How to Help Your Friend through a Difficult Time, Part 2: Your Role

Your Role When Helping Your Friend Through a Problem

When helping a friend through a difficult time, it is important to be clear about the most helpful role for you to play in your friend’s story.

Your friend is living her life and writing the story of her life one action at a time. She is the lead actor of her life making her way though her difficult challenge. You are in a supporting role. 

Your most helpful role is as a companion, observer, and supporter.

What Your Role is NOT

It’s important to know what your role is not when you are helping a friend with a problem.

You are not your friend’s fixer, rescuer, cavalry, knight in shining armor, mother or father, hero or heroine.

You are not the one who asks a lot of questions about your friend’s past, analyze her story, and determine the cause and cure of your friend’s problem.

Neither are you with your friend to make your friend “feel better.” You’re not there to change your friend’s feelings to feelings that are more comfortable for you.

You are not the “thought police.” Your friend has no thoughts that you have to police.

You are not the director of your friend’s life story, not in the role of telling your friend what to do and not do. Your friend is both the lead actor in his challenge and his own director of his actions.

Most important of all,  you are not your friend. Your friend’s challenge is not yours. It’s not your role to become the lead actor or a participant in your friend’s problem. When you over-identify with your friend and his problem, you and your friend both have problems to solve.

Your Role

Again, the best role to be in to help your friend is as a companion, observer, and supporter as she makes her way through the challenge she faces. 

You are someone safe, with whom your friend can safely and confidentially express whatever he feels.

You’re in the role of listening to your friend express her thoughts without forming opinions about what she thinks. You listen without judging her thoughts right or wrong. You neither agree nor disagree with what she thinks. 

You’re in the role of a collaborator; that is, one with whom your friend can form a plan of action. But it has to be her plan, not yours. 

As your friend’s friend, you are also in the role of protecting him from harming himself or others. You’re the one who gets helps if your friends is suicidal or a threat to others. You are the one who calls 911 when needed. You are the one who tells your friend that she needs help that you are not qualified to give.

Part Three of this series will give you some practical actions you can take to help your friend.

Mark W. Neville

Author, Educator, Life Therapist

828-551-8825

www.markwneville.com

On-line Counseling at WeCounsel

Book: Re-Visioning Spirit: A Brief Introduction to Thumotics

www.facebook.com/MarkWNevilleMDiv

How to Help Your Friend Get Through a Difficult Time, Part 1

It’s hard to watch a friend struggle through a challenging time in his or her life. Sometimes it’s more than hard. It’s painful. 

We care about our friends. It’s normal to want to help our friend going through a difficult time and important to know exactly how best to help. In this three-part series, I share information that you can use to help your friend.

In Part One, I share 7 things you need to know about your friend’s problem, emotions, thoughts, plans, and actions.

In Part Two, I share helpful, practical information about the most helpful role for you to be in when helping your friend.

In the last part, Part Three, I give you some practical things to do to help your friend through the difficult challenge.

Part One: 7 Basic Things to Get about Your Friend Dealing with a Problem

1. Your friend’s problem is not yours to take on and try to fix as if it was your own. Doing so robs your friend of an important opportunity in making his way through his difficulty.

    Your friend’s problem is your friend’s problem.

2. Your friend’s emotional responses are what they are. She feels what she feels. Her feelings are neither right nor wrong. They simply are what she feels. She cannot change her emotions by willing them to be different. If she could, she would. Like weather fronts, they will pass. 

3. Your friend’s thoughts are also what they are. They might be about doing things that are either helpful or harmful, but thoughts themselves are neither right nor wrong. They just are. Like emotions, thoughts come and go.

4. Your friend’s emotions and thoughts are less important than your friend’s plans and actions. What your friend plans to do or not do matters. What your friend actually does or does not do matters above all else.

5. What your friend plans to do to address his problem guides what he actually does. Since your friend’s problem is his to solve, his plan to solve his problem is also his. Creating a plan is his work, not yours. But you can help him think through and form his plan.

6. Your friend’s actions are hers. Whatever she does, she will not fail. She will do what she does. And she will get feedback. She will experience the consequences of her actions. Those consequences will help her decide whether to keep doing what she’s doing or do something different.

7. Your friend will make his way through his problem, one way or another: constructively or destructively. And he will do so with or without you. You are not necessary for your friend to solve his problem. However, you might be able to help him act more constructively than destructively to himself and others.

If this post is helpful to you, it probably is to others as well. Please share it and help others help their friends too.

NEXT POST: My next post, the second part of this series, will be about the best role for you to play and practical things you can do to help your friend through a difficult challenge.