How Can We Help Others Feel Truly Seen and Safe With Us?

I think our sense of ourselves is really determined to in large part by who we happen to be around. There are some people who make us feel really interesting. like we've got a lot to say. And then there are other people around whom we feel and we don't quite even know why. We don't have very much to say. We just feel a bit boring. We feel a bit dull. And I want to say that is often the result of an intuitive sense of how much another person will understand of what's inside us. If we intuit it that someone doesn't have room in their minds for what's in our hearts, we'll shut down and we'll feel boring to ourselves because we sense that there isn't space for who we really are in them. And then other people, we just can't stop chatting. We've got so much to say because we know they're understanding us. And so part of the art of being a good friend is signaling to the other person that a lot of what they could come out with we'd be able to tolerate. bear. And some of that has to do with questions. Take weekends, right? So if you say to somebody, um, so was your weekend really fun? Okay, you've automatically cut off all sorts of possibilities because if their weekend was not fun, they've been humiliated and subtly shamed into not admitting that. It's a closed question. Was your weekend fun? Is subtly coercing you to come up with lots of reasons why your weekend was fun. For many of us, weekends are not fun. There could be a time of sadness. We might have lost someone. We might have, you know, be digesting some humiliation or something. Now, the way to ask is to say, how was your weekend? Even you know, what interested you this weekend? Um, what were you feeling this weekend? That starts to create room. So, there are kind of closed questions that we direct to people and open questions. And if you want to be a good friend, part of the art of being a good friend is making sure you leave a lot of room for whatever it is that the person may want to get off their minds. Philosopher Schopenhau once wisely observed that anyone you meet might be on the verge of killing themselves. And that could be quite a strange view like I mean it's very dark idea. It's not necessarily literally true. But what he was saying was um there may be a lot more despair at large than you think. And to go around thinking that people's observable smiles are really the truth about what's inside them is to really cut off possibility. There may be a huge amount of sorrow that's going on in people. And as a friend, as someone who wants to be close to people, keep that in mind always. Maybe there's something even though you know it's an ordinary Monday morning or something, maybe this friend of yours has got something pretty large that they're wrestling with. And make sure you've got a kind of open countenance that would give it room if it was