WHAT TO SAY WHEN SOMEONE YOU LOVE IS STRUGGLING
The Part That Wants Better: What to Say When Someone You Love Is Struggling
There is a particular kind of helplessness that comes from watching someone we love move through pain we cannot take from them. A teenager who has gone quiet and hides in their room, a partner who is stressed and emotionally dysregulated, a friend who has stopped answering texts the way they used to. We want so badly to fix it and yet it's precisely that wanting that so often gets in our way.
I came across a conversation recently between Mel Robbins and clinical psychologist Dr Lisa Damour, whose work on adolescence and family life I admire, and it stayed with me for days afterward (the way good conversations do). Damour has spent more than thirty years working with teenagers and their families and her latest book "The Emotional Lives of Parents : Caring for Ourselves to Better care for Our Children", turns that same clear-eyed compassion toward parents themselves - toward the anger, hopelessness and shame that raising a child can stir up, feelings we rarely say out loud.
However, it was the podcast's central idea that I keep returning to: that distress is not the same thing as dysfunction.
Struggle isn't a symptom - sometimes it's a sign of health.
We've absorbed somewhere along the way, the idea that a person doing well should look calm, capable, unbothered. So when someone we love falls apart - grief, a breakup, a failed exam, a diagnosis — our instinct is to treat the falling apart as the problem to solve. Damour offers a different frame; feeling something painful in response to something genuinely painful is not evidence of a mind malfunctioning. It may be evidence of a mind working exactly as it should.
This matters enormously for how we show up. If we treat every hard feeling as an emergency to be managed away, we teach the people we love — especially the young people we love — that their pain is something to be embarrassed by, something to hide from us. And hidden pain doesn't go anywhere. It just goes underground.
The sentence that changes everything
One of the most useful pieces of language from the conversation is simple. When someone is spiralling — caught in a loop of anxious or self-defeating thinking — rather than arguing them out of it or trying to jolly them along, you can simply name what's true: there's a part of you in real pain, and another part of you that wants things to be better. I'm speaking to that part.
It works because it doesn't ask the person to stop feeling what they're feeling. It just quietly points to the part of them that is still oriented toward wellbeing — and speaks to that part, directly, as an ally rather than an interrogator.
A close cousin of this is the phrase what you're doing isn't working. Said gently, without judgement, it does something a lecture never can — it invites a person to notice their own pattern rather than defend it. It keeps you out of the role of opponent and leaves the struggle where it belongs: as theirs to work through, with you alongside.
Perhaps the hardest part is resisting the urge to either fix or flee. Damour's phrase for the middle path is simple: that stinks, I'm here. No advice. No matching their alarm with your own. No quiet withdrawal because their pain makes you uncomfortable. Just a steady presence that neither escalates the storm nor abandons the person standing in it.
I think of this often in my mediation and coaching work — with couples, with parents and their teenagers, with the adult children navigating their own parents' ageing. The steadiest people in a room are rarely the ones with the best advice. They're the ones who can stay, without needing the other person's pain to resolve on their timeline.
There's a te reo Māori concept I find helful: manaakitanga — the practice of caring for others through generosity, hospitality, and mutual respect, without conditions attached. It isn't about swooping in to solve. It's about holding space well enough that the person in front of you can find their own footing again, in their own time.
If someone you love is having a hard time you don't need the perfect words. You need to resist the pull toward panic, the pull toward silence, and find the narrower path between them — curious rather than corrective, present rather than performing calm.
There's a part of you that wants better. I'm speaking to that part. I'm here.
Sometimes that's the whole conversation. And sometimes, that's exactly enough.
Dr Lisa Damour's conversation with Mel Robbins, "How to Help Anyone in Your Life Who's Struggling," is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Her book The Emotional Lives of Teenagers and forthcoming The Emotional Lives of Parents are both worth a read.
