"I'm Not Your Therapist!" What to do When Friends Overwhelm You With Their Problems

Friends should feel comfortable sharing their woes - but what happens if you just can't face hearing any more bad or upsetting stuff?

Opening up and sharing your thoughts and fears, your hopes and anxieties with another person can be a great way to strengthen your bonds of friendship and mutual trust. 

Plus, humans love to reciprocate, so admitting your vulnerabilities usually encourages our friends to do the same. Such honest conversations are the cornerstone of the close relationships we all need to thrive.

But Megan Keon – a listener to my podcast The Happiness Lab – recently posed an interesting question about how to navigate these sorts of vulnerable conversations, especially when they can stop being a source of joy and become a weighty burden of worry. 

Megan asked what we should do when our friends’ problems begin to feel overwhelming. 

“It starts to feel like I'm their therapist and I'm not trained to be a therapist. I want to be able to support those friends, to be there for them, to be mindful of their happiness, without compromising my own?”

For help, I turned again to empathy expert and Stanford professor Jamil Zaki. 

“Feeling as though we care for someone and can't do anything for them… that helplessness can be a real killer,” says Jamil. 

Many of us, he says, are driven by “empathic concern” – we desperately want to improve the wellbeing of the people around us. We can become fixated on this goal and think that we must “solve” the problems of our friends and loved ones to achieve it. 

Of course, we usually can’t fix people’s problems for them. 

“It's very easy to feel as though empathy has failed if you're not able to change somebody else,” say Jamil. “People can decide: ‘Well, if I can't fix other people, if I can't make them happy, then I’m a bad empathizer, I'm a bad caregiver and I'm going to stop.’”

Withdrawing our empathy in this way can cause that friendship to collapse. Jamil suggests we reconsider the goal of our empathic concern instead. 

“Guess what? The job of empathy is not actually to fix other people, because other people are not in our control.”

Jamil says solving our friend’s problems shouldn’t be our goal. Instead, we act as a good friend when we merely show up and listen.

“When we show up for other people, all we have control over is what we bring to the situation. If we can be as attentive, as supportive, and as non-judgmental as possible, then I would say that our empathy has succeeded irrespective of how it lands with the other person, because we've done what we can.

“I think oftentimes we overestimate how much people want us to solve their problem," says Jamil.

“In fact, if you ask support receivers what they want, it’s usually just someone to be there. So Megan, even without fixing her friend's problem, might be doing a lot more than she realizes just by being a friend to that individual.” 

The second part of Megan’s question is also important – sometimes the private and personal things that close friends disclose are not easy to hear. They can be deeply upsetting and haunt our own thoughts long afterwards. 

“Being around somebody we care about who is really struggling is its own type of suffering for us as well,” says Jamil. “We need to realize that we too suffer when we're around people who suffer and that we need to care for ourselves during those times too.”

When I feel sorrowful and overwhelmed by the things a friend confides in me, I often try to recall the self-compassion advice of Kristen Neff.

She recommends that in such situations we need to remind ourselves:

• caring for people isn’t easy.

• it’s ok to be sad or upset because of what you’re hearing. 

• I’m not the cause of their suffering and while I may want to help them, it’s not within my power to make that suffering go away. 

I was so happy to receive Megan’s question because it’s not something we often talk about openly. When our friends share painful stories with us, we can feel selfish and ashamed for even admitting that their sadness is causing us pain and emotional fatigue too. 

But by being honest with ourselves about our own feelings - and the limits of our ability to “fix” the lives of others – we can continue to do the only thing truly with our power. And often that’s just showing up. 

So stay well, stay happy... and show up.

Laurie