#16 What's the Best Way to Show Up for Your Friend?
The four support system archetypes
If you’ve ever watched a cheerleading stunt, I can bet my dog’s life that your eyes were glued to the girl up in the air.
I was a cheerleader all throughout high school and college, and I had the chance to be both a flyer (the person being lifted) and a base (the lifter). While neither role is easy, visually, the flyer bears the weight of the theatrics; How could you not be in awe of a person contorting her body whilst standing on one leg six feet up in the air?
I follow elite cheerleaders on Instagram (The cast of Cheer, a Netflix docu-series that I highly recommend), and naturally, I’m always astonished by the flyers and their insane stunts. But then another source of mindfuck began to surface.
Look at the base. How the hell does he do that?
That is, how the hell does a person hold up someone else in all the right places and catch her in all the right ways?
Consider this video of a partner stunt (A partner stunt is a cheering stunt where there is only one flyer and one base) where the flyer, Gabi Butler, shows the struggle of nailing a stunt.
Spoiler alert: you fall a lot.
But with every failed attempt, the base perfectly supports Gabi’s fall. In the end, we see a successful run: The base tosses up an upside-down Gabi from her hips, Gabi does one-and-a-half turns mid-air, then the base, with one hand, precisely catches the back half of her right foot.
It struck me how easy it is to overlook (quite literally) this: the flyer gets to fly and shine because of the base. The flyer gets to feel safe and is kept safe because of the base. That’s the power of the right kind of support. (Gabi often credits her supremely skilled bases by saying “Thanks for making me look good.”)
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a good friend. Sure, there’s your standard maintenance: you bond with each other, check in on them, share memes and, if you’re like me, probably a bunch of dog videos. But it’s a different story when your friend’s shit hits the fan and you want to support them in the best way possible.
It can happen that, well-meaning as you might be, you end up behaving towards or giving feedback to your friend in ways that harm them rather than help them emotionally. There was a time I realized I was a source of toxic positivity to a friend who was struggling; I can only wonder how many times I’ve offended others even when I only meant to help. But what I’ve realized since is that it takes real conscientiousness and effort if you want to be the best kind of aid to the people you love most.
In his book Life is in the Transitions, author Bruce Feiler shared that, in times of trial and transition, we reach out to others in hopes of “receiving, at exactly the moment you need it most, the feedback you need the most.”
It begs the questions: If you’re the one who has the chance to help, how can you be like that elite cheerleading base who supports someone in the way she needs to be supported?
After mining through a myriad of feedback people received when they were struggling, Feiler was able to identify four personas: comforters, nudgers, slappers, and modelers.
(There was a fifth type, but it comes with an asterisk. Some people were motivated to change by a naysayer—by hearing criticism. I’m excluding it here as we are within the realm of constructive emotional support.)
I want to share these four types for two reasons: First, because it’s interesting to know which one you are. I think I’m often a nudger.
Second, because it opened my eyes to the value of being able to toggle between types, which is to say, I shouldn’t always default to a nudge. There may be a better way for me to hold my friend up.
Comforters
Upon hearing my ugly thoughts and emotions, my friend likes to tell me: “That is very valid.” And I’m always caught off guard by how much I needed to hear that.
When someone we love is struggling, there’s often that pressure to help proactively. So we give words of encouragement, suggest a silver lining, or offer advice.
But do people always want help? Or do they simply need, for the moment, to feel understood and find a safe space for their pain?
Comforters know better than to underestimate the power of simply showing up. Of listening. Of assuring someone that it’s perfectly okay—normal!—to be a mess, to be vulnerable, and to feel whatever he or she is feeling. They understand the weight of the European proverb, “A sorrow shared is a sorrow halved.”
Some comforter statements from Feiler’s research: “You’ll get better, but you don’t have to be better now.” “Don’t let anybody tell you how to grieve.” “I am praying that Allah grants you a thousand times more joy than the pain you are experiencing.”
In addition, this NYT Tiny Love Story by Jemma Dooreleyers credits comforters compellingly:
When my friends ask me over FaceTime how I’m doing, I tell them that I spend a lot of time crying. It’s easier than admitting that I can’t seem to get out of bed before 2 p.m. Or wash the dishes that are stinking up my sink. Or get done any work that I normally love doing. But it’s more honest than “good.” Sometimes they laugh and say “same,” and sometimes they look down and don’t know what to say. The rest of the conversation limps along. I apologize for being a stranger. They call me every week anyway.
Nudgers
In 2020, when I began to write on Medium, my original plan was to publish once a month. Around that time, I met with a friend to seek his counsel on expanding my skill set. In hindsight, I think he immediately sensed that I was lost in life (this didn’t occur to me). After probing my interests and motivations, he concluded that I should double down on writing. One piece a month was too slow, he said. “What if you publish every week?” And he told me to share it with him for accountability.
Sometimes, Feiler writes, a person may just need “a slight push, a delicate prod, or a loving poke.” This is what nudgers provide.
If you ever feel strongly about prompting someone in a certain direction, it’s best to remember: how you nudge a person matters.
I particularly love this example from Feiler’s research: When Amy Cunningham’s dad died in South Carolina, she was deeply moved by the funeral. “There was something about the South that I didn’t recognize in New York.” Inexplicably, she felt called to become an undertaker. She told Shelley, her astrologist and close friend about it. Shelley felt there was something more that Amy needed to unpack about this, and nudged her by saying: “Amy, I love you, but I think you need to go deeper. This comes off as a little shallow.”
Amy was stung but absorbed by the feedback. “That’s when I began to remember that my brother died before I was born,” she said. “My father’s brother died; their father died early, too. There was a lot of death in our house, and I spent a lot of time lifting sad people up. I shared this with Shelley, and she thought that was significant.
Slappers
Tough love, bitter pills, the rude awakening—these are the gifts of the slapper type. I suppose this is the trickiest type of support system because it’s hard to tell how someone is going to receive the slap. Maybe the nature of your relationship with the recipient counts for a lot; Maybe you’d be more receptive to blunt feedback if you’re confident that it comes from a trustworthy place.
And yet…
These two examples of slapper conversations prove otherwise.
The first, from Feiler’s book, is about Janelle, who struggled for years to get sober until she met her sponsor, Dave. The first time they met, Dave just gave it to her:
You’re a bad woman. I’m not here to love you, you’ve got plenty of people loving you, but did that ever help you to recover from alcoholism? I don’t care about your bullshit lies. In your case, if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a fire hydrant. You’re so full of shit, you don’t know what the fuck is going on in your life.
Janelle’s realization? “I had to have someone like Dave slap me around and make me question my perception.”
Then there’s this lovely dialogue from my favorite Christmas movie, The Holiday. In the scene, Iris (Kate Winslet) is having dinner with the aging Hollywood screenwriter Arthur (Eli Wallach). Iris confesses to Arthur that she was in Los Angeles because she wanted to get away from a certain guy back home in London. “An ex-boyfriend who just got engaged and forgot to tell me.”
“So he’s a schmuck,” Arthur assures her. Then he offers gold: “In the movies, we have leading ladies, and we have the best friend. You, I can tell, are the leading lady. But for some reason, you’re behaving like the best friend.”
Iris responds with tears in her eyes: “That was brilliant. Brutal, but brilliant.”
Modelers
Do you ever get those moments when somebody—whether it’s someone you know or know of—does something or owns up to something about themselves, and it makes you think, “Oh wow, you can do that? You can actually approach life like that?”
My most recent memory is when a heartbroken friend told me, “Sometimes I just like to sit with my feelings.” Look, for me and my normative sunshine, this was a strange phenomenon: how actively making space for your sadness might actually be helpful.
He didn’t insist that that was what I should do to get over my heartbreak, but the statement planted a seed in my mind anyway: What if it would benefit me to be more like my friend?
I suppose this last type, the modelers, is arguable as a support system because there’s zero assertion involved. All they really did is be themselves and share their story. But I think that’s what makes this type so special: You realize that the virtues of honesty and authenticity can also be modes of care. By simply telling your truth or your experience or even your idiosyncracies, you can help someone else be braver, or to see things they wouldn’t have had you not shared yourself.
That’s it! The four ways we can support our loved ones. The question now is: when should you employ which mode?
These are a few considerations: the personality and temperament of the person you’re dealing with, how close you two are, what that person has been through, and where, emotionally, he or she is.
Being a good friend and effective aid, I suppose, is a lifelong learning experience. We’re not always going to say or do the right things. But I can think of a few things more worthwhile than trying our very best to be at our best for the people we love.
If you liked this, help your girl out & like this post! Or share it if you think it might resonate with someone else. You can also comment on the post or reply to this email. In any case, it’ll really motivate me! (which I definitely need, lol) ♡