peacefultrifle wrote:
Hi everyone
I am curious if other people also find it difficult to know how to respond when a friend shares their feelings. It isn't that I don't care about how they feel. But when a friend messages me online and tells me about their deeper feelings and emotional struggles, I find I don't know what to say. I have one friend in particular who finds me easy to talk to and randomly messages me about what she is doing in therapy and asks for reassurance when she feels bad. I am sorry she feels bad and I recognize that she tells me because she trusts me, but I also find it jarring to be suddenly dealing with someone else's feelings with no warning. I don't know what the correct response is and it feels like I have been put on the hot seat!
Does anyone else struggle with this?
This is something I've struggled with too, although I think I've gradually gotten better at it.
Could you give some specific examples of things that your friend has told you (minus any identifying info, of course)? It might be easier for us to brainstorm appropriate replies to specific examples.
In the meantime, perhaps you might find some of
these tutorials on active listening helpful. Active listening serves many purposes, but one of them is to help the other person feel heard and validated, which is probably the most important thing you can do for your friend.
Feel honored occasionally that the person values my input enough to ask me..then ,becomes important to try to
Get some idea of what might be causing their feelings, if you can., and feed them back some information based on that. If you can .