How do you comfort someone? Helping someone with grief

If someone close to you is sad, you want to comfort that person so that he or she becomes happy again. But how do you actually comfort someone? Comforting can be necessary at all sorts of times in your life. For example, you comfort a child when they have fallen, you comfort a friend when they have lost their pet, and you comfort people when they have lost a loved one.

Sometimes it can also be part of your job to comfort someone. Like when you work in the hospital and people have to learn to live with the loss of their health.

There are all kinds of moments and ways to comfort someone. How it all works, you'll find out in this blog.

Ways to comfort someone

If you want to comfort someone, there are several ways to do so. You might say that comforting is about helping someone who isn’t happy to feel better again by offering them comfort, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Comforting someone also means giving them the space to be themselves and to experience grief in their own way. You’re essentially showing that person that it’s okay to feel sad and to grieve, even if it doesn’t happen in a very calm way.

You then accept, as it were, the way someone is dealing with his/her grief and that the person is grieving[1].

If someone who is grieving wants to talk about their grief, simply listening is often a good way to offer comfort. Expressing empathy for their feelings can go a long way toward providing relief[2].

In addition, how you deal with grief and what comfort actions go with it is often somewhat culturally determined[3].

What you often do with adults is indicate that a problem could have been worse. From about age 12, you learn that this is a way of comforting people, and you hear this more often when you have a problem that can make you sad[4].

Comforting someone also affects you

Touching someone when comforting them can also have many effects on the person touching the other person. For example, brain activity has been measured in romantic partners when the man touches the woman's hand while she is receiving a pain stimulus. That comforting touch changes the brain waves that deal with controlling movement in the man and provide more empathy in pain[5].

When do you comfort someone?

Comforting someone can be necessary at many times. For example, people with Alzheimer's and dementia need a lot of comfort because they often no longer feel at home anywhere; not even in their own homes. That is of course a terrible condition and then care with comfort in it can do a lot to still be able to recover from the unpleasant feelings that Alzheimer's and dementia can give[6].

Another situation where people are often comforted is, for example, in palliative care. If a nurse handles this well, it can give the patient the feeling that he or she can live a meaningful life and die with dignity[7].

But these are the somewhat larger problems where comfort is needed. Throughout life, being comforted or comforting someone may be necessary at times. For example, children comfort you when they are suffering from pain, anger[8] or anxiety[9] and so it applies to adults as well.

Usually adults report it when they need comfort.

How you then go about comforting someone depends on the purpose of the person having a problem for which they need comfort. For example, someone is sad or has experienced something that has upset them. This is told to you. First of all, it is then important to listen carefully, because by listening you can find out, among other things, what the purpose of the telling is now.

Is the goal just for a moment to throw out all the thoughts so he doesn't have to deal with them anymore?

Is the goal to find a solution to a problem?

So is it better to offer compassion or even advice? To make that choice, it’s important to listen first. If you’re then able to respond appropriately, the speakers—the people who need comfort—are often more satisfied[10].

What is also interesting is that a child often gets angry first and sad second. If, as an adult, you suffer greatly from unexplained sadness, it is often important to find that moment in that childhood to remove this sadness. So to be able to offer comfort in a good way[11].

This is one reason, for example, why a difficult childhood can lead to depressive symptoms and anxiety.

Comforting a man

Yes, I have a separate heading for this, because this is what people search for in Google. That actually says a lot, because men are just like people. You can comfort them just as you comfort women and children.

Also, for men who need comforting, you listen to them to determine if they need just a listening ear and empathy or if they want advice on how to deal with a problem.

Hypnosis and comforting someone

When you comfort someone—for example, by saying that things could have been worse—you’re already, in a sense, hypnotizing them. What you’re saying, in fact, is a suggestion about what could have been, and with that, you can influence the mindset of the person who is sad, causing them to view the situation differently and, as a result, feel less down.

Many problems that hypnosis helps people with also involve some degree of comfort. Comfort often includes listening, and that is certainly something you do when you help people with hypnosis, for example.

It actually starts during the initial consultation, because that’s when the person can describe their issue, and you can begin to assess how the problem is affecting their life. You can also explore what potential causes they think might have led to the problem in the first place . Next, you can offer suggestions to reframe the problem, which helps them see it in a different light. As mentioned, one reframing you can use is: “It could always have been worse.”

Sometimes more is needed, such as when grief stems from something in one’s childhood—something that, at first glance, may seem like inexplicable grief. In that case, you can use regression . With regression, the person mentally goes back to the very first moment when this sadness arose or when the belief that is now causing the sadness first took root.

This could be that moment in someone's childhood when they became sad and actually didn't come out of it well.

But now you have much more life experience than you did back then, and that means you can revisit that memory and thereby store it differently in your subconscious.

That alone can provide a lot of relief.

But sometimes more may be needed, such as starting the conversation with the inner child who is still sad, angry and/or fearful because of that event. In this conversation, you help the inner child step beyond that moment and grow with the person you want to comfort. By helping the inner child, you help to give the sadness a place and to be able to let go.

Then, when you've given advice or been able to let go of something, it can be helpful to reinforce the ego so that someone can move on with their life in good spirits.

This can be done by having the person being comforted repeat suggestions such as:

"I can do anything."

"I'm good enough."

"I can make good decisions."

These are just examples, depending on the problem that caused grief and the advice that was given, you may have other suggestions to rebuild the ego.

So comforting someone is done primarily by listening to them and possibly reframing the problem that caused grief. In addition, you can also see if someone wants advice or not.

Hypnosis can help uncover and release unexplained grief.

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Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder:

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