Along with respect, attention and care, support has an important place in partnership and interpersonal relationships. Support prevents a person from losing confidence in themselves, doing stupid things, withdrawing from life, eating themselves up from the inside and engaging in excessive self-criticism. It helps accept yourself, recover and gain strength, become more confident, increase self-esteem, feel needed and useful. Support makes a person stronger and gives him an opportunity to cope with a difficult situation more effectively. It fills a person with energy and vitality.
What Is Support and How Should It Work?
It’s good if you have people in your environment who can provide this support. But there are people who are knocking the ground out from under you, devaluing or criticizing where a person just needs support.
Whether there is support in the relationship or not depends on the relationship itself, and their stability or rupture, their unity or the emergence of triangles, when a person begins to receive support on the side, not from his partner.
What Is Support?
Support is an action that is given to a person to help him cope with his emotions, excitement, fears, doubts, insecurities, so that he becomes stronger and more effective in coping with some difficult situation for him.
Support is an external addition, but not the main resource a person can rely on. The main resources are inside him, in his personality. These are his strengths, his personal qualities, his personal experience and accumulated skills.
When to Give Support
There are a number of situations where support is needed and important. And if your loved one is in one of these situations, give him your support. It will be appropriate.
Difficult Situation
When a person is in a difficult situation. This can be anything: the loss of a loved one, divorce, a major fight or conflict, loss of money, dismissal and loss of employment, a terrible diagnosis or progressive illness, an age crisis, accusation or bullying.
Important Event
When some important event for a person is coming up: an important business meeting, a first date, a speech in front of an audience, a first round of the andar bahar casino game, a debut, an exam.
Threat
When a person is threatened or threatened with something: threat of loss of life, loss of health, loss of money, job, career, clients.
Problem of Choice
When the person has to make an important choice and is strongly hesitant and doesn’t know what decision to make: to choose a partner, to stay in a relationship or go to a new one, to stay in this city or move to a new one, which university to apply to, to quit their job and find a new one or stay at the old one.
Mistakes Made
When the person made a mistake, made a mistake, did something wrong, made a mistake, he needs help and support so that he could realize his mistakes, recognize and correct them.
Big Goals, Plans, and Tasks
When a purposeful person sets himself a big goal, plans, objectives, and he may not have any resources for it: emotional, material, personal, psychological, etc. He may also lack confidence in himself and in his choices, he may find it morally or psychologically difficult, but he takes a proactive stance and support in any form may be important to him.
However, it’s necessary to feel the situation when your support is appropriate and necessary, or when you will only distract the person from his/her actions or see that he/she is doing perfectly well by himself/herself, without any help.
Types of Support
Support can be: moral, practical, emotional, physical, material, intellectual and others. And it’s up to you to choose what kind of support you can give the person.
An important point is that the support must be sincere. Fake support is felt and it’s not inspired. Paying the person off with money is also not support, it’s payoff, even if the person needs the money much.
How can you help and support the person so that this support is felt by him and is valuable and effective for him?
Hug
Hugging someone and just being there, sometimes even without words, is the best support. Hugs give the person warmth and fill him or her with peace and the feeling that he or she isn’t alone and that there is a person close to him or her who supports and shares with him or her the complexity of the current situation, worries about him or her, on whom you can lean and trust him or her.
Praise
To give praise when the person has done well, but the person may not be completely sure or may feel that something didn’t work out the way he or she wanted it to. In this case, it’s important to find some positive things about what he did and what he really did succeed, and to appreciate his efforts and intentions. Praise is an indication of the value of the person’s actions and intentions.
Show Sympathy and Compassion
Sympathy and compassion are an important form of support when a person has experienced some loss, grief or distress. Sympathy can ease a person’s pain and suffering and give them hope for the future. It’s important to be able to share another person’s feelings, to let them speak out, to express their pain and emotions, and to ease their soul.
Turn to Their Strengths
When a person is in a stressful situation or is worried, he often forgets about his strengths, about his inner resources to lean on. In this case, he can be helped to focus on his strengths, to refer to his experience in dealing with these situations, to lean on his skills and abilities.
Give Competent Advice
Here it’s important not to give out your advice left and right, and not to tell the person what he should do where he already knows it himself. It’s important to give advice when the person asks you for it because you are either wiser than he is, or you have been through similar experiences, or you have more knowledge in this area. Competent and timely advice can help a person to make the right decisions.
Help Practically
You can ask, “What can I do for you? How can I help you?” It’s possible that the person will need physical help, to do something, to organize, to perform some task, to bring, to get, etc. Practical help is assistance, active action to help solve his problem.
Help Financially
To help with money if the person has had grief. Invest in the person if he doesn’t have enough resources of his own to develop his business, projects, and ideas.
Use Exercises and Techniques
If you know techniques or exercises to relieve anxiety or stress, how to deal with fear and anxiety, how to overcome insecurity, then you can share them with the person close to you and even help them perform them. This is appropriate when the person has an important event coming up or needs to make some important decision. However, he must be willing to do them. If he isn’t willing to do them, don’t force them on him.
4 Types of People
There are four types of people in which you can understand whose support you can count on and whose support you can’t.
Selfish people. Their principle is, “I don’t want to and I can’t.” They tend to think only of themselves and that the other person’s need for support doesn’t cross their minds. Expecting support from them, you will only waste your nerves and energy.
Those who don’t know how to give support, but if you teach them, they will begin to give it. Their principle is, “I can’t and I don’t see how.” These people aren’t as selfish as the previous ones. They live the way they have been taught. And if they have not been taught to give support or care, they don’t. However, they aren’t hopeless and they are capable of learning it. They are like plasticine and you can mold them into whatever you want, as long as such people are in your inner circle.
Those who want to give support, but don’t know how to give it properly. Their principle is, “I want to, but I don’t know how to do it right.” These people often make mistakes in giving support and sometimes give it ineptly. Sometimes so inept that the person does not even feel it. In this case, they just need to explain their mistakes and tell them what is expected of them and how they can give support more properly.
Those who know how to give support. Their principle is, “I can and I do.” These people do not need to be asked to give support, they do it themselves. Their support fills the person with strength and confidence and makes him or her a more effective person.
Look at your environment. They may be supportive or demotivating. Appreciate those who can provide support in any situation. Surround yourself with such people and reciprocate.
Support Mistakes
Support Isn’t Asked for, Support Is Given
If you are waiting for a loved one to ask for his support – you make a mistake. He may not ask, but not giving him support can create distance between you.
He Can Handle Himself, He Is an Adult
Mature people solve their problems, rather than passing them on to others. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need support. Here you can find out what kind of help you could give the person and how you could be of help to him. This won’t stop him being an adult, but faster and more effectively cope with their problems.
Rebuke
Don’t reproach and scold him if he has done something wrong, if he doesn’t listen to you. He will realize his own mistakes. Instead of blaming him, it’s better to support him and help him correct his mistakes.
Criticism
Avoid criticism, especially if you cannot give constructive feedback. It can hurt the person. You can correctly and gently discuss with a person their mistakes, so he could correct them, but it shouldn’t turn into harsh criticism and must be accompanied by a positive assessment of what he did well.
Depreciating
Don’t devalue the situation the person is in. Don’t devalue the person’s efforts, or the person himself, or any of his skills or abilities. Support is an appeal to the person’s values. Look for the values in him, not devalue him.
Ignoring
It’s unnecessary to ignore and pretend that nothing has happened, that he has no difficult situations, that it’s his experience and he must go through it on his own and make his own mistakes. There will always be those who will enter his situation and support him. But if you are not among those who support him, it will cause distance between you, which then will have to be overcome in other ways. Support removes the distance between people, even if it was there before.
Suppression of Emotion
If you don’t allow the person to live out and express their emotions (anger, resentment, guilt, sadness, etc.) and promote their displacement or suppression, it can eventually turn into psychosomatic or serious psychological problems for them. It’s better to show compassion or empathy and gently help the person switch from their pain to something else that can distract them.
Useless or Unnecessary Advice
Beware of useless or unnecessary advice, especially when the person doesn’t need it. Don’t impose your opinion on him. If he needs your advice, he will ask you for it. At the very least, you can tell him gently that you know how he can be helped and are ready to advise him. And if he wants to, he will ask you for it.
Support must help the person to cope with the situation himself and successfully overcome it. You can’t do something for the person or instead of him.
Strong people also need to be supported, they can also have difficulties and from such support they become even stronger.
