If someone comes to you who is suffering for whatever reason, the last things that should be done are to give the person empty spiritual platitudes, a list of your own woes or, God Forbid, unless asked for at some later point, advice. These responses often intensify the person’s suffering and they remain stranded and still feeling hostage to their emotions.
The greatest gift you can give to help relieve the person’s emotional pain is to LISTEN and to validate the person’s experience for them. This serves to initiate the process of the person feeling able to lessen the burden of what they feel and to integrate it. It’s so easy yet so many want to tell the person what to do, what to think, how they should feel, give them spiritual rhetoric or start telling the person of their own personal tragedies.
No.
Listen and validate. When they have told all, tell the person you are sorry for what they have experienced. Then, go from there. If you have listened properly the person will feel lighter and less aggrieved and more able to cope with the next moments.
This is simple, Unconditional Love In Action.
