To help someone going through a crisis, use these 7 words


🖊️ When writer Kelly Corrigan's daughters became tweens, Corrigan stood ready to help them with the troubles and travails of that delicate time. If one of her girls would came home from school angry and upset, she'd come up with ideas for how to deal with bullying, rejection, or whatever the problem was.

It didn't always go over well: "Their emotion would change, and they would go from something raw to something kind of tired and dismissive and then they would wander away," Corrigan, host of the PBS interview series Tell Me More, recounted on NPR's TED Radio Hour.

One day her daughter Georgia called, crying. Corrigan happened to be in a car with a friend who was training to become a therapist, so she put the phone on speaker.

Georgia said she hated sixth grade. All the girls in class were turning on her for no reason.

Corrigan's friend whispered: "Say 'tell me more.' " Corrigan echoed it to her daughter: "Tell me more."

Georgia went on complaining.

"Say 'that sounds really hard,'" whispered the therapist-in-training. "That sounds so hard," Corrigan said to Georgia.

"It is!" Georgia replied. And instead of shutting down like usual, the sixth-grader continued to open up to her mom. Corrigan says this different way of communicating, though simple, was shockingly effective.

When a family member or friend is struggling emotionally, using phrases like these can unlock a deeper connection, and it's far more powerful than giving advice, says Corrigan.

Corrigan has spent years talking about families — her own and many others — on her PBS show, her podcast and in her four bestselling books. She gave a TED Talk about having the courage to respond with humility when a loved one is in crisis, which requires putting aside our own ideas about how to fix their problems.


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