When we meet with someone who is feeling melancholic, empty, shaky, or confused, we can quickly become convinced that something is wrong, and that our role is to act urgently to fix them - to spin off into techniques, theories, and ideas to help them replace the actuality of their experience with what we believe they should be having instead.
It’s totally natural to want relief for those we care about and to do whatever we can to help; we don’t need to pretend this isn’t the case. We can hold that larger intention that they feel better, while simultaneously staying open to a call emerging in the field between us into deeper territory.
Perhaps it is something more subtle, nuanced, and merciful than relief that they’re most longing for. For the Friend, for a companion who will go with them into the dimly lit, endarkened landscape of the soul.
There is wisdom and guidance in the images, emotions, and somatic data arising into the relational field between ourselves and another, vital communication from psyche serving an initiatory function beyond what we can perceive. We don’t want to short-circuit that, especially as a result of our own anxiety and discomfort.
If we slow down and reflect, we might discover how much of our “fixing” activity, the movement toward relief, arises out of an unresolved relationship with our own shadow, untended historic core vulnerabilities and complexes, and from the spinning of the ghosts of our unlived lives.
It is possible that the most skillful and kind thing we can offer our friend is to sit in the charged energy with them, bearing witness to pure feeling together, in that claustrophobic or restless space, and stay near; to remove the burden that they come out of their experience, “feel better,” or heal in order for us to stay close.
Perhaps they don’t need to be healed, but to be held, to be heard, and to feel felt and understood, for someone to companion them as the hidden wisdom unfolds.
Where, together, we can make sense of their experience and discover the meaning in it, crafting a safe and empathically-attuned home where the shards of a broken world can reassemble.
