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this is a tricky but important thing to talk about so i'd like to clarify, the wording here is slightly off many of us are not sharing with our friends / loved ones how much pain we're actually in because we worry it's so much we would be hurting them; i wanna talk about this https://t.co/KieoFKFE9Q
unfortunately it is just actually true that many people don't know how to handle other people's feelings; you feel too strongly and express it to them and they get sad or scared or angry https://t.co/IPTKz4Lg7U
We - perhaps correctly! - believe that others can't handle our emotions, that they would freak out, get angry, try to caretake us because they'd feel like bad people if they didn't, etc. We don't want to burden them or worry them or annoy them, so... we don't.
i want to talk to the people who want to do better than this it is possible to become the kind of person who is not hurt by other people's emotional expressions, and then you can become a space where other people can feel safe expressing; this is vitally needed work
the actual #1 most important thing you need to do when supporting someone else emotionally is to just *accept whatever is happening for them* there are obvious ways of not accepting like freaking out or getting angry, but there are more subtle ones too
a common subtle form of non-acceptance is feeling a need to fix or help, esp. if it comes with a fear that if you don't you're a bad person / friend. what you are doing here is needing them to be different, to not be feeling what they're feeling; this doesn't feel good
your fear of being a bad person / friend if you don't do enough to help your friend is actually your stuff to deal with, not theirs; if your friend's going through a hard time and asking for support and you're willing to give it, set your stuff aside and save it for later
acceptance also means you don't do the "CBT-ish" (someone have a better word for this?) thing of trying to argue with the feelings - "no you're not a bad person, you're so good!" this pushes the feelings away when you could be holding them https://t.co/i7i0VTSLsU
5. i am more convinced now that a lot of the CBT-ish positive-thinking kinds of things that people do for mental health are not useful in the long term. stuff like noticing when you're judging yourself and trying to remind yourself that you're actually good or w/e
ultimately your capacity to accept other people's feelings and pain is bottlenecked by your capacity to accept your own, so if you want to train this skill you can work on that then tell your friends you're not going to be hurt if they tell you about their pain! (if that's true)
acceptance is the fundamental level 1 skill and if you master it (which is hard) you'll already be much better at emotional support than almost everyone at higher levels you can also learn how to help people name, express, and process their feelings - that's another thread
but as usual @DougTataryn's bio-emotive framework is a place i'd highly recommend to start: https://t.co/BNhWIuN3MK
arguing against someone's feelings in comic form extremely counterintuitively, sometimes the correct move to make in this situation is to ask your friend to repeat "i'm a horrible person" out loud 3-20x until they cry https://t.co/KUlhAC3iud