How to be a Good Friend: Tangible Ways to Support a Struggling Loved One

Have you ever struggled with how to support a person you love? You may wonder how to be a good friend. How do you best support someone you care about when they are struggling? There are amazing lessons on tangible ways to support a struggling loved one from a prominent voice for the disabled community.

Some of the best advice for supporting a loved one who is struggling comes from an incredible book. The book is Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (here’s more information about the book). Piepzna-Samarasinha’s advice, specifically in the chapter “Crip Emotional Intelligence,” highlights how the disabled community is skilled at showing up for each other in powerful ways. This chapter and this book contain valuable lessons on how to truly support loved ones. While not everyone has experiences with disability or disability culture, we all can learn from it. Disabled communities often care for and show up for each other in revolutionary ways. Much of this blog will draw from this chapter of this book and on my own experiences as a therapist and a student of therapy.

Why saying ‘just call me’ isn’t always enough

Often, when we know our friends and loved ones are struggling, we do not know what to do or how we can help them. We are often hesitant to take initiative with how to support them because of this. So, many of us tell our loved ones that we are there for them when they need us. We say “let me know if there’s anything I can do,” “just call me if you need anything”, etc. We do this, because a lot of us do not know how else to help.

But, unfortunately, as Piepzna-Samarasinha describes in Care Work, there is a huge stigma against asking for help. This is especially true for those in the disabled community. However, this stigma often extends beyond the disabled community. Have you ever felt shame around asking for help when you needed it?

Stigma and fear

Piepzna-Samarasinha describes the experience that many individuals in the disabled community have had with asking for help: “many people I know and love have a really hard time receiving care because ‘care’ has always been conditional or violent” (p. 132). For many individuals who have struggled with receiving care in the past, asking for help can be scary.

This fear and stigma around asking for support can make it hard for your loved one to reach out when they need you. For example, they may hesitate to call you when they need to talk to someone. It’s hard to know if they will take the risk and ask you for help. We need to recognize that saying “just call me” isn’t always enough. We have to understand the stigma around asking for help can be a barrier for our loved ones to initiate asking. This barrier can keep us from being able to help and support the people we care about. Because of this, we have to be ready to do more.

Offering acts of service

Because of the stigma around asking for help, we can offer to help or support our loved ones instead. We can be a good friend by offering what we can do to help. This takes some of the burden of asking off the other person.

Offering support is what Piepzna-Samarasinha highlights as a kind of “Crip Emotional Intelligence” in disabled culture. They describe it as “offering to do laundry. Is offering to do it again. Is knowing you will probably have to offer help a million times before another disabled person takes you up on it” (p. 72). They describe how offering acts of service is a kind of disabled love language that can be stubborn, persistent, and understanding.

There is an understanding about how hard it can be for a disabled person to ask for help. This is a lesson we can all learn when it comes to offering support. Acts of service can look like offering to do laundry, offering to do their dishes, or offering to make them a meal. It an also include asking if your friend needs you to come over and sit with them. Offering specific acts of service to those we love can prevent them from having to ask for help in the first place.

 How to be a good friend to yourself

There is only so much support we can offer the people we love before we run out of energy. Piepzna-Samarasinha describes how important it is to communicate what you are able to do to support a loved one. This communication is especially important when you are not able.

As many of us in the disabled community know, we all have limited levels of energy and abilities that sometimes run out. In disabled culture, we communicate to our loved ones when our “spoons” of energy run out. This understanding helps us and the ones we care for to understand without judgment what we can or cannot do. Being a good friend to our loved ones involves understanding our limits and prioritizing ourselves when we need to.

It’s important to remember that supporting someone does not mean becoming their therapist. When offering support to our loved ones who are struggling, we also need to take care of ourselves. We need to know when we can offer support and when we can’t.

Read more about why your friend is not your therapist

Ask before offering advice

Being a good friend can look like putting your friend first. This means honoring what they need from you in the moment. Sometimes this means asking, “do you want me to give advice or just listen?” 

A lot of us rush to give advice when our loved ones are struggling with something. We feel the urge to fix it. We do this because we think solving the problem will make things okay. But often, giving advice or trying to fix the problem isn’t what others want when they come to us with their struggles. A lot of people actually find receiving unsolicited advice unpleasant. Often, supporting a struggling loved one means prioritizing what they need and what they want support with. It’s helpful to try not to take the responsibility to fix what they are going through. It’s also helpful to avoid comparing their problems to your own.

Read more about being a supportive friend

Avoid assumptions

Furthermore, avoid making assumptions about others’ experiences and what they need. It is more supportive to ask your friend what they need and how you can help them. Not assuming anything is another disabled cultural value that Piepzna-Samarasinha describes. She writes, “Not assuming. Anything. It’s always asking: if you can touch, what you call your body or your sick, what you need, if you even want suggestions for your issue or if you just want listening.” This involves honoring your loved one by not assuming anything and prioritizing their needs. This valuable understanding in the disabled community is one we can all learn from. This goes along with us asking our loved ones what they need and honoring them as authorities on their own experiences.

We are all capable of supporting our loved ones and ourselves in better ways. We can use these lessons and understandings to transform how we support our loved ones when they are struggling. The care work pioneered by disabled culture and shared by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha can guide us in the way we support others. We can support others so much more if we take with us these lessons about how to show up for each other, how to offer acts of service, how to know our boundaries, how to communicate them, and how to ask our loved ones what they need.

What are some examples for how you will apply these lessons to the ways you support your loved ones in the future? Join the conversation in the comments below!