Active listening is important. If you don’t know what to say when someone you care about is talking, you’re not sure you have anything brilliant to add, that’s OK. Don’t feel pressure to be brilliant—just let him or her know what you thought you heard them say. This is just simply putting in your own words what you heard the other person say. This can be hard when you’re letting the person know that you hear their heart is broken, that the other feels like a failure, that they feel like no one cares.

Newsflash…saying it out loud acknowledges what is already there…you are not making a new scary reality—just not ignoring the reality that is already there.

When I teach students this active listening at the university, I will tell my students to spend a weekend, as they’re hanging out with friends and family, trying to paraphrase what people are saying rather than responding with new information.

Invariably they will tell me how silly or artificial or contrived it felt to do it—and then they talk about how their husband, or mother, or girlfriend just ate it up and would visibly invest in the conversation, how eyes would light up, and mood would brighten, and conversation would deepen and go farther than it usually did…they had been heard and they could experience being known by another

…and the power of that connection was meaningful.