say, friend, this is like an area I wanna support you in, but I'm so triggered by this. Right? That's all you have to do. You just have to be honest, be vulnerable. If you wanna be a source of support.
And if you wanna be able to ask people for more support when you're struggling, you gotta be willing to just be kind of vulnerable, which means you have to learn empathy. Again, your lesson is coming. But in the meantime, just being willing to let go of a solution to me oftentimes feels quite vulnerable. Right? Because of course, I wanna tell my friends, well, here's what I think you should do.
But, like, again, not that helpful. And they can figure it out. I don't need to figure out what somebody else's needs to do. About their life. That's not my job.
My job as part of someone's support crew is simply to support. Right? To be a good listener, to be empathic, and to be curious about who they are and what they want from their lives. And I can only hope if you and I start doing this more consistently, showing up and being really helpful to people, then people will do it for us. We are out here in the world doing this takeout therapy work.
We're modeling what good emotional and mental health looks like. We're modeling what healthy relationships are all about. Right? So, you and me, we will just stay along the path and do our best, to be good friends, supportive friends, and yeah, what else can we possibly do? Thanks for showing up and having interest in like being a better support system to people.
Because to be honest, I don't think people have enough support. So reach out. Reach out hand to somebody this week and offer some support and I will do the same. Okay. I'll see you again soon.
Thanks for listening. I'm so glad you joined me today, and I hope it was helpful. Always make sure to get the appropriate level of help for your unique situation. Check out the resources at takeout therapy dot com, and hopefully you can find something there. As always, thanks so much for showing up and doing your work.
Which in a way changes the level of emotional development in your community, in your town, even in the world. Yeah. It's kind of a big deal This podcast is intended as education and prevention, not medical or mental health treatment. See you next time.
