How to Support Your Loved Ones

Hello friends, and welcome to another episode of Hannah Talks About Things, also known as Wellness Wednesday. I'm your host, Hannah Rose. Don't know why I'm starting this like a podcast, but I'm just gonna go for it. Special shout-out this week to a new friend of mine, Cory Dion Lewis. I'm gonna put the link to his website in the— not bio— in the about section, because Cory's website is really awesome. He's a health coach. He interviews people. He does these podcasts that are incredible, just about health and not mental health only, physical health, mental health, all this stuff. He's writing a book. And my recent meeting with him really inspired me to start getting to work on my book, which I started in 2017. It is a memoir. Sneak peek, the title, which I know is really long and that's purposeful and will probably change, is called I Accidentally Snorted Heroin in a Gay Bar in Beijing: A Memoir. Because I'm pretty sure if you saw that title, you'd be like, "I wanna know more about this." So anyway, because I'm procrastinating on that book, but it's still on my mind, I am getting to work on my coffee table book idea, which is more about unhelpful things we say. I don't know what the title is gonna be exactly, but basically like things not to say when someone is in pain. And it's gonna be, you know, a book you can have on your coffee table with like cute illustrations that's funny, but also informative. 'Cause unfortunately, as Brené Brown tells us, We seldom know how to support the people in our lives empathetically. We usually jump to sympathy or we'll try to make it better and fix it. And those are unhelpful ways to support someone. So today I wanted to do a brief video and talk about things that are unhelpful to say, right? I wrote an article for, I don't remember what it was for, maybe my own blog. I don't know. But anyway, it's on Baltimore Sun. It got published there. It got published in the Denver Post and I had such phenomenal feedback and a response. Response to that article, and it was called "It's Okay to Not Know What to Say to Grief" or something along those lines. Like, it's okay if you don't know how to show up, just being there is enough. And basically this article was about a personal experience of mine with a friend of mine's brother passing away and him telling me really candidly, like, yeah, people just kind of don't reach out because they don't know what to say. And it really got me thinking, like, why do we do that, right? And Brené Brown again has this really great 3-minute short video called Empathy vs. Sympathy. It's super cute, but also like kind of life-changing. And it's on, I mean, you can just YouTube empathy versus sympathy, Brené Brown. And what she talks about is how we often miss our opportunities for true connection because vulnerability makes us uncomfortable and we like to fix things, right? How many of you have ever been in a relationship or are currently in a relationship, friendship, dynamic with family, or intimate partner relationship where you say, listen, I don't need you to fix it. Or your partner says, "Can you just listen? I don't need your advice." You know, how many times do we reach out to friends and say, "I'm really struggling with this," or, "I'm in pain," and automatically the response is, "Well, have you tried this?" And solutions can be helpful, right? If we are eliciting straight up advice or feedback or solutions, suggestions in that way, that can be super helpful. But sometimes it's more damaging because we're missing that opportunity for connection. Often when I am struggling with anything and I'm in emotional pain, I just want to be seen and heard. And that's like the core wound, right? A lot of us were not seen and heard and nurtured appropriately or effectively as children. And so a core wound for so many of us is just wanting to be seen. Two videos ago, I talked about loneliness and social media, and I also wrote an article for Think Ladder about it, which should be published in the next few weeks. And, you know, I think one of the reasons I have felt so lonely on social media in the past, or it exacerbates my feeling of disconnection, is because I'm trying to get this core wound met. This wound of, I want to be seen, I want to be validated, I want to be acknowledged, I want to be heard. And what happened is I have ended up, you know, posting or over-posting because I just want people to see me. And what I don't know is that I'm actually reenacting trauma. Because I can't be seen by everyone, first of all, or maybe I'm not gonna get the responses or validation that I'm seeking, et cetera. And so I personally have taken that step of being off social media for almost exactly a year now, and it's been life-changing because again, we can inadvertently reenact traumas and we have no idea that we're doing it. The brain. So unhelpful things to say. I don't wanna spoil my coffee table book too much, But so the first thing is trying to fix it right away. It's helpful to just ask someone who you're trying to support or be present for, do you, are you looking for advice? Are you looking for like solutions? Like what would be most helpful for you? And just asking. If you know someone that's in pain and struggling, it's appropriate to ask them, hey, how can I best support you? That totally opens up the lines of communication and deepens intimacy. Now, if you are the one struggling, if you're the one going through something and you're in some kind of emotional pain, it can also be really proactive to identify what you need. And sometimes we have to pause and figure that out because when I'm in pain and I go to my partner, sometimes I don't know what I need from him until he says or does what I discover to be the wrong thing. Right? And so a lot of times when I'm talking to Brian, I'll say, I really need to just vent about this. And I don't want you to like try to make sense of it or give me a solution. Like I just, I just want to talk to you about it. And he's like, okay. And sometimes I'm like, hey, I'm really stuck. I don't know what to do. Like, do you have ideas? Right? But if I can be proactive and say, this is what I need from you, like, I don't want you to fix it. I just want to be heard, or I just want to be held. Right? It gives— it empowers Brian to be able to best support me, and it empowers me to ask for what I need, as opposed to what happens so often in relationships where we don't express our needs. We may not even know our needs because we haven't paused to figure out what would be most helpful for me right now. And then we get resentful and frustrated at our partner for not meeting our needs, even though A, they can't read minds, which I know we hear all the time, but like it's true. And B, you know, most human beings go to that solution-focused place. We also go to sympathy before empathy because empathy is much more vulnerable. And what we know from the research is that vulnerability can be incredibly uncomfortable. What Brené Brown says is, Seldom can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection, right? I need to connect with that thing in me that knows what you're experiencing. Even if I've never experienced what you're experiencing, I know pain, right? Because I'm a human and I need to connect with me and put myself in your shoes and feel with you. That's empathy. Now, another extreme would be taking on all of your feelings with enmeshed emotional boundaries and then being super stressed out or upset. Because I have no emotional boundaries. That's equally as unhealthy as being completely shut off. Like I talked about in that podcast about vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue, a symptom of burnout is lacking compassion for anyone or everyone, right? But on the other side, the extreme is I'm so enmeshed, I have no emotional boundaries because these aren't things that are taught in school, right? We have to learn them and seek out resources to help learn them. And when I don't have emotional boundaries, I feel the weight of the freaking world and it's a lot. I totally have been struggling with that this week because your girl is recently vegan. I'm not going to talk about that too much. If you have any questions about why, please feel free to reach out to me. Similar things, resources that have absolutely impacted my life irrevocably, there's a documentary on Netflix and Amazon Prime called What the Health, like what the hell, but what the health. If you are an athlete or someone like me who's really into exercise and getting strong, I recommend watching The Game Changer. Dangers, phenomenal documentary. And like I mentioned last week, I'm reading a book called Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. This has been life-changing for me, not just mental health-wise in terms of overall mood, but physically. And I know we hear this stuff all the time and that any movement for vegetarianism or veganism is three-pronged, right? There's the physical impacts of this stuff on our body, which I will not talk about because that will be unsolicited. There's the ethical implications regarding animal animal welfare. And then there's environmental implications because the number one source of climate change and of deforestation and all the things that most of us care about is animal agriculture. So anyway, I encourage you to educate yourself about that. If you keep eating meat, doing so with intention is also really great. And if you have no desire to do any of that, that's cool too. That's the only thing I'll say about that. Anyway, so what I have found, I don't know why I mentioned that that that's something I'm doing. I don't know where that came from, but anyway, I'm trying to keep this video under 10 minutes and it's really difficult. So unhelpful things to say, going right to the solution-focused place can be unhelpful if that's not what that person wants or needs. If you don't know, ask. Other unhelpful things, anything that silver lines someone's experience, right? Another Brené term. It's like if you share something painful with me and I just want to put a silver lining on it. So And again, I really encourage you to watch Empathy vs. Sympathy. It's a great video. But if I say, hey, I'm really struggling with this, to say, well, you should just be grateful you have a job. I have a whole video on gratitude shaming, and I can talk about it for hours, and I will not. Um, but gratitude shaming is when we inadvertently tell someone or ourselves, you know what, my feelings here are not valid because I should be grateful. And so all the pain and discomfort that we are feeling just gets shoved down with this foe gratitude. You can feel pain and discomfort and sadness and frustration and all things and be grateful. Sometimes my work is very difficult. I am also grateful that I do what I do. Both can coexist. They are not mutually exclusive. So telling someone else you should be grateful, please take that out of your vocabulary. And if you want to tell yourself, hey, I need to cultivate more gratitude, you can do so in a non-shaming way. I make gratitude lists often, but I don't shame my pain away with gratitude. Again, both can coexist. So that's an unhelpful thing to say. Another unhelpful thing to say, depending on someone's religion and spirituality and schema and what they believe in, telling someone that everything happens for a reason can be incredibly damaging. When I was in high school and two of my friends, Sal and Francis, this month— how many years ago? 2008. I'm bad at math. 18, 19, 20, 21, So 13 years ago this month, got in a car accident and passed away. And I will never forget a member of the clergy at one of the funeral services saying like, this— everything happens for a reason and this needed to happen. This was God's will. If you believe that, awesome, and I hope you can find peace and solace there. I don't— I don't believe that my higher power takes people off the planet. And so when people— when I was grieving and anyone said, well, everything happens for a reason, it wasn't just unhelpful, it was damaging to me. And I got very resentful and I like swore off religion and God. That's my thing. But I don't feel that way anymore. But I still would not say that to someone that's going through pain, um, to try to make someone feel better. Maybe they don't need you to make them feel better. Maybe they just need to be heard, right? So anything along those lines, like platitudes, right? Don't be stressed, don't be anxious. You're going to see my favorite thing in the world. This is hanging up in my office, or it was hanging up in my office at work. I'm at home now, but I brought it home because I love it so much. It's a meme. I hope you can see the whole thing. Eh, can you see this? I don't know. Well, in case it's backwards, which I don't think it will be, it says, "When someone says don't be anxious and your anxiety is cured." Right? I say this to my patients all of the time. They'll say like, "Well, you know, my mom told me," I have nothing to be depressed about. And I'm just like, oh, first of all, with clinical things, like you don't need a reason to be depressed or anxious. If you have clinical major depressive disorder or clinical anxiety, right? Like it's the chemicals in your brain that are off. And so yes, behavioral changes and things in your life can make a difference. But to a certain extent, a lot of times we'll just shame ourselves because we'll say, well, I don't have a reason. I shouldn't be depressed. I should be grateful. And I'm just like, Oh my God, where did you get that message? And the reality is everywhere. I see it on LinkedIn sometimes. It's like, next time you're feeling down, just remind yourself, remember there was a time that you wanted everything you have now. And it's like, true, true, true, true, true, true. And if that's helpful, awesome. But if it's a shaming, if we receive it as shaming, like, yeah, I really shouldn't feel this way. I have a video about minimizing emotions and that is absolutely relevant here as well. So anyway, long story short, I'm writing a book. Unhelpful things to say. I wanted to put it out there in the universe. Like my friend Corey told me, if I tell people about it, I'm accountable and I like kind of have to do it. So that's helpful for me and to just get my creativity flowing. It's cool to talk about. But when I asked a couple of friends and posted a poll on LinkedIn on what do you want to hear me talk about on Wellness Wednesdays, one of the things that came up was how to support your partner, whether it's how to support your partner, a friend, a family member. It's how do we show up for others? And when you don't know what to say to someone, because you've never experienced yourself, it yourself, that's okay. Showing up is enough, right? Sometimes it's so much more powerful to just say, I'm really glad you told me, or God, that sounds really hard, like Brené says in her video, than it is to try to come up with the right thing. Oftentimes people ask me, how do you know as a therapist what to say to someone when someone's like going through something incredibly traumatic or someone tells you something really hard or vulnerable? And I'm like, My job is not to know the right thing to say. My job is to hear you and hold space for you and sometimes challenge you depending on the context and reflect back the things that you're saying to me. My job is not to problem solve or to know what the right thing to say is. But I will say what helps a lot with my therapeutic approach is not trying to figure out the right thing to say and knowing that there are some wrong things to say, like, "You shouldn't feel that way," or, "Be happy." Have you tried not being stressed? Platitudes, minimizing, gratitude shaming, and solution-focused responses are often not helpful, and that's what I want you to take away from this video. If you have any ideas of things that you want to hear about on Wellness Wednesday, feel free to comment below and subscribe. You totally don't have to subscribe because, like I said in my video about social media and loneliness, or maybe self-worth, um, the amount of likes or subscribers does not need to impact your self-worth. It just doesn't need to. So if you want to hear more of these videos because they genuinely help you, awesome, subscribe. If you don't, that's totally cool too. And I will see you next Wednesday for another episode of Wellness Wednesday. Have a great week.