Small Consolation

How NOT to Respond to Others’ Grief, Loss, and Disappointment

When we train organizational teams in SAVI, we talk about many different types of difficult conversations — from boring meetings to heated arguments. In this post, we’ll focus on one communication challenge that we often don’t get to cover: responding to someone who expresses feelings of grief, loss, or disappointment. While such conversations may not occur frequently in work settings, we all find ourselves engaged in them from time to time, and many of us have great difficulty handling them effectively. In fact, some of the most common attempts to be supportive can easily make the other person feel worse, rather than better. We’ll look at a few of these here, before considering more helpful alternatives.

Common Response #1. Imagining the Positive
Suppose you’ve just lost your job, and you’re devastated. It’s a big blow to your self-esteem and threatens your sense of security for the future. You share this with your friend, and she responds by saying, “I know things will work out well in the end. Within a month you’ll have five job offers.” Or, “This is just temporary. The industry is bound to recover soon.” How does that make you feel?

In all likelihood, the friend in this scenario has only good, altruistic intentions: trying to help you feel better and shift your focus from distressing worries to hopeful possibilities. Nevertheless, these sorts of comments are unlikely to feel truly reassuring. We can use the SAVI framework to understand why.

Using SAVI, we can identify your friend’s statements as Positive predictions — assumptions about the future, stated as if they were facts. Responding to any deeply emotional message with a Positive prediction is inherently problematic. First of all, the prediction avoids the core issue: the person’s feelings (e.g., in this case, feeling hurt, vulnerable, upset, and worried). Instead it focuses on concrete events or circumstances (getting a job offer, improvements in the economy, and so on). It also avoids the present reality (unemployment), focusing instead on what will happen in the future. And since none of us can know the future, Positive predictions are always in some sense misrepresentations. Those five job offers are not real facts about the world; they are just your friend’s projections. It should come as no surprise that imaginary future events thought up by somebody else cannot override the very real feelings you’re experiencing right now.

Common Response #2. Using All the Right Words (As Seen on TV)
Now consider a different scenario. Your father has just died, after a long and debilitating illness, and you’re struggling with grief as you return to work the following week. As your colleagues find out, they offer various expressions of sympathy, such as “I’m sorry for your loss,” “My condolences,” “At least his suffering is over,” and “He’s in a better place now” — all with no feeling in their voice tone. Do you feel comforted? Probably not.

Again, we can apply SAVI to help us understand what’s happening. These remarks are all examples of Ritual communication: predictable, socially determined phrases stated with little or no emotion. We pick up these conventional expressions from our culture, learning the “right thing” to say from movies, books, and television, as well as from direct social interactions. Anyone who enjoys watching police procedurals like Law & Order has probably heard “I’m sorry for your loss” hundreds of times.

Now, just because people respond to you with Rituals, that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care. In our example, it might be that some of your coworkers freeze up and get uncomfortable talking about emotional issues. They might rely on seemingly safe, standard phrases because they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing and making you more upset. The point is, you simply can’t tell what they’re feeling. At a time when you really need emotional connection, an emotionally flat, automatic response may just add to your distress.

Common Response #3. Delivering the Universal Truth
Have you ever received upsetting health news, and then found the people around you starting to act like medical experts? For instance, maybe you just learned that your child needs surgery, or you’ve been diagnosed with a serious injury or chronic disease. As you’re grappling with the emotional impact of that information, some of your family members jump in to share their unsolicited, dogmatic opinions. Each person conveys a clear impression that he or she knows exactly what you should do: “You need to get a second opinion right away.” “You really ought to join a support group.” “You have to go see this great acupuncturist I know.” “The only way you’ll turn this around is by changing your lifestyle habits.”

Would this advice help to calm or reassure you? While some of the ideas might potentially be helpful, the way they’re presented — as what we call “Oughtitudes” — makes it difficult to use them. SAVI defines an Oughtitude as “[c]omments expressing non-hostile superiority, dogmatic value judgments, rules about life, generalizations that imply universal ‘rightness’ and that the speaker has a direct line to the absolute truth which everybody ‘ought to know…’” These types of communication provide a very strong push in a particular direction, not leaving room for any doubt or opposing opinions. And of course, as with the other responses we looked at, they do nothing to address the emotions involved; instead of acknowledging what’s happening for you right now, they skip ahead to what you ought to be doing.

Common Response #4. Talking You Out of It
Imagine that you’re facing the end of a close relationship, whether it’s a divorce, separation, or break-up. You might experience a wide range of painful thoughts and feelings — from grief and despair to identity issues to fears about how the other person will manage without you. (We’ll leave out anger, resentment, and outrage, as they are less relevant to this discussion and raise other complications.) You talk to your friends, who care about you and so naturally don’t want you to go through this pain. When they hear what you’re thinking and feeling, they try to talk you out of it: “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” “You shouldn’t feel that way.” “There’s nothing to feel guilty about.” Sometimes their comments might be a little more subtle: “I totally understand why it seems that way, but that’s because you’re so upset right now” or “I know she’s having a hard time, but it’s really not your fault.” As the conversation continues, you find yourself shifting from sharing your feelings to having an argument. What’s going on?

When we coach people who report being on the other end of these dialogues — making failed attempts at reassurance — they often can’t understand what went wrong. They were trying so hard to be helpful, and instead of being appreciative, or at least feeling a little better, the other person started fighting with them. Once more we can turn to SAVI for insight. Statements like “You shouldn’t feel that way” or “Don’t be so hard on yourself” are Discounts, denying the value of the thoughts or feelings someone else has expressed. The intention behind a Discount may be kind and supportive, but the message that comes through most clearly is “You’re wrong.” Yes-Buts have a similar effect. The person gives a token agreement (e.g., “I know it seems that way”), followed by a contradictory opinion (“but it’s not true,” “but things will get better in time,” “but you haven’t considered…” etc.). Again, the core message that gets communicated is that this person knows better than you do what you should be thinking or feeling. No matter what the context, that’s a message that’s likely to lead to an argument.

Uncommon Sense
We mentioned earlier that these four types of responses are extremely common. Do you recognize any of them as the kinds of things people have said to you, or that you yourself have a tendency to say? When you’re on the receiving end of such comments, it’s pretty obvious that they aren’t what you need to hear. At best they’re simply not helpful, and at worst they can be downright infuriating. Yet when it’s you who needs to respond to someone experiencing grief or loss, you might find those same infuriating comments coming out of your mouth. That’s certainly happened to both of us. To be able to respond effectively, it’s not enough to know what not to say; we need to have a sense of what alternative responses would be more helpful. While there’s no “right” response, we can recommend several options that have much greater potential for success than Positive predictions, Rituals, Oughtitudes, Discounts, or Yes-Buts. Stay tuned for details in our next post, coming soon!

In the meantime, as 2009 comes to a close, we wish you all peace, health, happiness, and conversations that just get better and better.