ChristianKI mentioned the two big classes of caveats I’d worry about. The first being “be very mindful of what message you’re conveying”. If you view it as a big bad scary problem, they’ll probably pick up on that. It’s a good thing to be in a “calm” and attentive state yourself. But this principle applies more generally—its better to be mindful of what presuppositions you might have so that you don’t accidentally communicate them when they’re not helpful
The second is that the first thoughts on what suggestions would be helpful might not be right. Simple suggestions to “feel better” can be problematic for a few reasons (they don’t take it and you lose trust if you’re missing the big reason why they have the symptom, they try to take it but that underlying reason still nags at them, or they really do take it and whatever information was in there is lost). Coherence Therapy is the nice clean solution there. I recommend looking through some of their case examples and generally not pushing too hard on any suggestion unless you really get whats going on.
ChristianKI mentioned that sometimes the best thing can be to spend some time in the unpleasant state (and I agree). The caveat that comes to mind there is to make sure they don’t feel pushed into that state (either from you or from themselves). If you’re sitting there feeling bad and on top of that hating the fact that you feel bad (but doing it because you think you have to), then it’s not gonna go so well.
I guess the “offer, don’t push” one is one of the important heuristics to start out with if you want to make sure you do no harm.
ChristianKI mentioned the two big classes of caveats I’d worry about. The first being “be very mindful of what message you’re conveying”. If you view it as a big bad scary problem, they’ll probably pick up on that. It’s a good thing to be in a “calm” and attentive state yourself. But this principle applies more generally—its better to be mindful of what presuppositions you might have so that you don’t accidentally communicate them when they’re not helpful
The second is that the first thoughts on what suggestions would be helpful might not be right. Simple suggestions to “feel better” can be problematic for a few reasons (they don’t take it and you lose trust if you’re missing the big reason why they have the symptom, they try to take it but that underlying reason still nags at them, or they really do take it and whatever information was in there is lost). Coherence Therapy is the nice clean solution there. I recommend looking through some of their case examples and generally not pushing too hard on any suggestion unless you really get whats going on.
ChristianKI mentioned that sometimes the best thing can be to spend some time in the unpleasant state (and I agree). The caveat that comes to mind there is to make sure they don’t feel pushed into that state (either from you or from themselves). If you’re sitting there feeling bad and on top of that hating the fact that you feel bad (but doing it because you think you have to), then it’s not gonna go so well.
I guess the “offer, don’t push” one is one of the important heuristics to start out with if you want to make sure you do no harm.