Reply to What are things people say with the intent to make someone feel better...

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "What are things people say with the intent to make someone feel better..."

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]... but that usually have the opposite effect?

I was just watching a coach try to encourage some tweens who had had a bad performance today, and he did so by repeatedly telling them they didn't need to worry about being embarassed by their performance, because probably no one noticed. You could tell the kids were not encouraged by this in the least -- they still felt bad about having performed poorly, but also felt bad that apparently their efforts were so unimportant that none of their competitors or spectators cared one way or another. Not the reassurance I think the coach intended!

It reminded me of a time many years ago when I was going through a bad patch in life (break up, job loss, health issue all at once) and a friend told me that I needed to be grateful because there are people in war zones or experiencing famine who have it much worse. While that of course is true, it didn't actually help me solve any of my very real problems, but did successfully make me feel guilty for having them in the first place given how fortunate I am to not be starving or living in a house that might be bombed. I think my friend thought this was perspective I hadn't considered when in reality I knew I am privileged in a global sense, but in a practical sense it was pretty irrelevant to my problems at the time which were things like how to see a needed medical specialist when I'd just lost my health insurance.

Anyone have any other good examples?[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics