07/16/2025
When someone comes to you with their heart bared and their pain forward
How do you respond?
Do you shut down?
Ignore it?
Minimize it?
React to it?
Defend yourself?
Do you spin it back in their face and say - well here is how you have impacted me - making it about you
Or do you go into - they are telling me I'm not good enough?
I find these to be the most common responses to someone with charge and pain in their field.
They are also the most damaging.
Here is what you can try instead.
Validate their experience and pain even if it doesn't make sense to you. It's their experience and if you love them you ought to care about their experience. Even if yours is different.
100% of emotions deserve validation.
Example: Wow thank you for sharing this me, it makes total sense that you would feel this way. I'm curious to know more about what your experience is like.
Recognize if they are coming to you with their heart on their sleeve, tears in their eyes, fear in their bodies or a sense of deep lonliness that it took them a LOT of courage to bring it to you. How you hold this moment can make or break a relationship.
Instead of reacting or expecting them to show up from their mature self (they can't fully - something is triggered in them) sit with them in their experience if you have enough resource to do so.
Feel with them. Touch into their pain. Open your senses to understand what is going on inside their body. Feeling it with them doesn't mean taking it on as yours it's a simple act of connecting to them and what is active in their system
This can look like - wow i can sense the fear rising in you. The tension in your shoulders. How you speed up when you tell me this part of the story. I'm here. I can feel you. Here is what I feel this is stirring inside of you. You are not alone.
Tell them what you feel not as a way to fix, or with the intent to change, but as a way of connecting. When you are connected, Actually connected, it's easy to feel someone else and translate what you are noticing.
But if you are reactive or in defense you'll miss them completely and the pain will grow bigger for them because they will be alone inside of it, even if you are inches away from them.
When you feel someone else's pain with them it means they no longer have to be alone in the overwhelm they are feeling and it begins to shift the state. This is the beautiful technology of coregulation.
Again the intent is not to change the state because you are uncomfortable with the bigness of their emotion, but to connect to it, to feel it and by feeling it you understand it and through that connection it automatically begins to transform.
But if you react here, throw it back in their face, demand to be seen by them instead of meeting them - the damage grows, the chasm of disconnect gets bigger, the wounding gets louder and they will likely ramp up even more to let you know you missed the point - you aren't connecting to me, you arent feeling me, and I'm alone - it's absolutely overwhelming to feel alone inside your pain.
Because when I feel you feeling me I'm no longer alone and my system can regulate more easily. When I'm regulated connection becomes available again.
They came to you with their heart wide open.
Its a sacred moment and a gift, that level of trust. How you respond will either shape your relationship or break it.
They aren't coming to you to feel even more alone.
