Settle Deep. Ground Down. Open up.
The discomfort of watching someone suffering can range from uncomfortable to pure torture. Our heart can begin to race, our breathing to become ragged, and our anxiety levels to climb.
Your gut reaction could be to search for a solution. Are there words we can say? Is there something we can do? Is there something we can gift that will take their emotional pain away?
Try resisting the urge to dash for a solution. To help someone in emotional pain without depleting your energy, you need to settle your emotions and thoughts.
Ground your energy deep by bringing your awareness back into your body. Lengthen through your spine. Breathe in through your nose, expanding your front lungs, side lungs, and back lungs in 360 degrees. Feel your deep breath enter your body, cool as you breathe in, and warm as you breathe out. Slow down your breathing, your pulse, your thoughts.
Open up to the present moment and the person in distress beside you. Release the future, and the past, and give yourself entirely to listening.
Listen with your full attention. Your mind will wander, grasp for solutions, for platitudes, at distractions to pull your attention away.
Just sit. Be still. Be calm and grounded.
Make space for whatever the person beside you is feeling and experiencing.
Mirror Without Emotion
Empathy is not the answer.
Do you want to help someone in emotional pain without draining your vitality and well-being?
Compassion is your go-to tool to best help someone who is suffering. Compassion frees up your emotional and intellectual resources to help better than empathy.
Everywhere you will hear and read that the answer is to feel the pain of the person beside you, but do not listen. Do not try and dive into the person’s soul and experience their pain. Do not rage against injustice, bring your energy down to the low vibration of depression, or cry at the trauma or tragedy of it all.
Whereas empathy consumes and ignites your own powerful emotions, practicing compassion leverages your intellectual understanding of how the person in pain is feeling to best help them.
Are you a highly sensitive or intuitive person? You will need to work actively to resist your natural inclination to feel the pain of the person beside you acutely. Remember to settle your emotions and thoughts, ground your energy down, and only then open up.
As you sit grounded and still, listening with your entire attention, begin to mirror. Repeat the last three words that they say, and then wait.
Become comfortable with silence and learn the art of the long pause.
Give space for the person to form and express their experience.
Retain the Focus on the Person in Distress
It is natural to search for a similar experience with which to relate to the person’s situation. Resist the temptation to tell your story.
Retain the focus on the person in distress because their situation is unique. It doesn’t matter if you lost your grandma three days ago, and now you are sitting beside a friend who has just lost theirs. The situation, the experience, and the person are different.
The only thing worse than acute suffering is watching someone you love hurting. You can't take on the pain of the person sitting next to you, even if you want to with all your heart.
The truth is that trying to fix the person beside you with solutions, words, gifts, touch, and love can be selfish. One of the most beautiful ways to help someone with emotional pain is to allow space, silence, and acceptance to breathe and exist.
Name that Pain
Find a calm, low voice vibration. Remain rooted and grounded. Next, label the pain of the person in front of you. Frame it in a non-threatening way by starting with: “It seems….”.
It seems like you are feeling stressed.
Then wait. Give time for the person to think, to form their emotions into words, to speak their truth. They may elaborate on just how stressed they are feeling. Or they could correct you that they are furious, or devastated.
Begin mirroring once again. Once the person has stopped talking, repeat back the last three words that they said, and then wait for them to continue talking.
Once the person in emotional pain is done expressing their feelings, wait a moment before expressing your intention to be there for them. You can communicate how much you love and care about the person in distress, and assure them they can reach out for help to you.
Healing Touch
The power of touch to soothe is well-known. How does a mother respond to the cry of her hurt child? Offering a healing touch can be powerful, but this step depends on your relationship with the person in emotional pain and their disposition.
If touch is appropriate and will bring comfort instead of unease and awkwardness, then you can offer to hold their hand, a hug, a back rub, a hand or foot massage, or a cuddle session. The person in distress will experience a rush of feel-good chemicals with the power of your touch.
Sometimes: Ask to Serve
At times the right answer will be only to listen, mirror, name the pain, and offer compassion. Often people in emotional distress need space and time to feel and work through the negative emotions in their own time.
You may feel like you are doing little or nothing by flowing back and forth through the above steps. In reality, you will be offering companionship and acceptance for the person in distress. They are no longer suffering alone, nor feeling a push to ‘get better' and ‘move forward.'
You will be a calm, loving presence beside them, opening up space for them to dive deep into their feelings and experiences and talk about what they are going through now.
Sometimes this will be not only enough but all that you should do.
Other times the answer will be to take help one step further and offer to help.
Ask the person in pain what small things or activities bring them joy so you can gain a better understanding of how best to offer support and love.
Then brainstorm how you can uplift the person in distress with their help.
Carefully consider what you will offer and be sure there will be no resentment involved in fulfilling your acts of giving.
You can ask how you can best serve the person in front of you by voicing options. Would you like a hug or can I make you a meal? Would you like my help finding a psychologist or shall we go for a walk every evening together in the park?
Release. Recharge. Revitalize.
Free up time after being with someone in emotional pain to release any negative emotions you inadvertently absorbed and to recharge your body, mind, and spirit with positive energy.
Revitalize yourself through movement outdoors.
Yoga and Taichi are two of the best healing exercises to diffuse tension, sadness, and stress and open the flow of energy back into your body, but any exercise will help you recharge. Nature is a natural healer, so exercising outdoors is a more powerful way to revitalize than indoors.
After the exercise, take a cold shower or at least run cold water over each leg and arm for thirty seconds. Cold water charges your body with energy and clears negative energy.
Next, meditate for five to thirty minutes, depending on time limitations, and then relax. Read an inspirational book, watch an uplifting program, listen to an exciting and motivating podcast, or seek out the company of someone with whom you can laugh.
Nourish your body with high-vibrational foods, such as fresh, bright-colored fruits and vegetables and tall glasses of pure water with freshly squeezed lemon.
Short on time to refresh your energy after supporting someone in emotional pain? You can run through each step in just 1-5 minutes.
If you're at work walk once around the block, do some desk yoga, or climb a flight of stairs.
Splash your face with cold water or place your wrists under the cold spray for a minute.
Find a quiet space and bring your attention to the breath for one minute.
In a final step make a cup of tea and spend one minute writing a gratitude list or thinking of what you are most proud of accomplishing in the past five years.
wishing you radiant health, joy, and abundance, Heather