Instead of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, reverse empathy means trying to remember a time when you wore the same shoes.

The more you can relate yourself to what they’re going through, the better your odds of being genuinely helpful and supportive to the person next to you, not to mention being less reactive and emotional yourself.

The reality is that people struggling emotionally don’t want someone to fix their pain, they want to feel understood.

In order to let people feel understood, you could use a technique called reflective listening. Reflective listening means that when someone tells you something, you simply reflect back to them what they said, either literally or with your own slight spin on it.

Once we’re deep into a spiral of our own difficult emotion, it’s hard to have enough mental and emotional bandwidth to navigate both our own mood and that of someone else.

The solution is to get better at noticing and managing our own emotional responses early so that they don’t balloon out of control. And the best way I know of to do that is through a process called emotional validation.

Emotional validation simply means acknowledging our own emotions and reminding ourselves that they’re okay and reasonable even if uncomfortable.

So much unnecessary struggle, conflict and wasted energy comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about what’s really under our control.

When you stop expecting to be able to make someone feel better, you can start taking real steps to connect with them in a heartfelt way and be genuinely supportive.