Glad my wife and I aren’t the only ones. It’s frustrating to explain why proposed solutions won’t work while already worked up over stressful bullshit. Sometimes there just aren’t real solutions. Sometimes you just need to open a pressure relief valve for a minute so you can have a little reset and be better equipped to tackle the mountain of bullshit.

I prefer the renegade

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I find that the variety of emotes people have available on discord say more than I probably would half-ass with words.

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In the land of the blind awkward the one eyed I dunno less awkward I guess man is king

Hey thanks! I like that phrasing better. Less perfunctory, more sincere.

When is only you and your friend in evening near the grill, then i don’t know which sympathy i stole, i mean men truly open up very rarely and often in very small circle or even only to one person, so you have to show some compassion in these moments

So you say the initial cry’s a show?

It all depends on how you say it. Some people just genuinely do need to know someone understands them at face value. Adding your own experiences and using that to validate their feelings rather than overshadow then is an invaluable practiced skill. It allows you to layer advice into how you convey it, sometimes without them even realizing that’s what you’re doing.

A great way to do this subtly is to ask them questions that help you find VERY close similarities that open the door to a segway into your own experience. Example:

“Oh man, that’s horrible. Hitting a roadblock like that suck so much. Did you have to deal with [related thing] too?”

“YES and it only piled onto my stress. Ughhhhh.”

“I know all too well. It’s the worst and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I’m so sorry. If it helps, I could go through what I did. It’s not exactly the same, but maybe something that helped me will resonate? But I understand if you’d rather just vent. My ear’s always open.”

The trick is usually asking if they want to hear it. Then you know for SURE whether or not to proceed, and you’ve framed it in such a way that is less about you and more about investigating ways the shared experience can inform how they handle the issue themselves, or how the differences can add better insight into their own trouble.

I learned this a few years ago and my mind was blown because I’m autistic and this is indeed my instinct. I have also found that neurodivergent people are more likely to respond positively to an anecdote.

Neurotypical people tend to react better to “reflective listening” — basically the “it sucks” button, but more expanded. Like if someone is venting about something, I might say “That sounds really frustrating”, or similar. It feels like playing conversational ping pong where I’m not an active participant in the rally, but just reacting to my conversation partner’s shots.

I don’t tend to find reflective listening especially helpful if I’m the recipient of it (I cope with problems differently), so it blew my mind when I was trying to support a friend with these techniques and they ended the conversation by thanking me for the support, and they really needed that. It baffled me because I hadn’t felt like I’d said anything really at all, besides just reflecting stuff back at them, which felt sort of like small talk but even more superficial. But nah, turns out that different people find different kinds of support helpful. The_More_You_Know.jpg