By: Bailey Sykes

“Everything’s going to turn out fine. Don’t worry about it!”

Have you ever left a conversation realizing that a person’s well-intended encouragement didn’t give you the support you were expecting? In times of emotional hardship, we want the other person to understand our pain and offer genuine, helpful support. However, when the roles are reversed, it is easy for us to rely on the same clichés and unhelpful responses that we don’t want to hear ourselves.

So, how can we provide better support to those in our lives who need it?

Successful supportive communication requires stepping away from the cliché responses and taking the time to understand the other person’s perspective. Research shows that supportive communication is related to your own level of emotional awareness, or mindfulness, and your ability to adequately paraphrase others’ difficult experiences.

Mindfulness: More Than a Personal Practice

Mindfulness refers to awareness of one’s emotions and behaviors. Many mindfulness practices focus on describing, processing, and understanding the emotions we feel in a given moment. The Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, created by Ruth Baer, suggests that there are five different aspects of mindfulness—observing, aware acting, describing, non-judging and non-reacting.

Susanne Jones, professor of communications at the University of Minnesota, and her colleagues surveyed 183 undergraduate students to study the effects of the five mindfulness aspects on empathy and active listening, which are two components that can contribute to more supportive communication. The students were asked to answer questions that measured personal levels of empathy and active listening as well as levels of comfort in supporting a close friend in different contexts. Responses were recorded on one-to-five rating scales, and scores were calculated for each category.

Researchers found that respondents who scored higher in mindfulness, particularly in observation and description of emotions, typically showed higher scores in empathy and active listening. However, people who scored higher in the non-judgment aspect of mindfulness typically showed lower scores in empathy and active listening.

So, people who are better attuned to their own emotions and experiences are likely better able to empathize and understand others’ emotions whereas people who push away their feelings may have a harder time empathizing and understanding others’ emotions. Particularly, people who can actively observe stimuli in the environment around them and can effectively describe their emotions have stronger levels of empathy and are better active listeners.

Lastly, researchers found that people who scored higher in empathy and active listening also scored higher in the ability to distinguish between high person-centered messages and low-person centered messages. High person-centered messages focus on the individual’s feelings and validate them. Low person-centered messages criticize an individual’s feelings and attempt to minimize them. Thus, people who are highly empathetic and better listeners are better at understanding messages of support. Perhaps by being able to differentiate between high and low person centeredness, these individuals could be providers of more supportive messages.

Overall, this study shows that by practicing mindfulness, we are not just helping ourselves, but we are also helping those close to us. By taking the time to process our own emotions, we just might be more successful in supporting others to process theirs.

By taking the time to process our own emotions and helping others process theirs, we can become better listeners and develop more helpful responses. Paraphrasing is just one of the practices that can help in crafting supportive responses.

The Importance of Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing refers to the ability to successfully restate another person’s experiences and emotions after he or she shares them with you. This is an important concept in providing supportive communication because it can show that you are actively listening and that you understand the person’s struggle.

According to Livia Polanyi, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University, there are three elements to storytelling that can also be used to paraphrase: event, durative descriptive information and evaluative information. Event refers to what actually occurs in the story, durative descriptive refers to the context of the story and evaluative refers to the emotions a person felt in the story.

Imagine this scenario. Your friend tells you that she has had the worst day because of a group project she is working on. The project is worth a considerable amount of her final grade, and she is frustrated because her group is not doing their work. No one was prepared for their meeting today, and now the group is behind. She is stressed because she has other finals to worry about, and she doesn’t have time to help her group catch up. The following are examples of paraphrasing responses for each category.

Event: “You completed all your work on time, but when you showed up to your group meeting today, no one else had done anything.”

Durative descriptive: “This group project is worth a large portion of your final grade for the course, and you need every person in the group to contribute in order to do well.”

Evaluative: “You’re frustrated and stressed because of this group project.”

Graham Bodie, a professor of communications at Louisiana State University, predicted that combining all three elements of storytelling, also known as adequately paraphrasing, would be viewed as more supportive than just responding using one of the methods. He and his colleagues recruited 215 undergraduate students for their study, which examined the four approaches to paraphrasing and which ones were viewed as the most supportive. They expected that the adequate paraphrase would be the most supportive and event restatement would be the least supportive. Each participant was given one of three descriptions of a problem by a support seeker followed by four potential responses that could be categorized into event restatement, context restatement, emotion restatement, or a restatement of all three. Participants were asked to read through the problem scenario and then rate each of the four responses on twelve bipolar adjective scales, like helpful versus unhelpful and sensitive versus insensitive.

The researchers found that participants did not report a difference between responses for the first problem description. Participants rated event restatement as the least supportive approach for the second and third problem descriptions. Complete restatement of events, context, and emotions was viewed as the most supportive response for the second problem scenario and about as supportive as only context restatement or emotion restatement for the third problem scenario. In other words, complete paraphrasing and context paraphrasing were considered more supportive approaches than simply restating events or emotions.

This study shows that paraphrasing plays a crucial role in supportive communication, especially when the supporter can paraphrase as much of the message as possible. By paraphrasing events, context and emotions, you take the time to understand the other person’s feelings more deeply and in doing so, increase your chances of responding in a helpful and sensitive manner.

Building supportive communication skills doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Sometimes it’s developing the simple skills that makes the difference. By taking the time to practice mindfulness with our own emotions and to properly paraphrase others’ experiences, we are taking the right steps toward becoming more supportive listeners and encouragers.