The 3 Worst Things You Can Say To A Friend Who Needs Help
And why your natural inclination is probably all wrong
I volunteered on a suicide hotline and I have to confess something. I did it for the wrong reasons.
I wanted to learn how to say the right things to friends and family when they were feeling bad. I wanted to be the person that people came to when they needed to talk.
The other reason was even worse. I wanted to save people. I could tell that the other twenty or so volunteers wanted the same thing. But, after eight weeks of training, we learned that you can’t save people, and if you try, you will almost certainly make that person feel worse.
This is why out of 50 people who started the training, only 23 volunteers were left at the end. I wasn’t the only one who was there for the wrong reasons.
People called the suicide hotline because they were in crisis, but not the dramatic, standing on a ledge crisis. Devastated by years of pain, the crisis was almost every day. Chronic illness, sexual abuse, traumatic childhoods, relationship breakdowns, relentless loss — these were reasons people called. If It only took a few shifts on the hotline to realize what an idiot I was for thinking I could fix such things.
